‘To the Mountaintop…’
On this day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “mountaintop” speech in Memphis:
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live…a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The next day, April 4, 1968, he was assassinated.
Watching this is always a source of frisson coupled with real quietude for me. The yet-to-be-revealed tragic appropriateness of his allusion to Moses in Deuteronomy 34 is so very moving.
Never since has there arisen a prophet…
In his fine new book MARTIN LUTHER KING’S BIBLICAL EPIC: HIS FINAL GREAT SPEECH (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), Keith D. Miller includes the complete text of Martin Luther King’s last speech known as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” in Appendix A (pages 175-182).
It is not at all hard to figure out why Miller refers to King’s last speech as a biblical epic. On the contrary, it is hard not to notice that King is constructing his own biblical epic out of the biblical epic of Moses and the promised land.
Centuries earlier, American Protestants in New England started the American tradition of drawing on biblical and other sources in Western culture to compose the American epic, as Sacvan Bercovitch styles it in THE PURITAN ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN SELF (Yale University Press, 1975; revised edition with a lengthy new preface by the author, 2011). So King’s final speech stands in a centuries-old American tradition.
In his final speech King uses imaginary time-travel, as Miller styles it, to survey highlights of Western cultural history and then conclude with a moving affirmation of his own time in American cultural history and his own lifework in combating white supremacy in American culture in his day.
But here are my questions: Don’t all American adults need to “own” as we say our own time and our own place as Americans in American cultural history, even when we recognize flaws in American cultural history and current American practices? In other words, don’t all of us Americans need to follow King’s example in his final speech and work out our own ways to “own” our own times and our own American struggles?
King knew that death threats had been renewed against him in Memphis, and surely the knowledge evoked the language of his final speech. It requires one to include courage as one of the greatest, perhaps even the greatest, of the virtues he displayed. I used his example once to illustrate that courage was also one of the human virtues of Christ by which we were redeemed.
I suppose that if a similar speech were recorded as having been given before the suffering of Christ or one of the Apostles, that some historical critics would insist that it must be a vaticinium ex eventu, a “prediction after the fact”. …
At the time, as I recall, the speech seemed to suggest that Dr. King had achieved some kind of divine prescience. But I no longer think that’s true.
What I find so moving the speech now is that King is telling people that their vision will go on with or without him, that there is a Promised Land, and that his followers will achieve it, not because he’s leading them, but because they’ve learned to lead themselves.
(And as I was playing this, my kid actually looked up from his iPod to listen to it. Never underestimate the combined power of well-chosen words and a good set of lungs, even for Generation Schlump.)
Thank you for posting, David.
his own real illness and exhaustion are poresent as he practically falls into someone’s arms… Sure appaers llike an “Agony in the Garden” or some parallel to parts of John’s gospel– to overdo the comparison…
Twenty-five years ago, in Feb. 1987, Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the Amercan Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Empoverished the Souls of American Students” was first published. It shook the educational establishment to its foundations and made Bloom a pariah. To the astonishment of the NY publishing business it sold millions of copies and remained on best seller lists for months. His message was dismal: the Humanities in most American colleges taught skepticism, even hihilimsm: there is no truth, there are no values.
Was there a connection between King’s death and the popularity of this book 20 years later? I suspect that the millions who bought it were largely the same people who in their idealistic youth 20 years before had been inspired by King. They were looking to re-kindle that idealism. Bloom gave them a bit of hope that maybe dreams of goodness actually had some substance, that nihilism wasn’t our ate.
King was anything but a nihilist. Not only did he preach against the skepticism of the day, but he even preached the brotherhood of man and hope in an afterlife where goodness and truth would be ours — on condition that we sought forgiveness and mended our ways. Imagine that — he thought sin and forgiveness were real! This is what Academe has never understood about King: he was, of all things, a believing southern Baptist preacher, inspired by rock-hard truths which the academics scorned. The students knew, however, that there was something about this man that was *real*. Small wonder that the students bought Bloom’s book 20 years later hoping to find something to renew their idealism.
I think they’re still looking, and we can thank King more than anyone that they haven’t entirely given up.
Thanks for this reminder. Some of my own thoughts on the occasion can be found here: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
Would someone please plant an unworthy remark in here. Then, even I might be able to sneak in a worthy one.
Some people just seem too sincere to be believed. I’m old enough to remember him and those days and, to a large extent, that is how I felt about him at that time. He seemed not nearly cautious enough to survive. I am convinced a great deal of the naivety of the 60′s was as much a yearning for a better reality as anything else. But, there was naivety and we all too often left our brains out in the rain.
As for King he never gave up until the option was taken from him.
Joseph Komonchak wrote: I suppose that if a similar speech were recorded as having been given before the suffering of Christ or one of the Apostles, that some historical critics would insist that it must be a vaticinium ex eventu, a “prediction after the fact”. …, a “prediction after the fact”. …
Great point! The world of scholarship sometimes finds it unnecessarily difficult to deal with reality (but that’s how we make our living).
“Great point! The world of scholarship sometimes finds it unnecessarily difficult to deal with reality (but that’s how we make our living).”
Thanks, first of all, to David for reminding me of this speech: an astonishing moment of grace and courage.
For anyone who is intrigued by Joseph Komonchak’s and Nicholas Clifford’s “if this were in the Bible, we’d say something else” reflections, I can’t resist pointing out this, from Mark Goodacre’s NT Blog this morning:
http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/tabor-vs-charlesworth-on-talpiot-tomb.html
It’s a comparison of two firsthand descriptions by people involved in discovering some allegedly 1st century Jewish ossuaries. Sorry if this is way too off topic, but I found it thought provoking as we read through the Passion narratives this week.
“Joseph Komonchak wrote: I suppose that if a similar speech were recorded as having been given before the suffering of Christ or one of the Apostles, that some historical critics would insist that it must be a vaticinium ex eventu, a “prediction after the fact”. …, a “prediction after the fact”. …
Great point! The world of scholarship sometimes finds it unnecessarily difficult to deal with reality (but that’s how we make our living).
How is naive acceptance of an ancient text equatable with dealing with reality?