MLK's Memphis Speech - Why It Would be Banned by CRT Laws around the Country
GOP Politicians read single lines by MLK because they couldn't get through a whole speech without recognizing what a radical challenge MLK makes to simple "colorblindness"
I regularly teach a sociology class on Inequality in the Workplace and I have my students watch a documentary on MLK in Memphis - and my question to them before that class is always: what was Martin Luther King Jr. doing in Memphis?
And my students, overwhelmingly black and brown students in New York City don’t know, since almost nowhere do our schools or media talk about anything MLK did after 1965 and rarely what he said after 1963 (and not many details about the rest of what he said in that speech in D.C. that day).
But the answer is Martin Luther King Jr. died at the site of a picket line, of workers withholding their labor in protest of economic and racial oppression. Watch this wonderful documentary to get the whole story:
It was as woke an action as possible and the speech he gave the night before he died, everything he said before the “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” clip that is endlessly cited out of context, couldn’t be read in any classroom governed by the anti-CRT laws now enacted around the country.
We have laws designed explicitly to protect white kids and white adults in college classrooms from being made to feel uncomfortable. And MLK’s whole life, every speech, was designed to do and say things to make white audiences feel uncomfortable, to make them think about how their actions and their ancestor’s actions, contributed to the oppression of black Americans.
One tragedy of the domestication of MLK, of the attempt to ignore what he actually said to pretend all he said was pablum like “be kind to one another” and judge people “only by the content of their character” is that it makes it impossible in classrooms to read his actual speeches, which are wonderful examples of literary rhetoric, but also blazing condemnations of the exact hypocrisy of those who would hide behind rhetoric like the anti-CRT forces.
If you read the I've Been to the Mountaintop speech (full text in link), it starts with a leisurely question on what times in history MLK would want to have lived and he talks about the potential wonder of seeing the trek out of Egypt and across the Red Sea, of meeting with Plato and Aristotle, of seeing the Roman Empire or the rise of Renaissance culture, or meeting Lincoln as he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
But he says, no, he would tell God "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy."
Not because it is a wonderful place to live but because it is a sick civilization, but one where people are being challenged to deal with the sickness of hate:
Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.
But if that wouldn’t make an anti-CRT politician uncomfortable, his next paragraph would:
Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."
MLK explicitly compares the evils visited on black people in the U.S. to the violent colonization visited upon Africa. There is no kumbaya present where equality has been achieved, but only the hope of reconciliation in the future, but contingent on recognizing the demands of those who are still not free.
Oh and MLK would have choice words for the Herschel Walkers and Clarence Thomases of our modern era - for they have always been there and MLK noted the need to call them out:
We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
He also had strong words for those promoting violence and undermining unity on that end as well but mostly because they distracted from the main issue at hand, the oppression of sanitation workers, since the media will deal “only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers are on strike.”
In his speech, he talks of course of defying the violence by government officials - and people love those passages because they comfort themselves that they aren’t Bull Connor, so they can now ignore MLK’s speeches.
But MLK never talked about just protest. He supported concrete economic action. As he said that night:
Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively -- that means all of us together -- collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine…
We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right…we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread.
This is as woke a boycott as they come- the kind Elon Musk has railed against and threatened lawsuits to stop:
And the kind of boycotts GOP legislators are trying to ban with government threats
But then, MLK would not be surprised that any effective economic action, whether strikes, boycotts or marches would be met with legal threats by the state. He dealt with that every day and was dealing with it in Memphis:
Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.1 And so just as I say, we aren't going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.
The legal threats by Republicans, against “woke boycotts”, against CRT, against transgender people, against women - all would be so familiar to Martin Luther King Jr. The conceit of the GOP is that MLK protests were a thing of a distant era but they recreate the threats and harms he was calling out the night before he died every day.
He ended his speech by talking about when a woman stabbed him in the chest several years earlier and he rejoices he didn’t die then, that he had time to fight in Albany and at Birmingham and in Selma and now in Memphis. And it’s in the context of he’d faced death in the past that he said “It really doesn't matter what happens now” because while he might die:
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!
But the point is, in a speech detailing the current oppression of striking black sanitation workers, of the colonial oppression of blacks in America, or the government threats against free speech, he was not saying in 1968 that the nation has reached the Promised Land just because the worst aspects of Jim Crow had ended.
It was a prophetic speech that he no doubt would make today- and be accused on Fox News as being a disreputable “woke racist preacher.”
And as that great Memphis speech illustrates, MLK would feel right at home in 2023 America as if little had changed - much to the shame of our nation.
But the tragedy is that many students won’t read MLK’s Memphis speech because their state governments would ban it as “critical race theory.”
The irony of children likely being banned from reading MLK’s speeches on the say meant to honor his memory would not be lost on that speaker, whe always recognized the mix of tragedy and humor in fighting oppression.