By Marian Wright Edelman
The night before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his prophetic final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a speech he almost didn’t give. He had returned to Memphis on the morning of April 3, 1968, to continue his support of the city’s striking Black sanitation workers, but as the day went on he was exhausted and running a fever and the weather was stormy. There were fears the storm warnings would also affect the crowd turnout at the mass meeting planned that night at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, and Dr. King initially asked Rev. Ralph Abernathy to speak in his place. But when Rev. Abernathy saw the hundreds of people and the press contingent who had arrived, he called Dr. King at the Lorraine Motel and encouraged him to change his mind.
As Dr. King took the podium, he began that extraordinary speech by telling the crowd that if he had been given the divine opportunity to stand at the beginning of the world with a view of the panorama of human history and choose his time to be alive, after sweeping through all of the grand possibilities, from ancient Greece and Rome to the Renaissance to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, he would have chosen to live even “just a few years” at that very moment.
Dr. King said: “Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.”
We are in such a moment now. Yet when it is dark enough, we can still see the stars. How are women, men, and young people responding today?
Just three days before the Memphis speech, Dr. King was in the nation’s capital for the last time to deliver the March 31 sermon at the National Cathedral. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” was a title Dr. King took from the old story of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for twenty years and slept right through the American Revolution, and whenever he retold that story Dr. King used it as a warning that during upheaval in our own times we must not do the same. In that last Sunday sermon he refuted one more time the “myth” that patience and time would ultimately solve the problem of injustice. Once again, as we honor and remember Dr. King today, listen to his words:
“I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”