August 28, 2018: SpeechStudying: King’s “Dream” Speech

[On August 28^th, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech to the March of Washington. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other great American speeches!]

On two rhetorical strategies that exemplify the power of one of our greatest speeches and orators.

In my now-annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day post, I begin with the statement that King’s August 1963 “I have a dream” speech has been slightly overrated in our collective memories. I hope that the post quickly and thoroughly moves beyond that clickbait-y starting point to clarify what I’m really arguing, which includes not only an appeal for memories of King’s voice, activism, and legacies well beyond any one speech, but also and just as importantly an argument for better appreciating this one speech’s multiple sections and tones. That is, while the optimistic ending featuring the rightly famous “I have a dream” series of images is certainly worth our attention, that ending can’t be fully understood outside of the context of the speech’s far more pessimistic (or at least bitingly realistic) opening. There, King highlights the year’s centennial anniversary of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and then transitions, with the stunningly blunt sentence “But 100 years later the Negro still is not free,” into an extended reflection on the early 1960s “shameful condition” that has brought the Civil Rights marchers there to Washington.

That overall structure and shift is one striking and successful element of King’s speech, and here I want to highlight two other hugely impressive rhetorical strategies he employs. One is the extended metaphor King develops just after that biting opening, a metaphor that begins with the sentences, “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.” King then takes the metaphor to two additional levels: a criticism that “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’”; and an optimistic rejoinder that “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. 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.” I’m not sure most orators could have come up with this pitch-perfect metaphor at all, and I’m quite sure that very few others could have made such multi-layered and compelling use of it.

The other rhetorical strategy I’ll highlight is already better known, thanks to the aforementioned “I have a dream” sequence: King’s consistent use of repetition throughout the speech. While of course those culminating repetitions are tremendously moving on their own terms, I’d say the strategy overall works best because, not coincidentally, of how often he repeats it throughout the speech. King follows the stunning phrase “the fierce urgency of now” by beginning four straight sentences with “Now is the time,” creating that sense of immediacy and urgency for his audience. Later, he begins a series of sentences in a row with two alternating phrases, “We cannot be satisfied” and “We can never be satisfied,” framing the moment’s unacceptable realities and building toward the section’s conclusion: “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Through these and other repetitions and parallelisms, King fully draws his audience into the flow of his thoughts and perspective, making us into fellow travelers along the speech’s path from dark realities to hopeful dreams. One more way that, just to say it clearly one more time, the “I have a dream” speech is indeed fully deserving of its status as one of the greatest American orations.

Next speech tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other speeches you’d highlight?

August 27, 2018: SpeechStudying: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”

[On August 28^th, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech to the March of Washington. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other great American speeches!]

On the stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 150 years ago.

I’ve written many times, in this space and elsewhere, about the inspiring history of Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and their Revolutionary-era peers and allies. Freeman, Walker, their fellow Massachusetts slaves, and the abolitionist activists with whom they worked used the language and ideas of the Declaration of Independence and 1780 Massachusetts Constitution in support of their anti-slavery petitions and court cases, and in so doing contributed significantly to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more inspiring application of our national ideals, or of a more compelling example of my argument (made in the second hyperlinked piece above) that black history is American history. Yet at the same time, it would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to claim that Freeman’s and Walker’s cases were representative ones, either in their era or at any time in the two and a half centuries of American slavery; nor I would I want to use Freeman’s and Walker’s successful legal actions as evidence that the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” sentiment did not in a slaveholding nation include a central strain of hypocrisy.

If I ever need reminding of that foundational American hypocrisy, I can turn to one of our most fiery texts: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’s speech is long and multi-layered, and I don’t want to reduce its historical and social visions to any one moment; but I would argue that it builds with particular power to this passage, one of the most trenchant in American oration and writing: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” The subsequent second half of the speech sustains that perspective and passion, impugning every element of a nation still entirely defined by slavery and its effects. Despite having begun his speech by noting his “quailing sensation,” his feeling of appearing before the august gathering “shrinkingly,” Douglass thus builds instead to one of the most full-throated, confident critiques of American hypocrisy and failure ever articulated.

As an avowed and thoroughgoing optimist, it’s far easier for me to grapple with Freeman’s and Walker’s use of the Declaration and the 4^th of July than with Douglass’s—which, of course, makes it that much more important for me to include Douglass in my purview, and which is why I wanted to begin this week’s series with Douglass’s speech. There’s a reason, after all, why the most famous American slave is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman—we like our histories overtly inspiring, and if we’re going to remember slavery at all, why not do so through the lens of someone who resisted it so successfully? Yet while Tubman, like Walker, is certainly worth remembering, the overarching truth of slavery in America is captured far better by Douglass’s speech and its forceful attention to our national hypocrises and flaws. And despite the ridiculous attacks over the last few years on “too negative” histories or “apologizing for America,” there’s no way we can understand our nation or move forward collectively without a fuller engagement wth precisely the lens provided by Douglass and his stunning speech.

Next speech tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other speeches you’d highlight?

August 25-26, 2018: Cville A Year Later

[Last week my sons and I returned to my hometown of Charlottesville, pretty much exactly a year after the white supremacist/neo-nazi rallies there last August (which took place on the day we arrived in town last summer, because apparently that’s just life as an AmericanStudier these days). So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy a few contexts for this exemplary American city’s unfolding histories, leading up to this special weekend post reflecting on where we are in August 2018.]

On two distinct spaces where Charlottesville seeks to remember, and one hope moving forward.

Just over a year after the chaotic and violent rally in (if not to my mind truly focused on) Cville’s Lee Park, the statue of Robert E. Lee (and a neighboring one of Stonewall Jackson near the town courthouse) remains where it has stood for about a century. The city has changed the park’s name to Emancipation Park, a largely symbolic (and perhaps relatively unknown, at least outside of Cville itself) gesture but certainly a change nonetheless. For a time, the Lee and Jackson statues were covered by tarps; protesters kept removing the tarps under cover of darkness, however, and eventually a judge ruled that the tarps could not stay on indefinitely (since their stated purpose was “mourning,” which he ruled has an expiration date) and so they have been taken away. Now the statues are surrounded by metal fences that both keep visitors or vandals from getting too close and change the view from simply that of a marble memorial to a Confederate officer to something more overtly fraught and contested. In all those and other ways, Lee Park’s construction of public memory has continued to evolve over the last year, although I don’t know whether the park, Charlottesville, or we all are any closer to a truly meaningful reckoning with the questions and histories at play there.

On the other side of Charlottesville’s historic Downtown Mall is a very different and much more inspiring public memorial. In the worst moment of the August 12 violence, 32 year old paralegal and social justice activist Heather Heyer was killed when white supremacist James Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters (at least 19 others were injured by this act of domestic terrorism). Just over four months later, the city renamed the portion of 4^th Street where Heyer was killed Heather Heyer Way, and in the months since the space has become an impromptu but very moving memorial to Heyer. The brick walls on both side of the street are covered with chalk messages, many paying direct tribute to Heyer (or expressing condolences to her family) but many others advancing broader thoughts and ideas that echo and extend the ideals for which Heyer fought and was still fighting when she was killed. I don’t doubt that the site has seen incidents of vandalism or hate speech, but on the two separate occasions when I visited (in May and August, respectively) I’ve encountered only those more commemorative and celebratory kinds of statements. While of course the very existence of the Heather Heyer memorial reflects fraught, tragic, and horrific histories and realities, the space itself offers some of the best of what both public memory and collective voices can offer.

So where does Cville go from here? It’s far too simple to say that we can or should just follow the lead of or focus solely on the Heather Heyer memorial, for many reasons including the fact that Lee Park (whatever we now call it) continues to exist and demands our engagement as well. No amount of chalk messages, however thoughtful, can suffice for that historical, cultural, and contemporary dialogue. But at the same time, I’d say that the Heyer memorial is a pretty compelling example of critical patriotism and critical optimism—building off of a dark history, demanding that we remember it, but also using that place of public memory as a space to argue for the best of what we’ve been and are and can be. I’m not going to pretend that there’s any use of Lee Park that would satisfy the types who came to Cville last August to spread their hate and violence, nor for that matter do I have any interest in appeasing (or even talking with) that group of white supremacist neo-nazi assholes. But for the more thoughtful and sane of us (a group that the critical optimist in me still believes outnumbers the assholes, although I have my moments these days…), I can see great value in using such historical spaces in precisely that way—commenting on the prior histories, to make sure we acknowledge and engage with their presence and effects; but adding layers of collective voice and inspiration, to make sure we recognize that we are not bound by the worst of our past. If that can be one legacy of August 12^th, it would be a potent and crucial one.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?