Today would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s ninetieth birthday. In my opinion the three most positive moral figures of the twentieth century were Dr. King, Mother Teresa, and Gandhi. Over the last several years I have been increasingly aware of the impact that Dr. King has had on my worldview and my sense of what is important. The note that follows will draw on his last sermon and his last speech, both delivered in the last week of his life. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” was his sermon delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington on Sunday morning, March 31, 1968. As you will see, it was a great summary of his positions on race, nonviolence, America’s responsibility in the larger world, and the tragedy and meaning of our involvement in Vietnam. What was most remarkable about the sermon though was its emphasis on the responsibility of America to do something about poverty. On each of the topics he challenged us not to be asleep to injustice. He compared the complacency of our government and many of our citizens to Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep as a subject of King George III and woke up dazed and confused by finding that a revolution had replaced the king with a president while he slept. The sermon carries some of his most important teaching points and most famous quotes. I urge you to read it for yourself. If you have read it before, read it again.
There is no doubt that the best known of Dr. King’s speeches was the “I Have A Dream…” speech that he gave in August 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a few hundred yards from where his monument now stands. Perhaps almost as famous is the last speech, the “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” speech that he gave in Memphis the night before he was assassinated. He begins taking a long imaginary trip through history and concludes that there is no other time in history when he would rather be alive than in the middle of the twentieth century during the struggle for civil rights.
He reviews the civil rights movement and connects it to the experience of the disadvantaged around the world and to the story of the “Good Samaritan.” The grievances of the sanitation workers include abuse of their constitutional rights of free assembly and free speech by a court injunction that he will fight in court. Black Americans are individually poor, but collectively they are an economic force that can use boycotts to their collective advantage. The speech is a justification of the moment and a strategic review of the power of nonviolence. He predicts ultimate victory in the struggle. That would have been a logical place to stop, but he continued on.
He has perspective and faith. He believes that the injustices around them can not persist. After describing a previous attempt on his life when he was stabbed in the chest by a deranged elderly black woman, he contends with his own mortality. He realizes that he is no longer necessary for the success of the civil rights movement. He says that he has “been to the mountaintop.” That is a biblical reference to Moses going to the top of Mount Pisgah to see the Promised Land that he would never personally experience. He concludes with now famous words that suggest an eerie prescience.
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
The sermon at the National Cathedral four days earlier covered many of the same points as the Memphis speech, and in retrospect has the same “prescient” need to summarize what he believed to be import. He scolded, and attempted to educate and persuade those who of us who were sleeping through a “great revolution.” Dr. King was always evolving. He had recently published (1967) what would be his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? In an article published in the Atlantic in January 2014 Jordan Weissmann reviewed Dr. King’s evolution as revealed by the book and wrote:
King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington’s previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been “piecemeal and pygmy.” The government believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one—by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, “the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.”
Dr. King’s vision was expanding to embrace poverty world wide. He realized that poverty was an international issue. In America. and around the world, social justice required solving the problem of poverty for all people of all races.
Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.
He was planning the Poor People’s March on Washington for the late spring. There were millions of white Americans in poverty who were equally the object of Dr. King’s concern. I remember circling the National Mall in June of 1967 to witness for myself the thousands of people who were encamped there.
…—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.
…We are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.
…We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists…
Dr. King delivered a withering rebuke and a logical analysis of the realities of the past and current unfairness of those who suggest that Black Americans should lift themselves up by their “bootstraps.”
Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps…
In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln…this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, “You’re free,” and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.
But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
The unfairness is magnified by the fact that those same people who are told to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps built much of the wealth of America.
For more than two centuries our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail.
An interested reader who commented on my letter of January 11 wrote to suggest that the unfairness that Dr. King noted fifty one years ago persists today.
…the idea that poverty and its consequences have to be taken into account by clinicians, and educators, seems beyond dispute by those who care about facts, but that is very different than addressing the underlying causes of poverty which have, in large part in the US, to do with a generation of tax and social policies that have created inequality at levels not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 19thcentury and the boom years of the 1920s, both dominated by Republicans and nativist, anti-immigrant movements…
Poverty is a “wicked problem.” The Triple Aim is a long journey that is an uphill struggle through poverty and the “social determinants of health.” Dr. King knew the injustice of poverty and demanded that something be done. The sermon contains many of his famous quotes, including his belief in the inevitability of justice–someday:
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
I hope that you read Dr. King’s last sermon and last speech and ask yourself how you can help to apply his wisdom to our times. I think that he would agree that the greatest barrier to the Triple Aim is persistent poverty, and that we should not be sleeping when it is time for a revolution.
