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On May 8, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. granted an interview to veteran NBC News correspondent Sander Vanocur and made it clear that his famous dream had in many ways turned into a nightmare.
The interview happened 3 years after King’s powerful “Normalcy, Never Again” sermon—more commonly known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, thanks to King’s now iconic improvisations. His dear friend gospel singer Mahalia Jackson exhorted him to, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”
But three and a half years later, he realized that “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism” are cornerstones of the United States. And he realized that the U.S. government is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Make no mistake: When King told us about his dream, he understood the “fierce urgency of now,” but it took him a few more years to understand how deeply this nation lies to itself about the content of its character.
When King told us about his dream, he understood that we “could never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horror of police brutality”...
...but it took him a few more years to understand that the so-called white working class had perverted and distorted the “drum major instinct,” living day to day with this “false feeling that he’s superior because his skin is white.”
When King told us about his dream, he knew that the nation was overrun with rabid racists, but it would take him a few more years to organize the Poor People’s Campaign and let the powers that be in Washington, D.C., know that “we’re coming to get our check.”
When King told us about his dream, he already understood that liberals pushed the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism”...
... but it took him a few more years to understand what Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) taught us in the 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet”: “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
This is the Dr. King who told us that riots were the voices of the unheard. This is the Dr. King who was assassinated by the state because he was the “most dangerous Negro in America.”
Dr. King said in that interview, weariness all over his face and his body, “I must confess that that dream that I had that day has in many points turned into a nightmare.”
Dr King said, “Now I’m not one to lose hope. I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and I would say over the last few months...
“I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments. And I’ve come to see that we have many more difficulties ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial and now it must be tempered with a solid realism.”
Dr King said, “I think the biggest problem now is we got our gains over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak. It didn’t cost the nation anything. In fact, it helped the economic side of the nation to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations...
“It didn’t cost the nation anything to get the right to vote established. Now, we’re confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars. Now I think this is where we’re getting our greatest resistance.”
Dr. King said, “They may put it on many other things, but we can’t get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nation something.”
Without it costing the nation something. I thought about this as the survival checks went from $2000 to $1400. I thought about it again during the Capitol siege. I thought about Dr. King saying to Harry Belafonte, ““I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.”
Dr. King, assassinated at 39 years old, was a prophet, a revolutionary, a freedom fighter, and I’m grateful for his lessons. I transcribed a portion of his 1967 interview with Sander Vanocur above, but it’s definitely worth watching: #ReclaimMLK
