Martin Luther King's radicalism would not have succeeded without his evocation of conservative principles
By R.L.G. | BERLIN
JOHNSON feels some trepidation writing this column. What more can be said about what some consider the greatest speech of all time? On August 28th 1963—50 years ago on Wednesday—Martin Luther King, junior spoke on the occasion of the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Every year his resounding words ring out from family speakers on the occasion of King's birthday, an American national holiday. And every year they draw tears from your columnist's eyes.
The moral power of King's speech is unimpeachable. Its historical role is similarly unquestionable. His revolutionary words delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial would leave America changed. But what is striking is something that is largely lost to modern rhetoric: King's constant evocation of ancient laws and age-old values. With radical intent, King appealed to America with a deeply conservative speech.
To have invented rights would have been preposterous. Instead, King reminded his audience what Thomas Jefferson wrote: "That all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." King had come to redeem a two-century-old debt, a "promissory note" that America had defaulted on, or, riffing further, "a bad check". Again, the conservatism: responsible people do not write checks they cannot cover.
But the preacher in King reached back further, into the source of morality that nearly all Americans of his time held dear to their hearts, and the book they read and quoted memorised passages of. While the Baptist Bill Clinton, the born-again George Bush and the black-church-influenced Barack Obama have all salted their speeches with Biblical allusions, for King faith was not an added bit of spice but the meal itself, the base of his thinking—as it was for his listeners.
Mr Obama, for example, often names the passage of the Bible he is about to cite. For King, as for most of his audience, there was no need to cite the book of Amos in saying "we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." The book of Isaiah was so familiar to King that he had already begun ad-libbing when he quoted the prophet in looking to a future when "every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight."
Even the famous "I have a dream" riff speaks not only to King's aspirations for his children, but to his role as an Old Testament figure. Dreams and visions recur in the Bible: Jacob's ladder, Joseph's seven fat cows and seven lean ones, the "feet of clay" in Nebuchadnezzar's dream interpreted by Daniel. A dream was not, to the pastor King, a mere aspiration, but something prophetic.
Leaning heavily on the Bible was not without risks to King. That same Bible (with the curse of Ham, and the regulation of slave-holding in both the Old and New Testaments) had been used to justify inequality. Yet even the ancient Israelites, God's own chosen people, were sinners, yet redeemable ones.
Finally, King's speech reached to something literally as old as the hills, namely the hills themselves. In a glorious crescendo—it is incredible that King, just 34, was still ad-libbing—he evoked every corner of America:
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
Just as the Old Testament God was manifest in a burning bush or a pillar of fire, the earth itself, for King, was demanding freedom. It is this passage that gets your columnist (who grew up not far from Stone Mountain of Georgia, as did King) misty-eyed each time he hears it.
Some later black civil-rights leaders would frighten Americans with unfamiliar things: raised fists and cries of "black power". But King knew that this is not what 1963's America would listen to and truly hear. In drawing on the bedrock principles of Americans' secular scriptures, religious heritage and even the land itself, he stressed the ties that bound Americans. He made equality obvious—perhaps inevitable even.
