I thought I’d share a different Martin Luther King clip than the “I have a dream” speech that’s, with good reason, become so permanently etched in our historical memory banks.
In the clip above, we see MLK addressing students at Philadelphia junior high school in October of 1967. It’s obvious—SO obvious that it’s almost heavy-handed to say so (as if someone wouldn’t know without being told)—but even in the lesser-known speeches, we hear just how extraordinary an orator Dr. King was. The charisma that oozes from the words is so convincing, so moving and so breathtaking in its lyricism that it’s easy to see why King is viewed as the kind of voice that only comes along a handful of times every generation or so.
I’d never heard the “What is your life’s blueprint?” speech, but I really appreciate how it starts with Dr. King sounding something like a guidance counselor doling-out practical life advice. “I have a dream,” by comparison, begins on a high-pitched note of urgency. It is, as all Americans know, an impassioned plea to a nation with a broken soul and a blood-stained conscience, a nation practically drowning in its own viciousness and teetering at the abyss of being unable to find its humanity. But the “blueprint” speech comes off more like the words of a parental figure—maybe even a stuffy grandparent—speaking to a young person who has no way of knowing just how much potential their future holds. The speech, of course, gathers steam as it goes.
I love how King starts by saying “I don’t have a tradition of being brief all the time,” before admitting that he has another engagement to get to right afterwards. Like: I gotta be somewhere else in a little bit, so I’m just gonna give you an expedited version of a mic drop and then keep it movin’…
And I love how he uses the phrase “somebody-ness” in the context of self-worth.
The Friday before Martin Luther King Day, my kid—aged 6—told me that she learned about "Martin King, Jr." at school and that "he was a good man" and that "sometimes lighter-skinned people were mean to him." She told me that she learned he'd been "killed by being shot" and pointed out that it was "a lot for kindergartners to hear." I think another girl in her class got upset about that, so my daughter reassured her (although I’m not entirely sure that the other girl wasn’t upset about something they learned in class about cigarettes not being good for your health).
On hearing my daughter relay these themes through her 6 year-old’s perspective, I was overcome with a feeling of love, of wanting to squeeze and hear her say “Martin King, Jr.” over and over. It was heartwarming—not to mention instructive—to get a glimpse of the messages a child would take away from a classroom lesson about Martin Luther King Day. And I was reminded of how naive a child that age would be, as long as they haven’t been exposed to malice or hate.
Children can, of course, be really vicious. We do ourselves a disservice, I believe, convincing ourselves otherwise. Children can exclude, taunt and denigrate other children on purpose—just to be hurtful. Which is why I think it's wrong to just instruct kids not to bully. I’m adamant that it’s wrong act as if we can simply socialize violence out of children rather than acknowledging the part of them that harbors hostility.
I think it’s important to draw that part of children (and especially adolescents) out into the open, and to speak directly to the fear that lies at the heart of their antagonistic behaviors. And kids, we should admit to ourselves, can definitely be rejecting of other kids on the basis of physical features…
With all that said, though, it's always seemed to me that the whole concept of racism is foreign to children. And that they have to absorb it from adults before it even computes in their perception. They literally have to be introduced to it because they wouldn’t create it on it their own. They wouldn’t know how to give racism the oxygen it needs to start burning. Kids may be terrible to each other at times, but I would wager that the urge to hold ethnicity or race against one another doesn’t emerge until the world plants that seed where they can see it.
Something to think about as Dr. King’s words continue to echo across time…
<3 SRK