Justice and Power in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Mountaintop Speech, Part 1

Most American schoolchildren have at least heard or read excerpts from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which he delivered from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on August 28, 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

However, King's last speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop," delivered to a much smaller audience at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968, also demands our attention. While "I Have a Dream" expressed King's hope, "I've Been the the Mountaintop" talked about the struggle to fulfill the dream: the values that lay behind the dream, the risks of pursuing the dream, the need for determination, and the danger. For the struggle brought great danger.

This often-forgotten speech took King's audience behind the scenes to show them what they were working for and how they were working--and most important, why they were working. "Mountaintop" was a much more personal speech, and its power came to a climax at the very end as King foretold his own impending murder. King unashamedly emphasized Judeo-Christian values.

There is much to say about this powerful speech. Let us start with the trend to justice. Many people think that security goes to the strong. Judeo-Christian morality shows that it is justice, not strength, that gives true power. King said that the world was shifting toward justice: "Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world."

First, the "Mountaintop" speech arose from historical erudition. King imagined that he was watching "a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now." He imagined that he was watching Moses' march across the Red Sea, that he could listen to "Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes . . . as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality." He would watch the Roman empire, the Renaissance, and Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses. He would "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 watch Franklin Roosevelt tell people that they had nothing to fear "but fear itself." These all were, in King's vision, part of the struggle for justice.

Yet, King said that he would most like to live in the present, in 1968. Why? He admitted that "the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion is all around." Yet, he said, "that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars." He pointed out that only justice could enable our survival: "if something isn't done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their own long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed."

King gave a twist to the biblical parable of the Samaritan. He recalled driving the road to Jericho with his wife, and "the Jericho road is a dangerous road." Anyone who stopped to help the robbery victim would put himself in danger. Maybe the victim "was merely faking. . . . And so the first question the priest asked--the first question the Levite asked was, 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'"

That was the real lesson of civil rights, is it not? Instead of asking what harm will come to me, ask what harm will come to others.

The great rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke distinguished between positive and negative morality. We often think of morality as "thou shalt not do this, that, and the other thing." That is negative morality. Yet, there is also positive morality: morality obligates us to do good. And doing good can overwhelm the evil. People who oppose civil rights are sometimes motivated by hate, but more often by fear: "If I stop to help this man (or woman) what will happen to me?" But the real issue is, what will happen to them?

So, King's first thesis was that civil rights was a struggle to help other people, and that the danger to oneself is secondary. The danger to oneself was not the real question. The question is, what good can we do?

I'll write later today about King's second thesis in this speech, the danger that we face when we do good in a world that is "all messed up."

Here's my follow-up.