Been to the mountaintop

A couple of months ago, at a Toastmasters meeting, we watched a video/audiotape of the speech that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave – dubbed I”ve Been to the Mountaintop” – in a Memphis, Tennessee church the night before he was shot 40 years ago. It’s an amazing speech – putting the civil rights conflict and other 1960s changes in historical perspective and reflecting on King’s own life and morality. Perhaps many great things come in twos, since the greatest speeches in U.S. history have done so: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and second inaugural address and King’s “I Have a Dream” and “Mountaintop” speeches (let’s mention Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence here too). A month earlier, in January, for King’s birthday, I watched the “I Have a Dream” speech with two Children’s Fellowship kids at the church retreat.

Already in 1968 – going back to Watts and even Jacksonville, Florida – civil rights protests and grown violent – not only violence by whites against blacks but violence by blacks against whites. King’s advisors had in fact urged him not to go to Memphis and to leave once things had turned violent. King himself was a complex character had changed since “I Have a Dream.” His Poor People’s campaign had raised class, more than simply racial, issues, his increasingly outspoken criticism of the Vietnam war had alienated him from the Johnson Administration and from the Democratic Party and national security establishments, his fair housing campaigns not only in Southern cities such as Louisville but also in Northern cities had motivated many Northern working-class whites to join his opponents (obvious several months later in the success of Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s presidential campaign up North), and continual harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director, J. Edgar Hoover – sanctioned first by the Kennedy brothers and then by Johnson and fueled by rumors of extramarital romance by King – had taken its toll on King. You can hear the exhaustion in his voice in the Memphis speech.

Of course, news of King’s assassination – whoever was really responsible – unleashed an orgy of violence on U.S. cities, much more widespread even than that in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. Studies show that there was more violence in cities with entrenched (usually Democratic Party) political machines that resisted African-American incorporation and that rioting did work – Cities with heavier rioting subsequently got more federal aid for cities.

But the devastation and mistrust that the rioting left in its wake – even 40 years later – were not so easy to repair. Last year Stephanie and I watched a movie – “Talk to Me” – which was partly about the aftermath of the King assassination in Washington, D.C. Informants in my dissertation research sites – Albany, New York, and Columbus, Ohio – told me about that time in their towns. In Albany, where rioting by the relatively small African-American population was relatively restrained in comparison with other cities, whites shared with me that they’d steered clear of downtown ever since (at that time, some 25 years later). (In this sense, the riots may have helped provide a rationale for a whole generation of white flight/professional-managerial-class flight/sprawl.)

Of course, coming up in June is the 40-year anniversary of another assassination, that of then U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, also portrayed in a movie, “Bobby.” Hunting for videotaped speeches to watch in Toastmasters, last year I saw footage of Kennedy’s speech on the night of the King assassination, to an African-American crowd in Los Angeles.

Both of the Danish exchange students who have stayed with us – with their classmates – have been to Memphis, Tennessee, including to the Civil Rights museum that includes the Lorraine hotel, where King was shot. It’s on our list of places to visit (I’ve already been to the Civil Rights museum in Birmingham and King’s childhood home and the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta). Sunday and Monday we're traveling to Murray, Kentucky, just an hour or so away.

May we continue to strive for King’s dream of justice, peace, and reconciliation and may King’s soul rest in peace.