Ames Progressive

On January 24, Iowa State University held its annual birthday celebration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union. Mary R. Sawyer delivered the following speech at the celebration.

Sawyer participated in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and has studied Dr. King’s work extensively. She is the Director of Religious Studies at Iowa State University. She began her speech by showing a film clip of Dr. King.

I want to say a word about the context of this film clip: Dr. King had been asked to come to Memphis, Tennessee, to support the garbage workers who were on strike. The government had issued an injunction prohibiting the workers from marching. In the speech, you hear him referring to illegal injunctions and invoking the First Amendment to the Constitution. You will then hear the more familiar part of the speech — his “mountain top” speech — with King saying, “I may not get there with you. But we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” This is the last speech Dr. King gave. The next day, he was assassinated.

Contrary to what some may think … [w]e have not gotten to the Promised Land. We have not even been going in the right direction. I would suggest we have failed to go in the right direction because we have not understood what Dr. King was saying in the last years of his life.

We have been observing the King Holiday now for 22 years — longer than many of you have been alive. For these 22 years, what has been talked about, for the most part, is King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — that famous speech he delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963. This dream of racial harmony was a wonderful dream, and we have made much progress in that arena. But the King who talked about the Promised Land in 1968 was in many respects a different man from the King who talked about a Dream in 1963.

In 1963, Martin Luther King was focused on integration. He talked about diverse people being able to work together, to struggle together, to sing together, to hold hands together. The two major goals of the civil rights movement he led were 1) to desegregate the South, and 2) to secure voting rights for blacks residents in the South. These two goals were accomplished with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These were incredibly important accomplishments. But they did not solve the problems of injustice in this country.

Beginning in 1965, King’s analysis of the problems we faced deepened. As he came to understand the real complexities of institutional racism, his agenda for change became more radical. Integration and good will, he realized, were not enough. What purpose did it serve, he asked, if black Americans could now sit down in a restaurant with white customers, but could not afford to order from the menu? His emphasis shifted to economic issues and to the systemic nature of racism and classism.

This shift was greatly influenced by another leader and another movement. By 1965, many younger activists in the civil rights movement had become impatient with Dr. King’s approach. To them, his theology of non-violence and “loving the enemy” was inadequate to bring about the changes that were still needed. Deeply influenced by the political analyses of King’s counterpart, Malcolm X, these young activists began speaking of “Black Power.” It was a slogan that frightened many people and that was widely misunderstood. First and foremost, what advocates of this new movement meant by “black power” was economic power.

The civil rights movement, they pointed out, was largely a movement of middle-class blacks in the South. It had done little to change the lives of poor and working class blacks in the North. While Dr. King never abandoned nonviolence as his method of change, he did embrace the imperative of economic empowerment.

King began to speak in terms of “economic democracy,” by which he meant a form of socialism. He called for a redistribution of economic resources — for a leveling of the economic assets held by various groups of Americans. Furthermore, he began to tie the issues of poverty and economic disparity to the issues of militarism. And he pointed out that both were inextricably bound up with racism.

The war we were fighting in Viet Nam, he said, like so many of our wars, was against people of color. The war was draining resources from domestic programs such as the newly initiated “War on Poverty,” and the people in poverty in this country were disproportionately people of color. Militarism, economic injustice, and racism, he declared, were the triple evils of American society.

The overcoming of these evils required a “radical transformation of values.” Peace, not war. Economic fairness, not poverty on the one hand and extreme wealth on the other. The elimination of racist policies and practices from systems that continued to privilege whites and oppress people of color. These were the contours of the Promised Land. Today, I’ve no doubt he would include elimination of sexism, patriarchy, and heterosexism as well.

It was this agenda that got King killed. And it is this agenda that we must talk about if we would honor Dr. King.

The fact is we dropped the ball. When King was killed, his associates dropped the ball. For the most part, black and white ministers dropped the ball. Many social change activists dropped the ball. Ultimately, even some members of his own family dropped the ball. And who stepped into the vacuum?

The people in this country who really understood King’s agenda were white Christian men who had power and influence. They were angry at the changes brought about by the civil rights movement and they were threatened by the changes proposed by the women’s movement.

And so they organized. They created a movement of fundamentalist Christians who worked with neo-conservatives in Washington to advance an agenda that was precisely the opposite of King’s Promised Land. They elected presidents and congressmen who expanded the military budget, found other wars to fight, cut the social safety net, and began to restrict our civil rights and liberties. All in the name of “democracy” and “Christianity.”

This was not the social justice Christianity practiced by Dr. King. It was not the Republic of our founding mothers and fathers. We’ve had a radical revolution in values, alright. But do we live in a more just world today than forty years ago when Dr. King was killed? Hardly. Greg will have more to say on this. But I want to close with some suggestions for action.

We need to educate ourselves. We need to go to the library and read Dr. King’s books and speeches from his later years. I recommend this book by Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero. Watch the film series called “Eyes on the Prize” — it is the best video account of the civil rights and black power movements. The lessons and issues raised are still relevant today.

Enroll in courses in the African American Studies, Latino Studies, and Women’s Studies programs. Take history and political science classes that offer critiques of the right wing religious-political movement of recent decades.

We have an extraordinary opportunity this year. If you are not registered to vote, go and register. People marched, and lost their homes and jobs, and went to jail, and died so some of us could vote. If we want to honor Dr. King — and if we truly cherish inclusive and participatory democracy–the least we can do is VOTE!

And if you find your government still does not address issues of peace and social and environmental justice, then organize. Speak up. Protest. Exercise your First Amendment rights! Whether here on campus, or in Des Moines, or in our nation’s capital, be a patriot in the style of Martin Luther King, Jr.

We may not get to the Promised Land, either. But at least we will be moving in the right direction. At least we will be living lives of integrity and compassion and commitment. I do believe that Dr. King would ask no more of us than this. But neither would he settle for less