“I Have Been To The Mountaintop”

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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.

4 thoughts on ““I Have Been To The Mountaintop””

  2. Wonder what he would be saying about the race baiting three stooges, Sharpton, Jackson and Oblabla?

  3. 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.

  4. I don’t pretend to speak for King, but I found this quote on the History News Network:

    This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself.

    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.

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