History Fix

Ep. 146 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: How Civil Rights Leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Was Somehow All of Those Things

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 146

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In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this Monday, January 19th, I'm delving into the story behind this remarkable man. How does a Black man born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929, a man whose grandparents were sharecroppers in a post slavery American South, a man subjected to Jim Crow laws that intentionally sought to hold him down, rise to such great heights as to become the only single American with his own dedicated national holiday? Let's fix that. 

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​​I like to cover holidays. You’ve probably realized that by now if you’ve been listening for a while. They’re perfect for History fixing because everyone knows about them and yet no one knows anything about them. Why do we carve pumpkins on Halloween? Why is Saint Patrick’s day celebrated more in America than in Ireland? What the heck is up with the Easter bunny? Holidays are great fodder for fixing and once I dig into the roots of them, I’m often surprised by how weird they truly are and borderline shocked by how everyone so willingly celebrates something they don’t understand with this sort of unnerving blind passion. There is a holiday though that doesn’t fall into that category, one with a clear purpose, one that evokes, not blind passion, but eyes wide open passion: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is tomorrow in the United States. 


There aren’t many holidays named after people. There's Columbus Day which is so undeserved it’s shifting hopefully permanently into Indigenous Peoples Day instead. There’s President’s Day which is tied to George Washington’s Birthday but is really to celebrate all the past presidents, they all get lumped together. And then there's Martin Luther King Jr. day on the third Monday in January because his birthday was January 15th. So, if we rule out Columbus, which we very much should, MLK is the only single person with their own federal US holiday. That’s a big deal. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a big deal. That’s a lot of names isn’t it? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That’s a lot of names for a man who, in reality, was none of those things, except maybe the junior. I mean, hear me out okay. He had a doctorate degree in theology hence the title doctor, but he wasn’t a medical doctor which is what our minds jump to of course when we hear that word doctor. King, that was his last name, but he wasn’t an actual king which of course is a type of monarch, the ruler of a country. Even Martin Luther, that wasn’t his name at birth. He was born Michael King Jr. His father changed both their names from Michael to Martin Luther after a trip to Germany, inspired of course by the OG Martin Luther, famous instigator and leader of the Protestant Reformation. So Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a somewhat misleading name. And yet, somehow, I think you will come to see by the end of this episode as I did, he had the perfect name. Let’s fix that.


Hello I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Today I’m going to tell you about a man who was, quite possibly, unlike any other. A man who, many would argue, matters more than ever today. The words he spoke then ring as true and as necessary now, today, as they did over 60 years ago, unfortunately. This man, in his 13 year long fight for freedom who lived by the motto quote “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed,” was arrested 29 times. His home where his children slept was firebombed in 1956 over a bus boycott. He was assaulted on numerous occasions while participating in marches and other peaceful protests. He survived an assassination attempt in 1958 and ultimately succumbed to assassination, losing his life for the cause ten years later. This is a man the oppressor fought desperately to destroy but even death could not erase him. So, how does a Black man born in the Jim Crow era South in 1929 rise up to become the only American with their own dedicated national holiday. Buckle your seatbelts, my friends, and I’ll tell you the story. 


Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta Georgia. He was the middle child, woohoo go team middle child. He had an older sister named Christine and a younger brother named Albert. Their father, Michael King Sr. who would later change his and his son’s names to Martin Luther, was a pastor and their mother, Alberta Williams King, was a former schoolteacher. Martin attended a segregated public school in Atlanta. He was a very bright child, he excelled in school. Although, surprisingly, he did reportedly get a C in public speaking. Martin was so bright he graduated high school early at the age of only 15 and went on to attend Atlanta’s historically Black all male Morehouse College where he got a degree in sociology. Both his father and his maternal grandfather also attended Morehouse. 


Like I said in the intro, Martin was undeniably a Jr. That part of his name he owned. He admired his father tremendously. His father was a pastor and an early Civil Rights activist. Back in 1936, Martin Luther King Sr. had led a march of several hundred Black Americans to Atlanta’s city hall to protest voter rights discrimination. So Martin would have witnessed that at just 7 years old and was clearly inspired by it. He also admired his father’s work as a pastor although he himself did not originally plan to follow that particular path. It was during his time at Morehouse that that shifted. He was heavily influenced by Morehouse president Dr. Benjamin Mays who History.com calls “an influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality.” So coming out of Morehouse in 1948, Martin had decided that he did want to become a pastor like his father and he also wanted to use that position to champion racial equality. He goes on to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of his mostly white senior class. Next he gets his doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University. It was while he was in Boston that he met his wife Coretta Scott. Coretta was a singer from Alabama. She was attending the New England Conservatory of Music at the time. They got married in 1953 and moved to Montgomery, Alabama where Martin became the pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 


So now we’re in Montgomery, Alabama, 1953. Martin is a 25 year old Black man in the heart of the American South attempting to start a family and his professional career. This is no small feat within that context. So let’s talk about the context of 1953 Alabama for a minute. Ever since 1865, so for almost a hundred years, since the end of the Civil War, and really since the 13th Amendment that ended slavery in the United States, Jim Crow laws had been in effect. I’m sure you’ve heard of Jim Crow but what actually was it? Jim Crow laws were not federal. They were state and local laws all over the country, but mostly in the South that legalized racial segregation. They said it was okay for Black people and white people to remain separate, to attend different schools, eat at different restaurants, swim in different pools, use different water fountains, etc., as long as those facilities were equal, one was as good as the other. Now that, how air quotes good something is, is of course very subjective. Jim Crow laws, which are named after a character in a Black minstrel show, these were where white actors would put on blackface and impersonate Black people in incredibly offensive and racist ways, so yeah they’re named after a character from that. They evolved from something that came before called Black codes. So Black codes emerged right after slavery was abolished as a way for white people, grasping at straws now, to continue to oppress Black people. According to History.com quote “Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes. The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were subject to Black codes. These codes worked in conjunction with labor camps for the incarcerated, where prisoners were treated as enslaved people. Black offenders typically received longer sentences than their white counterparts, and because of the grueling work, often did not live out their entire sentence,” end quote. 


So Jim Crow laws came from that, from these Black codes, and their purpose was much the same, quote “to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities,” end quote. That’s not an opinion, by the way, that’s a fact. So this is the world in which 25 year old Martin moves with his young wife to try to establish himself as a minister, husband, and father. Pretty immediately things start to go awry because someone else you’ve heard of lives in Montgomery, Alabama at the same time too, Rosa Parks. In 1955 Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Buses at that time were segregated such that Black people had to sit at the back of the bus and white people sat at the front. If all of the seats on the bus filled up, Black people sitting towards the middle section were forced to stand and give up their seats to white passengers. This was mandated by Jim Crow laws in Montgomery. Rosa Parks refused to do this. She was, at the time, the secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. So she was morally opposed to giving up her seat on the bus and so she didn’t. And that’s called integrity and it's a beautiful but rare thing. 


Rosa Parks was arrested and this stirred activists to act. Activists for racial equality in Montgomery coordinated a bus boycott where Black people and other supporters refused to ride the buses that lasted for 381 days, over a year. For over a year Black people and other supporters walked wherever they needed to go, sometimes miles and miles to avoid riding the bus and this put a tremendous economic strain on public transit and on downtown businesses. It also provided an opportunity for Martin to step up as a leader of the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Because remember Martin is in Montgomery too. Martin is chosen as the leader and official spokesperson of this protest, this bus boycott. 


Now, Martin is very sure of one thing when he steps into this position. It must remain peaceful. No riots, no violence, they just don’t ride the bus and eventually the system will cave. You see Martin was a man of God and that’s supposed to mean a man of peace. I’m not sure why that’s been defied by Christians so many times throughout history but Martin actually abided by the teachings of Christ, AKA the Prince of Peace and so he knew that violence was never the answer no matter how angry you are, no matter how deeply unjust the situation is. Violence is never the answer. He was unwavering on that. Part of that came from his Christian faith and part of it came from his admiration of Mahatma Gandhi who was an activist in India who had successfully led a nonviolent campaign to end British colonization of India and had been assassinated just a few years prior in 1948. Martin looked at Gandhi like a hero and what Gandhi did worked. If it worked in India it could work in Montgomery, Alabama. 


So Martin led the Montgomery Bus Boycott which was ultimately successful. It led to the desegregation of buses everywhere per a November 1956 Supreme Court ruling. This gained Martin a lot of publicity, a lot of notoriety which was a blessing and a curse. That January his home in Montgomery was firebombed by white supremacists who were angry about the end of bus segregation. Luckily his family was unharmed because at this point he had two small children, a toddler and a baby. He and Coretta would go on to have 4 children total but at the time of the firebombing only the oldest two were born yet. 


After the success of the bus boycott, Martin teamed up with other Black church leaders in the South and formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of SCLC. The whole purpose of this organization was to continue nonviolent protests against Jim Crow laws all over the country. Over the next few years Martin traveled around the country and even internationally, giving lectures on non-violent protests and civil rights and meeting with other activists and political leaders including family members and followers of Gandhi in India. He also wrote several books and articles. In 1958 he was doing a book signing at a department store in Harlem when a woman named Izola Ware Curry walked into the store and asked “Are you Martin Luther King?” When he answered that yes, he was, she stabbed him in the chest with a small knife that narrowly missed his heart. He survived the attack and was emboldened by it saying quote “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place,” end quote.


In 1959 he moved his family back to Atlanta, Georgia where he grew up and became joint pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Still working with the SCLC, they turned their attention to Birmingham, Alabama which was apparently just blowing it so hard with the racial discrimination that it became the main focus of this whole organization. They started organizing sit-ins, marches, and boycotts in Birmingham to protest Jim Crow, mostly segregation and unfair hiring practices. These peaceful protests prompted extreme violence in return. And this violence was televised, garnering nationwide attention. News coverage showed police officers spraying protesters with pressurized water jets and police dogs chasing down and attacking protestors. Now, let me remind you they weren’t rioting. These were sit-ins in some cases. They were literally just sitting there. And the news coverage helped the cause tremendously. Americans were outraged. In the end the Birmingham police chief resigned and public spaces were desegregated throughout the city. 


Martin was arrested during this campaign in Birmingham and sent to prison. It wasn’t his first time and it wouldn’t be his last but it was significant because, while he was in prison there in Birmingham, he wrote what came to be called his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In the letter he addresses some of the pressure he’s been getting, mostly from white supporters of the movement, to use legal means instead of protest to try to get civil rights. Go through the courts, try to do it legally instead of using nonviolent protest. In response to this he writes quote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.… We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” end quote. The courts aren’t going to do it. They aren’t just going to hand it to you because you asked them nicely. That’s not how oppression works. You have to demand it, not by attacking or destroying, not by fighting, but by simply inconveniencing them such that they are forced to give in. You won’t desegregate the buses, okay then we just won’t ride the buses. Oh public transit is going bankrupt? You’ll reconsider? Great thanks. I mean, it works if done correctly. 


In 1963 Martin’s SCLC worked together with the NAACP and other civil rights groups to organize what is probably the most famous event of the movement. It was officially called the “March for Jobs and Freedom” but it came to be known as the “March on Washington” instead. This is the one where some 250,000 people went to Washington DC, the nation’s capital, to peacefully demand civil rights for Black Americans. This is also where Martin delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a location chosen, of course, because of Lincoln being the president who abolished slavery almost exactly 100 years ago. I’d love to play you a snippet of the “I Have a Dream Speech” because it is truly iconic, regarded as one of the most revered orations in the English language and I would add likely in all of the languages too. Unfortunately audio of that speech is highly protected by copyright so I can’t play his voice for you but I have linked it in the description, NPR aired it back in 2010 so you can listen to it at that link, I’ll let them pay for the license cause she ain’t cheap. I would like to read you an excerpt though. 


King begins quote “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.


When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” end quote

Skipping ahead he says quote “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back,” end quote. 

He keeps going with this very eloquent, well written speech that he’s planned and prepared and probably practiced over and over again. And then about two thirds of the way in, a friend of his, a gospel singer named Mahalia Jackson shouts quote “tell ‘em about the dream.” And Martin pushes the paper he’s been reading from aside and he starts to improvise the rest of the speech. There’s a clear shift. It goes from this very formal recitation of a pre-written script to what’s essentially a very passionate church sermon. This is the most famous part of the speech too, the “I have a dream” part for which it’s named and I won’t do it any justice reading it because I’m not a Black Baptist minister from Atlanta but he says quote “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day,” end quote. Improvised it guys. Some of the most famous words ever spoken. He was also only 34 years old at the time that he gave this speech. 

The March on Washington and Martin’s “I have a dream” speech almost certainly directly led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act in July of 1964. The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, ended segregation in public places, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce fair employment practices. It also enforced voting rights. That same year, 1964, Martin was named Time Magazine’s man of the year and received a Nobel Peace Prize, making him the youngest ever recipient at just 35 years old. 

But despite all of this progress, the fight was not over yet. Even though Black Americans, or Black American men I should specify, were given the right to vote with the 15th Amendment way back in 1869, that right had been continually trodden on ever since. Red tape after red tape after red tape had been put in the way in order to prevent Black people from voting despite the 15th Amendment and despite the Civil Rights Act. So in the spring of 1965, Martin went to Selma, Alabama… Alabama’s really not looking good in this episode is she? Y’all get it together over there, for real. But he went to take part in a voter registration campaign to combat voting discrimination that was still happening. Once again like in Birmingham, violence broke out directed at the peaceful protestors and was televised, outraging the nation. This culminated in a march called the Selma to Montgomery march that Martin led with the support of President Lyndon B. Johnson who sent in federal troops to keep the peace. That march then led to the passing of the Voter’s Rights Act which freaking finally guaranteed the right to vote to all Black Americans that had first been awarded by the 15th Amendment literally almost a century ago then just blatantly ignored ever since. 

With civil rights and voters rights moving in the right direction for now, Martin focused his attention elsewhere, speaking out against the Vietnam War and working to rectify economic inequality, addressing poverty in the US. Together with the SCLC, he began planning the Poor People’s Campaign which was going to include another massive march on Washington. But, before that could happen, in April of 1968 he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee to support a sanitation workers strike happening there and as he stood on the balcony of his motel in Memphis he was shot and killed, assassinated by a man named James Earl Ray. According to a History.com article quote “James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998,” end quote. And they just left it at that. But wait, what? He recanted his confession and gained supporters in the King family? Like, they didn’t think he did it after all? So I dug into that a bit and it’s a whole can of worms. I’ll put out a mini fix about it on Wednesday over on Patreon. Basically members of the King family came to believe that Ray was just a scapegoat for a larger conspiracy operation involving the government or possibly organized crime. The FBI was definitely trying to sabotage and blackmail him, there’s solid evidence of that which I’ll talk about in the mini fix.  It’s this whole convoluted theory but the consensus all things considered is that James Earl Ray did kill Martin Luther King, there’s just disagreement over whether he acted alone or not. But, yeah, it goes deep so I’m gonna leave it right there. 

Martin Luther King was highly accomplished both during and after his short life. According to NAACP, quote “King was honored with dozens of awards and honorary degrees for his achievement throughout his life and posthumously. In addition to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King was awarded the NAACP Medal in 1957 and the American Liberties Medallion by the American Jewish Committee in 1965. After his death, King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1994 with his wife, Coretta,” end quote. The King Center says quote “During the less than 13 years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the modern American Civil Rights Movement, from December 1955 until April 4, 1968, African Americans achieved more genuine progress toward racial equality in America than the previous 350 years had produced. Dr. King is widely regarded as America’s pre-eminent advocate of nonviolence and one of the greatest nonviolent leaders in world history,” end quote. And yet, it still took 15 years to get the man his own holiday. After 15 years of campaigning by activists and his wife Coretta, President Raegan finally signed a bill making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday in 1983 but it wasn’t actually observed for the first time until 1985. He also has, in case you were wondering, he also has over a thousand roads named after him. I’m sure you’ve driven down an MLK boulevard somewhere at some point if you live in the United States. 

I want to circle back around to the name, that very lengthy and somewhat misleading name Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I said at the beginning of this episode that in some ways Martin was none of those things, except for the junior, and yet, at the same time, in other ways, he was all of them. Take doctor for example. Martin had a doctorate degree in systematic theology but he wasn’t a medical doctor. He wasn’t a doctor in the way we think about the word doctor, at least not literally. Doctors work in medicine. They heal people, right? They heal diseases and infection and they restore health and they save lives. But in many ways Martin did all of these things, in a more figurative sense. Before Martin Luther King this country was sick, it was unwell. There was a disease that had taken hold long ago and was lingering and spreading and continuing to putrefy all that it touched. Racism was a sickness in America, an infection that was poisoning our country. Martin Luther King healed us. He healed us with those words he improvised at Lincoln’s feet “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” He healed us with his actions, his example, with his own character, his commitment to nonviolence. Martin was a healer and so, doctor suits him perfectly. 

Martin Luther was not his name at birth. Both Martin and his father, for whom he was named, were born with the name Michael. In 1934, the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where Michael soon to be Martin Sr. worked as pastor sent him on a multinational trip with one of the stops in Berlin, Germany. He went to Berlin to attend the Fifth Congress of the Baptist World Alliance, this Baptist event there. But while he was in Germany, he visited many sites associated with Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther. I know I’ve touched on Martin Luther in the past probably several times. He was a Catholic priest from Germany back in the 1400s, 1500s. This was back when the Catholic church was the only church. He became disenchanted, we’ll say with the Catholic church and with the corruption that he saw within that institution and he wanted to make it known to the people. He wanted people to know that the church was doing these really corrupt things and that it wasn’t okay. And so he wrote 95 theses, 95 papers that he posted to the door of a church in Germany and in them, he exposed all of this corruption. And this of course was a huge scandal, a big no no, and something that could cost you your life. This was heresy. But Martin Luther stuck to his principles. He believed that what the church was doing was wrong, specifically the sale of what were called indulgences. This was a way for Christians to essentially do bad things and then just buy these indulgences from the church to be forgiven and avoid punishment. The church was making money, people wealthy enough to buy indulgences were free to sin as they pleased. It was a problem in Martin Luther’s eyes. This was not what Christianity was supposed to look like. And so he called them out for it. And he did it in this very peaceful way of posting these theses on the door of the church. And when they took it down he just posted another one. He did this 95 times. He posted 95 of them. And he used the printing press, a new invention, for Europe at least, to mass distribute them and to translate the Bible which had historically been in Latin or Greek or Hebrew into German so that the common man could have some control over his own religion. In doing all of this, Martin Luther kick started the Protestant Reformation that created protestant churches like Baptist of which Martin Luther King Sr. was a minister. So you can see why Martin Sr. would be into Martin Luther, so much so that, upon returning from that trip, he legally changed his name from Michael to Martin Luther and he legally changed his five year old son’s name too, I assume so that he could keep his namesake and remain a junior. 

That was a choice that Martin Sr. made. But, I think it’s incredibly fitting for the man Martin Jr. ended up being. Both of these men, Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther of the Civil Rights Movement, saw injustice and wrongdoing in their respective worlds. They saw abuse and oppression and they were courageous enough to call it out publicly for the world to hear, risking their own lives. Both men were successful in sparking massive change, cataclysmic shifts in the way things had been done for hundreds of years. Now the OG Martin Luther certainly had some faults which I’ll save for a future episode dedicated to him. But, in many ways, the two Martin Luthers had a lot in common. Different causes, similar arc. 

And then there’s King, his last name, which of course in the literal sense of the word is the ruler of a country. Martin was not a politician and, if you remember, even rejected the idea of fighting for civil rights through government and the legal system in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But when we shift the word ruler which has a much more authoritarian connotation to the word leader, without a doubt Martin Luther King was a leader. He was a leader unlike any the world has ever seen. A Black man from Atlanta, Georgia, whose grandparents were sharecroppers rose up to deliver what is arguably one of the most influential speeches ever given in the nation’s capital to a crowd of 250,000 enraptured onlookers. He led boycotts and marches and sit-ins. He led activists and organizations. His leadership inspired an entire movement that brought about actual, real, tangible, needed change in his country and in the world. In many ways Martin was more a King than any of the entitled, pompous, undeserving heirs who had sat on thrones all over Europe for much of the last millenia guzzling wine and shouting orders for world domination just because they were born into a particular family in a particular birth order and of the correct gender. 

And so, yeah, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a very fitting name for a man who was all of those things. In 1957 Martin spoke at the NAACP Emancipation Day rally in Atlanta Georgia. There he delivered another influential speech called “Facing the Challenge of a New Age.” He concluded this speech by saying quote "I close by saying there is nothing greater in all the world than freedom. It's worth going to jail for. It's worth losing a job for. It's worth dying for. My friends, go out this evening determined to achieve this freedom which God wants for all of His children," end quote. Freedom. It’s something we continue to fight for today in many ways. But, I often see people fighting for it the wrong way. All this political animosity, the choosing of sides, the divisiveness. This is not what Martin meant. In fact, 6 years after that speech in Atlanta, he clarified that sentiment a bit in his “I have a dream speech” when he said quote, “But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force,” end quote. And so, that’s the message I hope to help spread this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In honor of the man who gave his life for freedom, in a time when bitterness and hatred and violence run rampant, let’s remember our soul force.