“I Have Been To The Mountaintop”
By Mitch Berg
My dad was a speech teacher. I think I may have grown up around a record collection with more speeches than music, until I started buying records.
So a great speech is a wonderful thing.
And I lament the fact that great oratory is such a dying art – although the likes of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz both practice it with great panache.
But Martin Luther King was one of the greats in the history of oratory, even if you don’t bother with his civil legacy.
And here – the day before his murder – was one of his great ones, submitted as I usually do on King’s birthday.
January 18th, 2016 at 12:34 pm
Wrote his own speeches.
Didn’t use a teleprompter.
January 18th, 2016 at 4:03 pm
Wonder what he would be saying about the race baiting three stooges, Sharpton, Jackson and Oblabla?
January 18th, 2016 at 6:43 pm
I don’t think that many of today’s Black activists are interested in being integrated into American society.
Ta Nahesi Coates specifically rejects the idea of social integration. He thinks that any racial accommodation whites approve of will be oppressive to Blacks.
January 19th, 2016 at 12:18 am
I don’t pretend to speak for King, but I found this quote on the History News Network:
http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/135514
King identifies the greatest sin, not just of the marxists, but of the capitalists. King’s use of the word ‘person’ is intriguing. Human beings are persons, as are the the three irreducible elements of the Holy Trinity. In religious terms, a person is a being which has the attributes of emotion, reason, and will. Form doesn’t matter. The devil is a person. So is God. So are you and I.
King is saying that other people do not exist to make you happy. They aren’t right when they help you make the world better for you and wrong when they make the world worse for you. People are not instruments of your happiness.