Hidden in Plain Sight: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Radical Vision
Lesson by Craig Gordon
Used by permission of the artist Barry Deutsch.
Back in 2001, I was trying to get my 11th grade U.S. history class to focus on a passage from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Unfortunately, I was not surprised when a student protested, “We already know about him. We’re tired of hearing about Martin Luther King.”
So I asked, “Okay, what do you know about him?”
“He had a dream,” another student replied as others laughed.
I insisted that there was infinitely more to King and his ideas than one line from a very famous speech. “Well, that’s all they ever show us,” someone complained.
“And that’s why I’m trying to show you something new about him,” I responded, showing — I hope — only a hint of my frustration.
I decided to put together a unit (with support from fellow educators) designed to help students penetrate the curtain of clichés and lies the corporate media have erected around Martin Luther King Jr. in order to make him “safe” for public consumption. The bland projection of King as promoting moderate reforms and racial harmony obscures his legacy of fierce opposition to white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and violence at home and abroad.
My goal was for my students to be able to explicitly identify the ways in which King is portrayed in the mass media and which of his ideas are communicated to the public. Above all, I wanted them to read and discuss a range of King’s ideas that are almost completely unknown to most people today and reflect upon why many of them are almost never referenced in the mainstream media or in U.S. history textbooks.
For example, like the students in my class, most people in the United States have heard about Dr. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, but few know about his “Beyond Vietnam” address given on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. King’s identification of the systemic roots of racism, poverty, and war still resonate today:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, 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.
Dr. King went on to point out the dramatic role giant multinational corporations played (and continue to play) in the world’s poorest nations, a reality that many students have not heard or thought much about:
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”
While many of my students have some knowledge of the Vietnam War, most have been surprised to learn that King vehemently opposed the war and called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Of course, this leads to a discussion of parallels with U.S. militarism in our time.
One student wrote:
What I didn’t know was what he wanted to do for Vietnam. He said the bulldozers destroyed their areas and the precious trees, poison their water and kill a million acres of crops. He said “if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing [clergy and laymen concerned] committees for the next generation.” I never heard this whole speech before and I thought it was cool that he wanted to help not just the African Americans but Vietnamese.
Others were equally surprised that King planned to lead a massive direct action Poor People’s Campaign.
One student explained,
I didn’t know that his plan was to “mobilize and train thousands of poor and allies to camp out [in front of the White House] with him until they help the poor.” He planned to group the poor together, no matter the color, race. I didn’t know he wanted unity, well maybe I did, but I didn’t know he fought for the justice of poor people of all color and race.
This student’s closing sentence highlights a key difference between the simplistic racial harmony typically attributed to Dr. King and the militant, multiracial class solidarity he actively organized just before he was murdered. As one of my students wrote, “We never hear about King’s other ideas because the people in power are afraid that we might try to take up some of King’s ideas and make it a reality.”
What follows is part of a larger lesson plan I’ve developed and refined over the years.
It’s worth noting that my student’s comment about the censorship of ideas foreshadowed the temporary suppression of the original King lesson. In April 2014, the Fraternal Order of Police and Fox News complained about one of the extension activities in that lesson regarding famed political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. Oakland Unified School District officials immediately caved to the police and right-wing media pressure and took down the entire Urban Dreams website containing the King lesson and dozens of other social justice lessons created by Oakland teachers. Eight months of organizing and public pressure from community members, educators, unions, Ed Asner, and Alice Walker ultimately defeated police censorship and forced the district to repost all of the lessons in full.
Grade Level: Middle and high school
Time Required: One class period (or two if more time is provided for students to summarize selected quotes and discuss their current relevance)
Materials
Handout A: Martin Luther King’s Beliefs
Handout B: King’s Words Beyond “I Have a Dream” (see also, Teacher’s Guide for Handout B).
Procedure
1. Ask students to complete Handout A: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Beliefs. Students will read statements and check off whether they think Dr. King had a strong belief about each subject, e.g., “We should work to achieve racial equality” and “You can’t get rid of racism without also getting rid of economic inequality and militarism (war), because all of these problems are connected.”
2. Distribute Handout B: King’s Words Beyond “I Have a Dream.” Ask students to read Martin Luther King’s quotes carefully and to follow the steps listed at the top of the handout. (See “Teacher’s Guide for Handout B” for help with step 1.) You may want to have students do this work in pairs or small groups. If there is not enough time for students to read and respond to all of the quotes, you could divide the pages among students and have each read one or two pages. Here are four of the more than a dozen quotes on the student handout.
There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy . . . And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society . . . And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?” These are words that must be said. — from Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community, 1967
[The Vietnamese] watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. . . . So far, we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. . . . What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? — from "Beyond Vietnam" address, Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967
The limited reforms we have won have been at bargain rates for the power structure . . . . The real cost lies ahead. To enable the Negro to catch up, to repair the damage of centuries of denial and oppression means [spending money] to create jobs and job training; it means the outlay of billions for decent housing and equal education. — from Teamsters and Allied Trade Councils, New York City, May 1967
I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, nonviolence as the most potent weapon in grappling with [racism] . . . But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last 12 or 15 years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met . . . As long as justice is postponed, we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption. — Speech at Grosse Pointe High School, March 14, 1968
3. When students are done reading, ask them to review their responses on Handout A. What did they learn about King’s beliefs that they did not know before?
4. Ask students to share at least one quote, or part of one, that they found most surprising, interesting or powerful. Ask them to share their summaries of their selected passages and to explain why they think each one may (or may not) be relevant today.
5. Point out to students that most of what we hear about Martin Luther King does not include any of the views he expressed in these excerpts from his speeches and writings. Instead, we almost exclusively hear a few lines from his “I Have a Dream” speech and similar calls for racial harmony and against racial discrimination. Ask students, “What may be some reasons why the public almost never hears or reads that King said the things we read today?”
Adapted from GOOD Magazine and Urban Dreams Project.
Printed with permission from Craig Gordon.