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May 23, 2013
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 Still Dreaming After All These YearsPosted on Jan 19, 2009
Truthdig normally celebrates Martin Luther King Day by remembering the more complex, more subversive King—the man who railed against America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and “a society gone mad on war.” But a day before America inaugurates its first black president, we have other things on our mind. It’s easy to be cynical about this moment in history. Will Barack Obama’s ascension to the highest office in the land undo the incarceration rate that sends one in three black men to jail? For all the great leaps forward, there is clearly much work to be done. Yet it is also easy to be hopeful now. The images, Sunday, of Barack Obama, the son of a son of Africa, standing where King stood, with Lincoln watching on, captured so clearly that in the long course of history there are great leaps, and we intend to enjoy this one. To that end we bring you the classic—King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered 45 years ago not far from where Obama will take the oath of office. King would have turned 80 last Thursday. Were he looking on, we can only imagine what he would be thinking. The text below comes from American Rhetoric I Have a DreamAdvertisement 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 one hundred 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. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. 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." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: 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. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.
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By software development uk, August 14, 2009 at 3:33 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
That was an inspiring post,
I hope he was alive and could have seen that now america is free and an african american is now the president
Thanks for writing, most people don’t bother
Report thisBy thebeerdoctor, January 21, 2009 at 4:26 am Link to this comment
re: Little Brother
Being the savvy self promoter that I am, I would like to point out a piece called “Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars”, written back in April 2008, that not only compared Obama with King, the social visionary, but also with John Coltrane, the musical visionary. Both of these men have seen their essential vision diluted by a marketing-driven media.
Report thishttp://beerdoctor-beerdoctor.blogspot.com/2008/04/only-when-it-is-dark-enough-can-you-see.html
By Little Brother, January 20, 2009 at 8:38 am Link to this comment
Even for an irony junkie like me, it was too much when Reverend Martin Luther King, assassinated by Amerikan security state operatives, was deftly transmuted in death from a radical, subversive social critic—in the best and finest sense of the terms—into Martin Luther King™, paragon of docile and conformist public service.
Even the embalming job they did on Lenin wasn’t as effective as the one the political and corporate media elite did on Dr. King.
If that wasn’t bad enough—and it was—worse yet is the Happy Horseshit conflation of Dr. King and Obama. Obama, the savvy self-promoter, was only too pleased during the primaries to have Caroline Kennedy pop out of the Obama Express caboose and shovel clean-coal sentimentality into the furnace, promoting Brand Obama as the Second Coming of JFK.
At the time, one of the many gushing nitwits published at the Huffington Post crowed that Caroline is “the last blood heir” to JFK. Mark Twain’s attempts to wean naïve and ignorant Amerikans away from atavistic and decadent royalism were in vain.
And now, in part because of coincidences of the calendar, Obama is shoehorned into Dr. King’s legacy.
I’m sure there is no end of kitsch commemorating this artificial public-relations linkage.
I expect a chorus of credentialed talking heads to enthusiastically pluck this artificial fruit and pitch it on teevee until the juice runs down their collective chins.
Stuff and nonsense!
Report thisBy thebeerdoctor, January 20, 2009 at 5:26 am Link to this comment
For some strange reason the King legacy has been diluted to the point that it now appears as simply a call to do charitable service. This is strange when you consider that King’s essential message was about injustice; whether it was racial or economic, and where unbridled militarism was an oppression to all of humanity, along with the violence that such actions ensure.
Report thisConsider what happened in Moscow yesterday: the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov was gunned down in broad daylight, after a news conference. Markelov represented the family of an 18-year-old Chechen woman, Heda Kungayeva, who was strangled in 2000 by Col. Yuri Budanov, as part of Russia’s war on Chechen “terrorists”. The colonel was freed last week. Markelov announced he was considering an international court appeal against Budanov’s early release. He was shot in the head soon after, by a masked gunman using a silencer. Novaya Gazeta freelance journalist, Anastasia Baburova, 25, was also killed, attempting to intervene.
By Shepherd, January 20, 2009 at 2:11 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Can’t we just enjoy MLK Jr.‘s work and Obama’s achievement without dragging Israel, Aquarius and subpar eloquence into this? It’s a great day in American history. Let’s just leave it at that for at least 24 hours.
Report thisBy eileen fleming, January 19, 2009 at 7:25 pm Link to this comment
In the ‘60’s two black men in America; one a Christian and one a Muslim shared a similar dream with different philosophies and means to achieve them.
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had “a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed… that all men are created equal.”
Malcolm X’s radical creed was, “Anything you can think of that you want to change right now, the only way you can do it is with a ballot or a bullet. And if you’re not ready to get involved with either one of those, you are satisfied with the status quo. That means we’ll have to change you.”
Both men dreamed of a world freed from the bondage of prejudice and racism, a world in which their children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. While King consistently advocated for a brotherhood of all peoples and persisted in only nonviolent actions to achieve it; not until after a pilgrimage to Mecca, did X evolve in his spirituality and thus reject his separatist beliefs and begin to advocate for unity and a world wide brotherhood.
Both can be said to have fully understood that there are “truths that are self-evident: That all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights;…[and] that, to secure [those] rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”- The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776,
Both men engaged in the struggle to wake up good people whose ears were not ready to hear, whose eyes were not ready to see and whose hearts were not yet pierced to bleed for the least and oppressed of humanity. Both men were shot dead before either could see any of their dreams realized.
A few weeks before Rev. King bled to death on a patch of pavement in Memphis, he said:
“Peace for Israel means security, and we stand with all our might to protect its right to exist…I see Israel as one of the greatest outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.”
King died ten months after the 40 years of Israel’s Military occupation of Palestine began.
On May 14, 1948, The Declaration of the establishment of Israel proclaimed: “On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations.”
The Hebrew prophet Amos prayed:
“Let JUSTICE roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
I contend that if King and X had lived, they would have followed the call of Amos and would have called for an IMMEDIATE Bilateral ceasefire, free flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and END to the Israeli Occupation and upholding of Universal Human Rights, upon which Israel’s statehood was CONTINGENT upon upholding:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…
Report thishttp://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=1
By Libarchist, January 19, 2009 at 5:04 pm Link to this comment
Obama is afraid to utter the word liberal—and the sheeple are saying we are in the new Age of Aquarius.
Report thisBy coloradokarl, January 19, 2009 at 3:05 pm Link to this comment
Martin Luther King died for our sins. A martyr for the ages, His words will forever shine as a beacon in the night for all who can see. The hardened heart of the Fearful Racist drowns his soul in the sea of humanity that surrounds most in the warmth of love. The Racist feels no love. Hate breaths a Fascist sigh of hopeless anger, Joyless in life, A fast fading memory, The funeral pyre burns dim. Alone at last, an eternal Damnation.
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