“I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Martin Luther King, Jr. declaimed in Memphis on April 3, 1968. The day before he fell to an assassin’s bullet, King anticipated death with triumphant oratory. He thereby set for his legacy the tone that has ever after prevailed. The assassin was reduced to the role of a bit player in a grand drama with the power to move the entire world.
Fifty years on, we must pause to reflect on that drama. For there is a continuing story to tell, one from which we may profit now as surely as the U.S. did 50 years ago.
To begin, though, we must disentangle the contradictory myths that have enveloped the assassination and King’s prophetic anticipation of it. The one myth likens the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to the Passover setting in Jerusalem, where King is a Christ figure, sacrificing his life for the sins of his country. A second myth is grounded in the Old Testament. In that rendering, the mountaintop was the last earthly stop for Moses, who would not enter the Promised Land. In touching the rock at Meribah without honoring God, he had given offense. While he did not lose his salvation, his sin ended his service in this world. When Moses lost his focus, his work was done.
What can we see in King’s journey from the Montgomery bus boycott to the Memphis sanitation strike that will allow us to elevate one of these myths and dismiss the other? This coming July, supported by Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, I will lead 50 school teachers from Atlanta, to Montgomery, to Birmingham, to Selma, to Oxford, to Memphis, to Little Rock, looking closely at the history of the Civil Rights Movement. In large part, we will be treading in the paths laid down by King during the first part of his mission, the portion which he often memorialized by associating landmark legislation or judicial decisions with the impact of the nonviolent protest movement. From integrated transportation (following Montgomery) to integrated public accommodations (following Birmingham) to expanded voting protections (following Selma), a decade of irresistible progress unfolded.
As that decade closed, however, the U.S. swerved into an era of mass rioting in urban centers, the cotangent emergence of anti-war protests and the Black Power movement, and the insistent demand that King take on the systemic evils of the entire American society. With only three years remaining before he would die, King had to refashion his narrative to include poverty and joblessness, inadequate housing and education, an “unjust” war and the needs of people of color all over the globe.
“Operation Breadbasket,” “The Poor Peoples’ March,” and other ventures represented a new focus in the struggle. The results, however, differed markedly. King no longer targeted the evildoers — the Bull Connors of the world — but the amorphous system, which responded to him by saying yes, but doing no. In part because it never meant “yes,” and in part because it had not the least idea of how to deliver “yes.” Instead of a true-false exam, King had served up a multiple-choice quiz. He had changed his focus.
In the 13 years of King’s campaign, there were many assassinations, but none meant so much as his on April 4, 1968. The reason, perhaps, is the very thing he said about the four young girls killed while attending Sunday school in Birmingham in 1963. “Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly to make the American Dream a reality,” he said. “They did not die in vain. God still has a way of wringing good out of evil … ”
To question whether the work was worth the losses is to fail to understand all that King meant to the U.S. His ambition was large, for he believed that “human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men wiling to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. … Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood” — what he called the “beloved community.”
Once King changed his focus, his work was done. He could climb to the top of the mountain to look back upon all that he had accomplished. We, too, should look back upon this story, and in doing so, we may yet say this was a providential work.
William B. Allen, Ph.D., is a former chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a member of the Board of Directors of Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge.
