On Monday we honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the foremost leader of America’s civil rights movement. His commitment to civil rights grew from his faith. His oratory was suffused with biblical allusions. So was his life.
Dr. King graduated from Morehouse College; received a divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania; and earned his doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University. Returning to the segregated South, he served as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and co-pastor (with his father) of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Martyred at age 39, he is justifiably famed for his presidency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. But he’s best known for “I have a dream” — the speech he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963.
Like the Gettysburg Address a century before, King’s “I have a dream” was deeply rooted in the ideals of the American founding. Yet most people don’t realize how.
Aspirations reaching for actualization
From the beginning, America’s founding documents articulated aspirations well in advance of their realization — beginning with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, which officially inaugurated the American experiment.
But the work of the founders was far from done. Declaring independence was one thing; obtaining it, quite another. Even after the Revolutionary War ended in American victory, on Sept. 3, 1783 — and with Great Britain recognizing the independence of the United States — the work of the founders was incomplete.
The States were United only in name, not in fact. The miracle at Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1787 culminated in the signing of the Constitution. But again, the work of the founders wasn’t done. Ratification — over strenuous opposition — was required.
When the Congress of the Confederation certified one year later, on Sept. 13, 1788, that the Constitution had been duly ratified, still more was necessary. Several states had conditioned their ratification on adoption of a Bill of Rights.
Three years later, ratification of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution — the Bill of Rights — was completed, on Dec. 15, 1791.
But, of course, the work of the founding still wasn’t done. Because the rights set forth were secured for some, but denied to others.
Reaching for ‘a new birth of freedom’
Much happened in the century between the nation’s founding revolution — which filmmaker Ken Burns called the country’s first of two major civil wars — and that second disastrous conflict a century later.
As Burns summarized Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, “The American Revolution is still going on, meaning, we are a country in the process of becoming.”
Speaking at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln famously said the Civil War was then testing whether “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.”
Thankfully, it did. But again, the work of the founding was far from over.
Following the war’s end, on Dec. 6, 1865, the nation began to experience, as Lincoln had resolved, “a new birth of freedom.” The 13th Amendment prohibited slavery; the 14th extended equal protection of the laws to all; the 15th affirmed the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous servitude.
But still, the work of the founding remained incomplete.
The American dream reaffirmed
Nearly a full century later, as of late summer, 1963, state-mandated segregation persisted. And that leads us to Martin Luther King’s great speech.
On Aug. 28, 1963, a quarter-million people had gathered on the National Mall to protest state-sanctioned racial discrimination, which King correctly identified as an affront to America’s founding ideals. Notwithstanding the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the states of the former Confederacy had imposed a thicket of legal impediments to racial equality and turned a blind eye to race-based terrorism. The Union may have won the War, but the Confederacy, in many respects, won the ensuing peace — if we can call it that.
Thus it was that Dr. King, speaking from the Lincoln Memorial, began:
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
“But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
King called for Black Americans to be “granted his citizenship rights.” He stated his case plainly, grounding it in the text of America’s founding documents:
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise 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."
Even as he acknowledged “the dark and desolate valley of segregation” and “the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” in “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent,” King abjured violence:
“In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”
He acknowledged that many in his audience had “come here out of great trials and tribulations,” some “fresh from narrow jail cells,” others from “areas where your quest for freedom left you battered.” Even so, he said:
“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.
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. . . .
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . . I have a dream that . . . one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers....
“This is our hope.”
May it be our hope as well, and our resolve.