Today, as part of Martin Luther King Jr Day my 9-year-old asked to listen to Dr. King’s “I have a Dream Speech”. So we went to Youtube and searched for it. There were multiple options and I simply chose the video at the top, not noticing the 6 minute 46 second length of the video. We started watching and at the 1 minute 55 second mark there was, to me at least, an abrupt edit. This video skips straight from “One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty” NOT even finishing the sentence, and goes straight to the “I have a Dream section”.
You may be tempted to think that this was simply someone cutting a 17 minute speech down to a 7 minute speech and nothing more. But the 10 minutes cut out is the difference between “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter.” Let me walk you through this. We’ll start with the intro left in (I’m pulling the text from here).
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
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 one hundred 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
So they at least left in the Emancipation Proclamation. It would be hard to smash cut straight to “I have a dream” without at least some intro. The “One hundred years” refrain is just getting started and the editor leaves in the acknowledgement of segregation and poverty. But oddly the poverty sentence is chopped midstream (made possible by Dr. King’s oratory style). The full sentence is:
One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
Ahah. Acknowledging poverty is one thing. But pointing out the obscene injustice in the distribution of wealth needs to be edited out. But it gets even more uncomfortable for white people who are unwilling to hear the truth:
One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we have 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." But 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 have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
Here Rev. Dr. King calls out the hypocrisy of the American call to freedom being only for rich white men. It clearly lays blame as to who is at fault. The powerful in America refuse to let freedom and justice be freely available to all people.
But the speech isn’t done calling out the inequality. Forgive ME for skipping down a bit. The entire speech is worth reading here. But unlike the editor of the video I am alerting you to both the fact that I am skipping and that a section is missing while providing you a link to the full text. To more succinctly make my point I am skipping to:
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. 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.
Some white people get nervous when a Black person talks about unrest and revolt. It is easier to pretend that the fight for civil rights and justice is safely in the past and there is no more need to fight. Yet there is. Even 60 years after the Rev. Dr. King’s speech there is much work to be done. To acknowledge that there is more to be done may make some racists nervous in their twisted need to maintain their power to the detriment of others. Even though the Rev. Dr. King goes on to emphasize the nonviolent principles he is known for, the means is not the point for the racist but the maintaining of power over others. And by that we mean police brutality.
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.
60 years later and police brutality of people of color is still a severe problem. To leave this part out of the speech in is to acknowledge how little has changed in some areas.
We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only". We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
We at least no longer have the “For Whites Only” signs and there is some better upward mobility, but we continue to have both voter suppression in many states and even some “Liberal” Democrats don’t fully support progressive ideals to the extent where they side with corporate interests over economic justice for everyone.
And then the Rev. Dr. King comes to the feel good “I have a Dream” section where we all hold hands and sing “Let Freedom Ring” together. Don’t take my snideness as deriding the Rev. Dr. Kings speech in any way. It is a masterpiece and one I taught to my students. My snideness is for the white-washing of the Rev. Dr. King by the editor of the video to something the “All Lives Matter” people can embrace and pretend they aren’t the racist jerks that they are.
To have a dream of racial harmony without acknowledging the massive injustices of the past and the present is an affront to all folks who have worked hard for Racial Justice. People have died for the cause. Skipping the truth telling regarding Police Brutality and poverty is exactly WHY the Black Lives Matter movement needed to spell out the Black part. Some of today’s racists like to pretend they aren’t racist and listening to sanitized version of “I have a dream” with the uncomfortable parts removed is how they get to pretend they aren’t racist.
Now, is Youtube intentionally highlighting this video over others, or is it just an artifice of structural racism? I can’t really tell. Or is it that people are too lazy to face injustice for 17 minutes and need the feel good 7 minute version? I don’t know. But I encourage you all to make sure you see the full version. (There are several full versions, this is simply one out of several). It’s so worth hearing all of his beautiful oratory. And the “Dream” section is so much more powerful when put into the context of the greater whole.