Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a man many love and respect now. We quote the most whitewashed and comforting portions of his speeches without further examination or questioning his thoughts, philosophy, or intent. Most have never read his radical sermons like "The Birth of A New Nation," a speech where he chronicles the election of previously jailed Pan-African organizer Kwame Nkrumah to Prime Minister of Ghana, who to him was an inspiration. Or the speech he gave in 1967 at Stanford University, "The Other America," where he expounds on the American Negro living in a triple ghetto. A ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, a ghetto of human misery.
So imagine, after taking years to study this profoundly complex figure, how we've diminished his legacy to political speeches and dwindled our connection to him to days of service. The most we can do in his name is pick up trash, as city Public Works employees by the droves just days ago spoke at the City Council meeting about discrimination and poor working conditions. Bare in mind Dr. King's assassination was on the heels of joining the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike in Memphis after Echol Cole and Robert Walker died after being crushed to death in a garbage compactor.
The same issues Dr. King examined and attacked with increasing veracity yet remain. Homelessness exploded last year by over 300 percent in women and African Americans, over 200 percent by those ages 18-24, and over 1,600 Hamilton County students have no permanent address.
We've seen more legwork in this lackluster administration for a taxpayer-funded minor league baseball stadium than upskilling our population to break up concentrated poverty and put languishing communities to work again. We've sat idly by and watched more back and forth over culture wars in education than dealing with persistent illiteracy, which inevitably is chained to increased participation in criminal activities and generational poverty. We've fallen asleep at the wheel and left the responsibility of being a drum major for justice to the hands of a small few.
In all of its narratives, Chattanooga has a long way to go to produce the gains Dr. King expected for our city's African American population, the working class, and the poor. King said that integrating lunch counters and public parks was "easy" because it didn't cost anything. But true equality would require spending money.
"We are confronting issues that can't be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars," King said. "We can't get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nation something." What is Chattanooga willing to pay?
The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education at Stanford University houses speeches, sermons, major events chronology and more.
Marie R. Mott