Martin Luther King's final speech in Memphis, Tennessee, on the evening of April 3, 1968, was a deeply moving experience for him. By the end of the speech, tears were rolling down his face. Toward the end of the speech, King affirmed his commitment to do the will of God. He said that God had allowed him to see the promised land. Then he said, "I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land" (quoted from page 182). In this way, he seemed to have predicted his own death, because he was assassinated the next day in Memphis.
King's last speech is known as "I've Been to the Mountaintop." In his book MARTIN LUTHER KING'S BIBLICAL EPIC: HIS FINAL GREAT SPEECH (2011), Keith D. Miller includes the complete text of King's last speech in Appendix A (pages 175-182).
It is not at all hard to figure out why Miller refers to King's last speech as a biblical epic. On the contrary, it is hard not to notice that King is constructing his own biblical epic out of the biblical epic of Moses and the promised land. But Miller does not want to leave us with any doubt about this. So he painstakingly details all the sources of King's thought that he can locate not just in the Hebrew Bible and the canonical Christian Bible, but also in the liberal American Protestant tradition of preaching. Incidentally, Miller's father was a white liberal Protestant minister, so our author grew up kind of immersed in liberal Protestant preaching.
In any event, Miller is an experienced detective in spotting what he refers to as liberal Protestant commonplaces in King's last speech.
Because the rhetorical term "commonplaces" is not a household word, I would like to mention here that President Ronald Reagan worked out his own way of using commonplaces in his speeches. He compiled his commonplaces on note cards. He would go through his notes cards to find certain commonplaces that he wanted to use in his speeches. Reagan's collection of commonplaces has been published in book form as THE NOTES: RONALD REAGAN'S PRIVATE COLLECTION OF STORIES AND WISDOM, edited by Douglas Brinkley (HarperCollins, 2011).
Wolfgang Mieder has compiled a massive collection of King's commonplaces, which Mieder refers to as proverbs: `MAKING A WAY OUT OF NO WAY': MARTIN LUTHER KING'S SERMONIC PROVERBIAL RHETORIC (Peter Lang, 2010).
As Miller details, King uses a lot of liberal Protestant commonplaces in his last speech. Once you have examined Mieder's book, it seems unremarkable that King uses commonplaces in his last speech, because he was in the habit of using commonplaces in his speeches.
King delivered his final speech in Mason Temple in Memphis. Miller does a fine job of explaining the historical heritage of this black Pentecostal church. From the way Miller describes the church interior, the church interior had a remarkable architectural design. I wish that some photographs of the church and especially of the interior had been included in Miller's book. But I got the picture - the church interior was remarkable well designed for the kind of powerful and deeply personal speech that King delivered there that evening.
From Miller's fine description of the church's interior, I would surmise that the speaker-audience interaction that evening was powerful. But I wish that Miller had at least mentioned William M. A. Grimaldi's excellent essay "The Auditors' Role in Aristotelian Rhetoric" in the book ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATION: HISTORICAL APPROACHES, edited by Richard Leo Enos (Sage Publications, 1990, pages 65-81).
But now we come to the most interesting part of Miller's overall argument. Miller argues that King breaks new ground in his final speech. Miller says, "Stoutly resisting Christian supersessionism and the anti-Semitism that it often spawns, King clearly attests that Judaism serves as the wellspring of Christianity" (page 163).
Got that - no Christian supersessionism?
In one speech, King repudiates both white supremacy and Christian supersessionism.
In a speech composed of so many liberal Protestant commonplaces, it is radical stuff to repudiate not only white supremacy but also Christian supersessionism.
Earlier, American Protestants in New England, who were not exactly what we today would call liberal, started the American tradition of drawing on biblical and other sources in Western culture to compose the American epic, as Sacvan Bercovitch styles it in THE PURITAN ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN SELF (Yale University Press, 1975; revised edition with a new preface by the author, 2011). (Disclosure: I have posted a customer review at Amazon.com about Bercovitch's preface to the 2011 edition. His preface is a gem.)
In light of all the other antecedents that Miller mentions, I don't know why he didn't mention Bercovitch's classic study in American studies.
In any event what Miller styles as King's biblical epic stands in the American epic tradition started by New England Protestants.
Next, I want to say that I really like the way that King closes on such a deep personal note about himself:
"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!" (page 182)
No wonder he was moved to tears. This is a deeply moving passage even to read.
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