Let Freedom Ring: 50 Years of the ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

Fifty years ago, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC echoed with the greatest speech of the 20^th century.

This was long before I was born, inhabiting a world of both literal and figurative black and white, grainy film footage and crackly audio being my only connection to Martin Luther King’s iconic moment. From that perspective it’s history; inspiring history, yes, but history nonetheless.

But it’s easy to close the speech’s borders, to assume it’s only about the Civil Rights movement and racism, but it’s not that easily contained. It’s about economics and history and poverty and non-violence, themes with destinies that, like our own, are bound together with one another. How we treat refugees and the poor influences how we treat our neighbours; the decision to go to war made in plush London adn Washington offices impacts six-year-olds in Syria; one trolling joke about rape pollutes starts to pollute the whole of Twitter. King saw this, recognised how our destinies are intertwined and how our attitudes create policy and attitudes.

King says this better than you or I could though, his words carrying the weight of history and literature and scripture. Echoes of the Emancipation Proclamation and Richard III resound alongside heart cries of King David and the Prophet Isaiah. And yet that’s not all – about halfway through, King deviates from his original notes and improvises, and that’s the point everyone listening goes to church as Reverend King kicks into gear. The speech wasn’t originally meant to be about a dream; its most famous moment is the beginning of the improvisation and, possibly, the moment the orator becomes the prophet.

The Dream still isn’t a reality, not in the US, nor in the UK. The Trayvon Martin case points to that, as do the ‘Go Home’ vans driving around Britain. The narrative here is informed by racial tension, but is grounded in fear, fear of the outsider, fear of the unknown, and fear so often manifests as brutality. That’s why King’s call for nonviolence is so powerful – do you really win by using force, or do you just postpone the fight until the other guy comes back with a bigger stick? Besides, isn’t it better to live in a community defined by cooperation, not conquest.

“I Have a Dream” isn’t history, it’s a reminder. A reminder that the world isn’t equal, that racial tension is still real, that people still automatically equate ‘Muslim’ with ‘Terrorist’, that women are still forced to survive domestic and online abuse, that in some places you can still get arrested for being gay. Fifty years on, Dr. King’s words still matter.

Happy 4th of July

This isn’t going to be a Fourth of July post that uses the occasion to attack America. Truth is, I love America. Admittedly I’ve only been there three times, which is enough to decide I like the place but not to have developed any long standing issues with it, like not being able to find a public toilet or free healthcare. And I’m not sure that New York and San Francisco are representative of the country as a whole.

But wait – is anywhere representative of the whole of America? Hawaii and Alaska seem poles apart, as are Hollywood and small town Oklahoma. It always seems slightly strange to me that the country is so polarised between two political parties, as you’d think the sheer size and diversity of the place and its population would have lead to thousands of smaller parties all fighting for radically different constituencies.

From the outside, that could well be a strange sort of strength – a national unity of sorts. Sure, I’m pretty certain that the place is rent with divisions, but there still seems to be a unifying principle behind it all. Certainly American patriotism is worn on the sleeve more than it ever is in Britain, where it’s only really brought to mind by wars, football and annoying newspapers. Sometimes the way American national pride is expressed is flat out offensive (I’m from Britain, for goodness sake, we’re a democracy too and we don’t hate freedom!), but often it’s touching, even inspiring.

But then America is an easy place to be inspired by. If you’re from the US, take a moment to consider that many of you live amid a landscape that can only be described as epic. All those deserts and mountains and beaches and vast cornfields… It’s no wonder Hollywood took off, what with all those locations in which to film.

But most of those landscapes exist within the imagination. Texas belongs to John Wayne movies, California to the Beach Boys. Maine is Stephen King’s, the South is Harper Lee’s, and New Jersey is Springsteen’s. Music and movies have created an imaginative landscape that, to outsiders perhaps, is more America than America. It’s a landscape that’s big enough to hold a lot a narratives.

And not all of those narratives are fiction – the space race, for instance, and the Civil Rights campaign. Say what you want about American politicans – I do – but it’s hard not to have respect for the likes of Neil Armstrong and Martin Luther King, people whose stories contain both the good and the bad of America.

So on the Fourth of July, America gets to celebrate its independence, and thinks a lot about freedom (and, hopefully, the responsibilities of that freedom). And I hope it’s a good day; I’m happy to be British and wouldn’t trade the BBC or NHS for anything, but I’m glad America is around. Because I also wouldn’t want to live in a world without rock and roll and footprints on the moon.

Dreams and Visions: In Memory of Martin Luther King

(This post was originally written for Martin Luther King Day 2012, but as today is the anniversary of his assassination I thought it was appropriate to give it a second airing.)

“And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, 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 one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

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 today!”

 

Wrong era, wrong country. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is, like the moon landings, something I’ll only ever experience second-hand, with decades of context and scholarship and history and conspiracy theories ossifying around it. It’s an amazing speech even today, but to have stood before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights campaign, and just a couple of months before the Kennedy Assassination, must have been electrifying, visionary, transformative, one of the most iconic moments in a decade that feels like a thousand iconic moments stitched together.

3,000 miles away from where I sit today, America will be celebrating Martin Luther King Day, but his legacy, especially in a time of protest is relevant worldwide. That legacy is huge, covering everything from taking a stance against injustice to the importance of non-violence, but there’s another aspect to all this that may not get as much airplay today, although it’s something that’s stuck with me.

King came to prominance through the African-American church, with its preaching drenched in lyricism and a rapturous musical tradition, and his great speeches, two of which are quoted at either end of this post, reflect a poetry that’s been filtered through psalm-writers and prophets. His civil rights work was inseparable from his faith, and that raised an idea, a concept, a belief to the level of a vision.

If we take Hollywood as an authority, then visions are about the future – someone goes into a weird trance, all rolled eyes and strange camera angles and psychedelic rock, before delivering some ominous message. Maybe a crow will be watching them at the time, but the whole thing will be about the future – this is how things are going to unfold, and something, be it supernatural or even divine, will not be diverted from its path.

Well, that’s Hollywood for you.

Another way of looking at it is precisely that – another way of looking at things. In the Biblical tradition, that’s being granted the opportunity to see things through the eyes of God, and so visions and prophecy were as much commentary on current events as they were about the future. “This is the world you think you see,” says this idea, “But this is what it should be.”

And so King was a visionary in this sense, standing in front of thousands of expectant listeners and painting a picture of renewed and restored world while speaking with a prophectic voice against the sins of the present. There’s a line from the Bible that reads, in the sonorous tones of the King James Version, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” And that’s hard to deny, because without a dream of a better world, the possibility of change, a sense of hope, what is there? Sure, life can go on as it always has, but if it’s founded on a false premise then sooner or later it’s going to crumble. In King’s case that was a state taking Melting-Pot America and trying to segregate it along racial lines. Nowadays it’s encouraging people to get educated, get rich, get famous, then immediately throwing them on the scrapheap of income inequality.

A better world is possible. It just needs visionaries to see it, envision it, preach it. Sometimes it’s not enough to protest – sometimes it’s necessary to inspire at the same time. That job often falls to prophets, dreamers, people who may be flawed – and King had his flaws – but who can still check out the burning bush, who can hear a still small voice amid the chaos, who can push forward and climb to the mountaintop. And that will attract naysayers and cynics and killers, but it’ll also attract crowds and communities and movements. And then the world will change because the vision is too powerful, too compelling, too true to fall. And as King declared, on the day before he died in 1968:

“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! And 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!!”

 

San Francisco Memories

Photograph sourced from http://pdphoto.org/index.php

On this day in 1847, Yerba Buena in California adopted its more famous name, which is as good a reason as any to post some of my memories of when I visited it back in 2004.

 

It hasn’t been that long since I was in San Francisco, not in the grand scheme of things, but some of the memories are getting a bit hazy. Alcatraz is a pretty cool place to visit; it’s now a National Park, and so amid the tours covering the history and law and order aspects of the place, we had one tour guide enthusiastically telling us about a colony of oysters that was developing off one of the piers. That’s one of the reasons I have such respect for tour guides – the US National Parks Service is one of the reasons for that. The Park Ranger at Alcatraz genuinely loved his job, bubbling over with enthusiasm and geeky joy in his subject. That’s actually the thing that most stands out from that particular tour; well, that and getting pooped on by a seagull.

(Reading that back, it sounds a little dismissive of the place and I don’t want that to be the case. It’s well worth visiting if you’re ever in San Francisco, even if Mythbusters may have proven it to be less escape-proof than everyone thought…)

My most recounted memory of SF came at the end of the holiday. We got a cab to the airport and, frankly, the driver was insane. He looked how you’d expect a cabbie in San Francisco to look – long grey hair, vaguely hippy-ish – and he drove maniacally, swerving around a three or four lane freeway as if all other cars were merely conceptual entities and thus couldn’t kill us if we drove into the side/back/front/roof of them. He operated a clever system of indicating the opposite direction to that he intended to move, and when other drivers hit their horns and, you know, swore at us, he just blinked his hazard warning lights with Zen-like calm. It would have been beautiful in its Darwinian elegance if it weren’t for the fact I was in the passenger seat and therefore had a close-up view of everything we were about to hit.

(Minor thought on memory – I remember sitting on the left hand side of the car, but that can’t be right, because it was American and so the passenger seat would have been on the right, surely?)

He also told us that, although he was married, his wife was a hippo and therefore he had a mistress. I don’t think his wife was really a hippo, I just think she nagged him a lot to reconsider his vocation, what with the whole driving thing being a bit of a kamikaze mission…

One night we went to the Hard Rock Cafe, eating over-sized portions, listening to live music and impressing a cute waitress by polishing off a dessert the size of a whale. I think that’s when I consolidated my little tradition of going to Hard Rock Cafes in every country I visit.

(I guess I should apologise for being a bit corporate there, especially when I didn’t find anything relating to Joshua Norton and I didn’t visit the City Lights bookstore.)

Then there was Haight-Ashbury, the legendary hippy district, which still kinda looks the part, although there’s a GAP there which sort of spoils the image. We went there on the bus; in front of us a teenage girl was crying and an aging hippy couple were trying to comfort her. “Write all your memories in a book,” the guy said, “Then when you turn the page it puts those memories in the past and they don’t hurt so bad.” I remember being a bit cynical about that; now I look back and admire the guy for giving a damn about a crying girl on a bus.

Also in the Haight we went to the Ben and Jerry’s store, where the spaced out twentysomething dude behind the counter told us how The Da Vinci Code had blown his mind.

But all this aside, one moment stands out, embedded in my bones. 2004 was a bad year for me; something bad was coming, I knew it was coming, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. It was a good holiday in a bad year and so that’s the context for all this.

Our last night in SF, we went down to Pier 39. It’s a popular tourist spot, all carousels and smelly sealions, and we’d travelled there a couple of times on the famous trolley buses. It’s a nice spot and on that last night I found myself on my own at the end of the pier. Behind me were the sounds of shops and sideshows; before me was San Francisco Bay, dark, waves lapping, the lights of boats slowly drifting, the Alcatraz lighthouse blinking on and off and on and off… And time slowed to a crawl and I was at peace and didn’t want to leave and I just stared out at the Bay with a sense of transcendence and a presence and a peace that I believe to have been God but I wasn’t in much of a state to do much with that knowledge at the time.

“There he is,” said my friend Andy, “You alright, Mr. Hyde?”

“Yeah. Just taking a moment. Just taking a moment.”

 

Martin Luther King Day 2012: Dreams and Visions

“And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, 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 one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

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 today!”

Wrong era, wrong country. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is, like the moon landings, something I’ll only ever experience second-hand, with decades of context and scholarship and history and conspiracy theories ossifying around it. It’s an amazing speech even today, but to have stood before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights campaign, and just a couple of months before the Kennedy Assassination, must have been electrifying, visionary, transformative, one of the most iconic moments in a decade that feels like a thousand iconic moments stitched together.

3,000 miles away from where I sit today, America will be celebrating Martin Luther King Day, but his legacy, especially in a time of protest is relevant worldwide. That legacy is huge, covering everything from taking a stance against injustice to the importance of non-violence, but there’s another aspect to all this that may not get as much airplay today, although it’s something that’s stuck with me.

King came to prominance through the African-American church, with its preaching drenched in lyricism and a rapturous musical tradition, and his great speeches, two of which are quoted at either end of this post, reflect a poetry that’s been filtered through psalm-writers and prophets. His civil rights work was inseparable from his faith, and that raised an idea, a concept, a belief to the level of a vision.

If we take Hollywood as an authority, then visions are about the future – someone goes into a weird trance, all rolled eyes and strange camera angles and psychedelic rock, before delivering some ominous message. Maybe a crow will be watching them at the time, but the whole thing will be about the future – this is how things are going to unfold, and something, be it supernatural or even divine, will not be diverted from its path.

Well, that’s Hollywood for you.

Another way of looking at it is precisely that – another way of looking at things. In the Biblical tradition, that’s being granted the opportunity to see things through the eyes of God, and so visions and prophecy were as much commentary on current events as they were about the future. “This is the world you think you see,” says this idea, “But this is what it should be.”

And so King was a visionary in this sense, standing in front of thousands of expectant listeners and painting a picture of renewed and restored world while speaking with a prophectic voice against the sins of the present. There’s a line from the Bible that reads, in the sonorous tones of the King James Version, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” And that’s hard to deny, because without a dream of a better world, the possibility of change, a sense of hope, what is there? Sure, life can go on as it always has, but if it’s founded on a false premise then sooner or later it’s going to crumble. In King’s case that was a state taking Melting-Pot America and trying to segregate it along racial lines. Nowadays it’s encouraging people to get educated, get rich, get famous, then immediately throwing them on the scrapheap of income inequality.

A better world is possible. It just needs visionaries to see it, envision it, preach it. Sometimes it’s not enough to protest – sometimes it’s necessary to inspire at the same time. That job often falls to prophets, dreamers, people who may be flawed – and King had his flaws – but who can still check out the burning bush, who can hear a still small voice amid the chaos, who can push forward and climb to the mountaintop. And that will attract naysayers and cynics and killers, but it’ll also attract crowds and communities and movements. And then the world will change because the vision is too powerful, too compelling, too true to fall. And as King declared, on the day before he died in 1968:

“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! And 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!!”