'From the Mountaintop'

On the evening of April 3, 1968–a Wednesday–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the podium at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee and greeted 3,000 black men and women gathered there. His colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were scheduled to speak that night in support of 1,300 striking workers. However, the crowd demanded to hear from Dr. King himself until he was eventually driven from his hotel room to the packed church to speak.

In his speech, Dr. King places the Memphis strike in the broader context of a world rocked by social upheaval in the name of liberty. He lists the civil rights movements in Tennessee and Mississippi, the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa and the decolonization of Kenya and Ghana as different manifestations of the same visceral cry: “We want to be free.” In no other age, he says, could he have lived more happily than in the second half of the 20th century, as a witness to these changes. He concludes the speech with a metaphor taken from the tale of Moses.

“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!” 


On April 4–a Thursday–Dr. King was assassinated outside of his hotel room. This last public address is referred to by its defining line: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

Until the day he died, Dr. King possessed a combination of strong idealism and tactical practicality that I’ve always found fascinating. Nothing expresses the contrast and the balance more aptly than this speech. Not only did he visit the mountaintop. He lived there, positioned squarely between the “Promised Land” he hoped to reach and the mountain-face his people were climbing.

Put differently, I mean that he worked with the reality of racial struggle while also maintaining the hope that a better day was coming. For an individual who looks at the world from the mountaintop, reality is the mountain behind them. It is the struggle that must be made for progress and all of the resistance met along the way. For Dr. King, that was the battle against institutionalized racism. Yet, in the face of that challenge he did not lose hope in his ideal, and he worked hard to insure that his supporters never did either.

Beyond the mountain is the “Promised Land,” Dr. King spoke of, a time or place where our current struggles will have passed and our goals will have been achieved. The dream Dr. King described in his more famous “I Have a Dream” is likely the same “Promised Land” he imagined. There, tolerance and equality had no racial boundaries. I believe this is where Dr. King, and his supporters, drew their motivation from. The impetus behind all of their work was to achieve this dream and Dr. King’s unwavering belief that the ideal was possible is what made him so effective at inspiring others. His ideal, therefore, had as much to do with his success as his strategies.

From the Mountaintop will be my tagline for this semester, because I believe, as Dr. King did, that the ideal is as important as the reality. I also believe that hope is one of the most powerful forces ever used in politics and I cite the Civil Rights Movement itself as evidence. Over the coming months I will be exploring a number of subjects relating to politics and society from a mountaintop perspective, meaning that I want to compare more than policy alone, because that debate is already well-populated. I want to dive into the messy intersection of ideals and policies, worldviews and aspirations. I want to discover where the fundamental disagreements are on the issues that face our world, trace their roots and perhaps shine a little light on unexpected common ground. Who knows what I’ll come up with or what kind of trouble I’ll get myself into along the way, but if you think you’re interested, then please do tell…