I CAN SCARCELY BELIEVE that I first met Martin Luther King Jr. twenty-one years ago, in Atlanta. I find it nearly impossible to believe that my stocky younger brother, which is the way I thought of him, has been dead for ten years. Ten years!
The mind and the heart refuse and resist the knowledge. (So does the body, perhaps: this note has been delayed for twenty-four hours because the moment I began to write it, I fell ill.) Searching for a kind of lucidity, one picks up the sorrowful chronology and holds on to it. Yes, for example, it was 1957 when we first met. Martin was stealing a few days from Montgomery to work on his book. The blacks in Montgomery were still marching. Yes, I last saw him alive in 1968 in New York, and, yes, I was in Hollywood, in 1968, when he was murdered in Memphis.
And this is 1978. Ten years ago, I was working on the screen version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and was sitting beside a California swimming pool, with Billy Dee Williams, when the phone rang and a friend’s voice told us that Martin had been shot. And I really feel, as I write this now, the same unbelieving wonder, the same shock and helpless rage.
I have a dream.
One looks around this country now, remembering those words, and that passion. A vast amount of love and faith and passion, and blood, have gone into the attempt to transform and liberate this nation.
To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep, and, certainly, the children’s teeth are set on edge. This is not the land of the free; it is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave, and all that can be said for the bulk of our politicians is that, if they are no worse than they were, they are certainly no better.
I have a dream.
I was in Boston last year, twenty years after meeting Martin, twenty-three years after the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools. Just before I got there, young, white patriots attempted to bayonet a black American citizen with the American flag. Someone apparently prevailed on the young patriots to apologize—it was never intended that the flag should be used for such a purpose—and that would appear, for the moment, to be the extent of change in Boston.
I was in Atlanta, which is visibly desegregated in all the downtown hotels. “But don’t let it fool you,” a black matron said to me. “This is just about the only level on which we ever meet. It’s window dressing.”
Now, as was the case twenty years ago, whatever amenities are being arranged in Atlanta, they can have no effect on the state of Georgia. In North Carolina, the frame-up of the “Wilmington Ten” has now been justified by the governor of the state. The news from all the Northern cities is, to understate it, grim; the state of the Union is catastrophic. And when this is true for white Americans, the situation of blacks is all but indescribable.
Yes, I have a dream: for Martin really knew something about this country and had discovered a lot about the world. At the point, precisely, that he could mix the American domestic morality with America’s role in the world, he became dangerous enough to be shot.
Americans refuse to perceive that theirs is not a white country; they can scarcely avoid suspecting that this is not a white world. It is no accident, for me, therefore, that the role which Andrew Young now plays on the troubled stage of the world is a role for which he was prepared, whether consciously or not, by his work with Martin. For, what Martin saw on the mountaintop was a future beyond these shores, and an identity beyond this struggle.
(1978)