This day back in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Over the last few years, I’ve learned so much more than I ever did in school. I remember the sorrow my parents felt, my mom especially, just days before my youngest sister was born. My dad rarely showed any emotion, was a little quieter than normal. I can’t remember for sure, but I bet he went to work the next day. At six, I had no idea what the Civil Rights Movement meant. In hindsight, I was sheltered from blatant racism. Our next-door neighbors were white, there was rioting less than a mile away in the streets of Chicago, but my neighborhood was untouched. It happened on a Thursday, and I had just started school as part of the first fully integrated class to matriculate through the Evanston Public School system. I couldn’t tell you whether we went to school on Friday or not.
I was sheltered, suburban, middle class. I’m sure I did a book report or two on Dr. King but couldn’t tell you which books. In 7th grade I recited the I Have A Dream speech during what was then Black History Week in 1975. I listened to the speech over and over again trying to match Dr. King’s cadence. I delivered the speech so well that the Black teachers had tears in their eyes. I went on a mini speaking tour at my own church and another local church, reciting Dr. King’s words. I understood the power of the speech, but at thirteen I was not mature enough to understand the meaning. At 63, I understand that if I could go back and talk to the 13-year-old me, or the 23-year-old me, 43, and maybe even the 53-year-old version of myself, I would tell them to reread and remember the last speech Dr. King gave on April 3rd, 1968.
Dubbed the Mountaintop speech, Dr. King ended with the now-famous words, but few even bother to read and sit with the full speech. I did again today, equipped with a new lens built with tools I didn’t have before—access to Black scholars like Dr. Greg Carr, listening to hosts on Urban View who challenge us to look beyond the boundaries of American history, and the ongoing evolution of my full Black self.
Dr. King starts with an opportunity from the Almighty to visit a different age and time: “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” Dr. King didn’t just pick one. Beginning in Egypt, to see God’s children trek from there to the Promised Land, he says, “but I wouldn’t stop there.” He would travel to Greece to watch Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes discuss the great and eternal issues of reality. Moving on to 1863, to watch “a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.” He would keep going to the 1930s to see Franklin D. Roosevelt trying to give hope to a bankrupt America, telling the country, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Finally, he would end up in his own time period, telling the Almighty, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the Twentieth Century, I will be happy.” Dr. King name-checked nations and cities all in the middle of the same fight—Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; and Memphis, Tennessee—the cry is always the same: “We want to be free!”
Today, do we want anything different? As the Supreme Court contemplates birthright citizenship and the word “domicile” takes on a different meaning for most of us, was the intent of our ancestors to one day go back home when they were “freed”? Were we granted citizenship because white people felt like we deserved it? For those of you playing at home, the answer is NO. So if domicile is the intention to stay instead of going back home, and that is the litmus test for citizenship, who gets to determine your intent?
Dr. King went on to talk about violence vs. nonviolence. He said, “It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.” And also, in the human rights revolution, “if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.
The Global Majority is the tip of the spear for human rights, specifically Blacks in America. The Civil Rights Movement set the table for everybody else. The battles we won, the ones they have been trying to dismantle since 1965, gave every other discriminated group the toolbox and blueprints to fight. You’re welcome. Malcolm X addressed his views on nonviolence and ultimately landed on being nonviolent as long as the other side is nonviolent.
Is the continual oppression of Black and brown people Dr. King’s warning—his “Let my people go” declaration? The empire will fall if you don’t.
Dr. King was in Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers, primarily Black men asking for fairness and job safety. There is a moment when he calls out mainstream media for doing what they still do today: “They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that.” The press was more concerned with a few broken windows than the actual issues. The squirrel, as Lurie would say.
He called for a march again. This was when marching was effective, not a parade of costumes and nifty slogans. The signs simply read—I AM A MAN. There was no threat of mace and dogs at the No Kings marches.
The most significant part of his speech was his call to action: “Go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk… tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread… What is the other bread, Brother Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart’s bread.” Target may have been crippled a bit, but fundamentally they didn’t make any concessions after bowing to the current administration’s DEI elimination. Memphis was the first showing of collective Black economic power. All three companies felt the pressure locally.
The blueprint is there. We just need to stay focused. I heard somebody say if all the Black people in the world stomped at the same time, it would knock the world off its axis.
Dr. King addressed a fear that keeps many of us silent today: “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Dr. King provided a better question: “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”
On this Easter Sunday eve—what would Jesus do?