By Brian Boone
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is of course a notable and effective revolutionary, civil rights activist, organizer, and orator. One aspect of Dr. King’s life that’s somewhat overlooked: His beautiful, precise, and captivating command of the English language. On the occasion of the holiday honoring this great American, let’s look at Dr. King’s tremendous capacity to communicate with the written words.
He wrote a lot as a student
Dr. King was allowed to skip two grades—ninth and twelfth—and enrolled at Morehouse, a Historically Black College, at just 15 years old. After completing his degree and becoming an ordained minister, he enrolled in divinity school at Crozer Theological Seminary. And that’s where King, one of the greatest public speakers and speech deliverers in history, earned a “C” in a public speaking course. He still graduated as his class valedictorian nevertheless and when he earned his doctorate at Boston University (at age 26), he defended his heady and complex philosophy-minded thesis, A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.
He won a Grammy for something he wrote
The Grammy Awards honor recordings, not just music. In 1971, nearly three years after his death, Dr. King won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording for something he wrote and recorded. In 1967, he delivered a political, pacifist sermon at the Riverside Church in New York City, released in 1970 called Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam. A sampling:
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society, when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
He wrote a landmark “Letter”
Certainly Dr. King’s most famous work is the “I Have a Dream” speech, delivering at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in August 1963, which galvanized the Civil Rights movement to a new level and made King a famous and influential leader. His second-most-famous work isn’t an oral work at all, but his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Composed on April 16, 1963, when Dr. King was imprisoned in Alabama for protesting peacefully (or parading without a permit), the work lays out the leader’s manifesto, explicitly explaining what he was out to achieve, and why, and how his civil disobedience and imprisonment served as an example.
“Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”
Additionally, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” casually and frequently demonstrates the breadth of King’s education and ability to reference other literary works; it’s full of references to the Bible, ancient philosophy, modern thought movements, English language prose, and poetry.
He published a great many books
During his lifetime (he was assassinated in April 1968 at age 39), Dr. King wrote half a dozen books. Among them was Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958). The work is a first-person narrative journalism recounting the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, a pivotal early protest in the Civil Rights Movement. Strength to Love (1963) collects King’s church sermons on the subject of race, racism, and segregation. Why We Can’t Wait (1964) is a call to action for equality in the U.S., and reflects on the monumental moments of the Civil Rights Movement over the previous year, and Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) covers similar ground, but with more urgency.