Nearly 60 years after the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a Howard University professor said his students still find the address relevant — once they read the entire speech.
Marcus Board Jr., associate professor of political science at Howard University, points out that the first part of King’s speech was a sharp critique of the nation’s treatment of Black Americans.
In the first segment of his address, King said Black Americans fighting for civil rights could never be satisfied “as long as the Negro is a victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” and called for accountability, saying “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.'”
Board said students are not familiar with that part of King’s address. Instead they’ve been taught the part of the speech that talked of King’s dream of a society where racial harmony has been achieved. Board said students have absorbed what he called “the disingenuous version of Martin Luther King, what Cornell West has called the ‘Santa Claus-ification’ of Martin Luther King.”
Board said that King’s dream is of course a desirable goal, but that, “The reality is, you don’t get that society without sincere work and without sincere change.” Using a term in King’s speech, Board said, “That’s the ‘fierce urgency of now’ he talked about.”
When asked how he’ll be spending the 60th anniversary of the March On Washington, Board said he’ll be thinking about the conditions of today, and how the speech shows how much work remains to achieve the kind of society King described.
Board said he’ll be “trying to think about how we get people to believe, as so many of us have before, and to not give up the hope that history can change, and that justice is possible.”
On an optimistic note, Board said, “We don’t necessarily have to change the entire world. We all have very local communities that we’re a part of, and we can change those communities every day.”
