Abstract
“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Such was the entreaty that, according to popular lore, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted to Martin Luther King Jr. on August 28, 1963.
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The civil rights leader was two-thirds through the speech he was delivering on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. King had spoken about his dream in other contexts but had not included the idea in his prepared texts for this speech. We can be grateful then that King, responding to Jackson or some other grace-touched inspiration, went off script and spoke words that, though often scorned at the time, have ever since resounded deep in the American soul: I say to you today, my friends, 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. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification,” one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
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The speech, given to an audience of 250,000 gathered around the entire length of the Reflecting Pool, would be acclaimed as one of the greatest speeches in American history, if not the greatest.
This issue commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of that speech by examining the themes important to it and to King’s life and writings. It opens with M. Shawn Copeland’s examination of King’s challenge to contemporary Christian praxis in regard to three issues: racism, poverty, and war (“‘The Fierce Urgency of Now’: The Example of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”). After analyzing King’s trenchant critique of US social and ecclesial mores, she ends by highlighting the possibility of and need for a different set of praxes. “Hope is, at once, the eschatological and concrete ground of human existence and human action. On the one hand, hope is fixed on God; it is religious, resurrectional, eschatological; on the other hand, hope springs from the concreteness of our creatureliness—our experience, energies, capacities, and abilities for action.”
Our two international contributors witness to the universal reach of King’s dream. To dream about a different future requires hope, as Maria Clara Bingemer’s “To Dream in North and South America” argues: King’s dream offers “a horizon of hope that stimulates struggle.” She appeals to King’s critique of American racism in order to identify, in a comparative fashion, the different historical and structural realities that have operated in the United States and Latin America. Bingemer’s analysis helpfully examines the concrete practices in Brazil that have furthered racism’s continuance and those that, one hopes, will contribute to its eradication.
While Bingemer’s focus is on internal reform within an existing nation-state structure, Deogratias Rwezaura, SJ’s “Martin Luther King Jr. and Julius K. Nyerere’s Shared Dreams for Racial Equality and Human Dignity” steps back to look at the racist beginnings of Africa’s nation-state system itself and the historical efforts to overcome the colonial legacy of racist political power. He appeals to a Christian theology of liberation to identify commonalities in the political emancipation efforts of African activists such as Bantu Stephen Biko and Julius Nyerere and King’s dream of racial equality. Indeed, the influence between King and African liberative movements was mutual (“King’s fight for integration in an America that had been independent for more than two centuries was also inspired by the fast-moving political independence of African states”). Indeed, King saw in the two struggles “a call for solidarity between African independent nations and the struggle of their brothers and sisters in the US.”
King’s use of nonviolent resistance to overcome injustice is often seen, for good reason, as an example of its practicality and effectiveness for bringing about change. Three essays examine different aspects of this Christian tradition. Jennifer Sanders’s “The Cross and/as Civil Resistance” grounds Christianity’s commitment to nonviolence in Jesus’s exhortation to love the enemy. With this foundation, she develops “a nonviolent soteriology.” Her approach “maintains that the cross is both an act of solidarity with the offended and an offer of solidarity to offenders that attunes peoples’ feelings to God’s unrestricted and unconditional love and mediates this love into human history.” Eli McCarthy (“A Theological Exploration: Nonviolence as Intersectional Praxis”) analyzes COVID-19 and police violence through a nonviolence lens to show how “interconnections as well as . . . power interlocks across structural and cultural forms of violence.” He concludes that “nonviolence offers an intersectional praxis for moving us toward a more sustainable, just transformation.”
Finally, one indicator of the depth of early Christianity’s commitment to nonviolence can be found in its struggle to reconcile it with biblical depictions of violence. Michael Magree, SJ’s “The Nonviolent Christ at the Apocalyptic Center of Origen’s Homilies on Joshua” shows that for Origen, “Christ brought a revolution” in regard to acts of violence, and thus, Origen, using what Magree refers to as an “apocalyptic-moral” approach, reinterprets “narratives of warfare and bloodshed” so as to exclude any justificatory rationale that they might otherwise be used to provide for intra-human violence. For Origen the cross of Jesus Christ exemplifies the Christian response, “conquering evil through nonviolence and making religious violence explicitly prohibited.”
With its interweaving of the concreteness of justice’s basic demands and an eschatological vision of God’s ultimate hope for the world, King’s speech continues to inspire even as it provides a marker for how far short we still fall. Celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the speech, the journal is pleased to offer these six essays that reflect on themes that were central to the speech and to King’s writings.
