Achieving Martin Luther King's Dream

Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 80 years old this year. I wonder what he would have said about Barack Obama’s inauguration tomorrow. It’s an interesting thought that just 41 years after King was murdered for standing against bigotry, an African American man has been elected president. How far we’ve come.

And how far we still have to go. I had to smile in November when some people started proclaiming that Obama’s election signaled the end of racism in America. Racism isn’t gone; we’ve got plenty of evidence of that. Evidence like the New Year’s Day murder of a subdued and handcuffed Oscar Grant by a BART police officer.

These instances of racist violence are fewer and farther between than they were in Dr. King’s day, but a quieter racism remains. There is still much to do, but it is good to be reminded of how far we have come. I say “we” because the end of racism isn’t just good for the African American community; it’s good for all of us. The end of bigotry that Dr. King and other heroes of the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century struggled for is one that we in the LGBT community and many others are continuing with them today.

I’ve been trying to come up with something new to say on the 80th anniversary of Dr. King’s birth, but it all seems to have been said by others more educated and more eloquent than I am. Instead, I found a couple of important excerpts of Dr. King’s writings to share. As my focus is on two fronts, civil and religious, so is the focus of these brief excerpts.

From Dr. King’s collection of sermons, Strength to Love:

Softmindedness often invades religion. This is why religion has sometimes rejected new truth with a dogmatic passion. Through edicts and bulls, inquisitions and excommunications, the church has attempted to prorogue truth and place an impenetrable stone wall in the path of the truth-seeker. The historical-philological criticism of the Bible is considered by the softminded as blasphemous, and the reason is often looked upon as the exercise of a corrupt faculty. Softminded persons have revised the Beatitudes to read, “Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God.”

From the book Why We Can’t Wait, which includes Dr. King’s famous Letter From Birmingham City Jail:

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Finally, from the speech for which Dr. King is best known, collected in the book A Testament of Hope:

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

We’re getting there, Dr. King. Happy birthday.

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