TL;DR:
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. offers us insights that are applicable to our practice as teachers.
- His teachings can act as entry points into our own lives by calling on us to have the courage to do difficult work for and with our students.
“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from Strength to Love, 1963
Each year, I position my argument/persuasion unit of instruction so that it aligns with the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. No matter what grade I am teaching, I ask students to listen to, pause and reflect on, and write alongside the “I Have a Dream” speech and other texts. At home, I typically begin the three-day weekend with the annual ritual of returning to his iconic “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In recent years, I have offered this ritual to students as a part of our classroom study.
Introducing students to King’s life and work begins with an understanding of mutuality; what it means to honor, respect, and check each other by doing what my friend Traniece Brown-Warrens calls “extending the table,” inviting all voices to address the inequality that is everyone’s problem. Achieving Dr. King’s dream, and not pretending that it is already a reality. I teach the text in my classroom every year for the same reason I return to it every year: as a reminder that the work toward our collective liberation is ongoing, mutual, and not meant to be done alone.
Understanding Martin Luther King’s “Dream” Requires Reading Beyond It
In order to understand Dr. King and the true scope and significance of his life and message, we must read “I Have a Dream”…but we cannot stop there.
Nonviolence was a steadfast and unwavering approach taken by Dr. King and his followers. However, when we focus solely and expressly on his nonviolence, on the “dream” rather than on the everyday systemic reality, we ignore the whole picture.
Looking to Other Works
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” has so many points that offer us a fuller scope of MLK, and illustrate his concept of a beloved community. He calls on faith leaders in the South and on white moderates to stop accepting gradualism and passivity as a response to the life-and-death situation of ending segregation and systemic racism.
Every year, I ask myself and my students to think about the speech given at the March on Washington. Originally, it did not have a name. King’s use of anaphora, particularly the repetition of “I Have a Dream,” gave it that name. But what of the other phrases he uses: “The Time is Now”; “One Hundred Years Later”; “Let Freedom Ring”? (Credit to Tricia Ebarvia for this lesson idea).
The truth of the matter is, even at arguably the “greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,” America as a country was not ready to do more than talk of dreams. The time was then, to facilitate the liberation of Black people, women, Latinx people, Asian people, queer and trans people, disabled people; of all people. The time is now. But if it were to happen then (the “now” King described), the same structures designed to defend and uphold white supremacy would have crumbled.
One hundred years after the emancipation of enslaved people in America, Black citizens still could not vote; still could not attend fully desegregated schools (they still don’t); freedom had not rung. King’s ideas, as evidenced by his assassination, were safest when they were merely dreams. This, in my opinion, is a reason the title stuck.
In order to understand Dr. King and the true scope and significance of his life and message, we must read 'I Have a Dream'...but we cannot stop there. Click To TweetLessons from Birmingham Jail
The mistake we make when we whitewash and soundbite Dr. King’s words and his work is that we miss the parts where he was angry, tired, and human. We must understand that there can be anger, there can be frustration, without there being violence.
Dr. King was an example of all those truths converging to create the tension he carried and symbolized throughout his life and even in his death. Despite his saint-like patience and unwaveringly peaceful approach, to pretend Dr. King was never angry, lonely, or tired is to mischaracterize him in an attempt to rewrite his work for our own comfort. In fact, he cautions us against this very thing in “Birmingham Jail”:
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was “well timed” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait.”…This “wait” has almost always meant “never.”
It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity…”
In his letter, Dr. King discusses the “crisis-packed” situation of racial injustice that enveloped the nation—it still does. King implores other religious leaders to quit engaging in respectability politics. He asks them to question the differences between law, justice, and morality. And in so doing, he is asking us to do the same, in 2022.
Today’s Freedom Fighters are still being asked to ‘wait.’
When we ask protestors and organizers who emphasize the crisis that is the questioning of their humanity to be quieter and less inconvenient, this is tone policing. King talks of the privilege that he does not have: the time or the patience to wait for what should have been his at birth.
“My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.”
King’s words make it clear that we must present these crisis-packed situations to students; we must show up at our board meetings and advocate for the visibility, dignity, and representation of all students in the literature they read and the histories they learn. His work asks teachers to be brave in cultivating spaces that promote and facilitate criticality, community, and love. King’s words make it clear that just as we did during the Civil Rights era, we owe our students the truth.
Truth Telling Creates Beloved Community
One of the most critically important concepts emphasized by Dr. King was the practice of beloved community. Entering into spaces with one another where people could discuss, share, love, and hope.
The practice of love and being loved—moving beyond the idea of hope to practicing it—that is beloved community. Community, especially those fostered in love, are also places where accountability is central.
In 2022, this means that we must hold each other accountable; for our mistakes and missteps, for our privileges and our knowledge gaps, and for lovingly and critically keeping each other on the path toward our collective liberation. It is our responsibility as allies and co-conspirators to recognize when we are standing in solidarity with our comfort, our privilege, and even with oppression, and to correct it without centering our discomfort. King says in so many of his works that our freedom and liberation are inextricably linked with that of others. Thus, our liberation depends on our refusal to stand in solidarity with oppression.
Part of accountability and love is also telling the truth. This includes the whole truth of our nation’s history. Teaching and talking about events such as the Tulsa Massacre, Jim Crow, redlining (because racism is not and was not exclusively a Southern problem), the Stonewall Riots, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, Japanese internment, the systemic failure of the AIDS epidemic, mass detention and deportation, and the many dark spots of our nation’s history is a part of our responsibility. Beloved community and mutuality, collective liberation, depends on our knowing that individuals and the systems they participate in are flawed and imperfect. It is our failure to learn from those imperfections that bring us out of community with each other and create the discord that leads to more oppression.
It is as simple as this: If I love you, I am willing and able to tell you the truth—about yourself, the world, and the conditions that affect us both. It’s healthy and good to be honest with each other. It is healthy and good to admit when we were wrong as individuals, and as a nation. But admission is a beginning.
Sources / Reading
“Letter from Birmingham Jail”; Dr. Martin Luther King, 1963
“I Have a Dream”, Dr. Martin Luther King, 1963
When they Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir; Patrisse Khan-Cullors Brignac
1619 Project: Born on the Water by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renee Watson and Nikkolas Smith
“Beloved Community: MLK’s Prescription for a Healthy Society”; Jeff Ritterman for the Huffington Post
Martin Rising: Requiem for a King by Andrea Davis Pinckney and Sean Pinkney
About Cait O’Connor
Cait O’Connor is a fourth-year public school English/ESOL educator in New York, committed to social justice and equity in education and beyond.
