Preaching Against Copyright
Martin Luther King and the Power of Double-Voicing

Susan Harding, University of California at Santa Cruz

All social revolutions are made solely by the power of the spoken word.

  -- Kenneth Burke^[i]

    With one exception, the rules of Jim Crow segregation barred blacks from participating in the gala  events surrounding the 1939 premiere in Atlanta of the film version of Gone With the Wind.    The choir of Ebenezer Baptist Church was invited to dress as slaves and sing spirituals standing before a replica of Tara at the Junior League's Gone With the Wind Ball.   The slave choir included ten-year old Martin Luther King, Jr.   This was King's first appearance on the national public stage.  It also occasioned for him an early exposure to the fiery debates among southern black preachers about race relations.   At a meeting of Baptist ministers the following week, King's father, who was Ebenezer's pastor, more militant ministers subjected him to a ferocious attack for allowing his choir to appear at the gala ball serenading an all-white audience that did not even include the blacks who played slaves in the film.^[i] 

            As I write this story I struggle to put it "in my own words."   I decide I can repeat "a replica of Tara" but not "ferocious attack" without acknowledging that the phrase was used by one of my sources.  I am not sure why.  I am neither certain nor conscious of all the rules of intellectual propriety, but I try to follow them (a process that requires considerable time and attention and affects my style and my voice) so you will think of me as the author of my words.  [Mallon, pamplet story]  If you do not, I will lose my authority to speak to you.  You will not want to listen to me.  You might toss me out the door. 

            Preoccupations about plagarism, intellectual property, and copyright have plagued Martin Luther King's oratorical legacy, but they did not shape his oratory.   He spoke from within an intellectual regime that preceeded the modern regime of authorship, a regime that is still widespread though culturally and legally ignored – an intellectual regime of appropriation.^[ii] Proprietary preoccupations have plagued the legacy of Gone With the Wind as well and lately triggered a battle between advocates of the opposing intellectual regimes on the eve of publication of  Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone.   With their words, both Randall and King joined America's unending conversation about race relations; Randall in order to revoice Margaret Mitchell's iconic vision; King in order to revoice, and re-direct, American history.  

Neither King nor Randall could have accomplished their ends had they submitted to the regime of copyright.  Their power depended – and the power of many great orators and writers depends – on appropriation, on appropriative speech, or double-voicing.    It also depends on a view of language that is profoundly social as well as an understanding that history is more an outcome of chains of interactions than of individual actions. 

    History is a "dramatic" process, involving dialectical opposition.  Where does the drama get its materials?  From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born.  Imagine that you enter a parlor.  You come late.  When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about.  In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is fully qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.  You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument.  They are arguing about the South, about slavery and its aftermath, about race and racial stereotypes.  You put your oar in.  Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent.  You realize that your opponents are dominating the conversation because they share a powerful narrative vision of what the South was like, a vision that excludes the point of view of slaves and ex-slaves, of blacks and mulattos in the South.  You enter their storylines and begin to speak back from the perspective of those silenced.  Your opponents are now listening to you very intently.  They notice that you are speaking their words, their vision, but differently.  You are re-accentuating their words, at times making them say the reverse of what they intended.  They tell you they do not like your style of argument, that it's not okay to mimic others in public, and they ask you to leave the party.  You point out that they have been mimicking each other all evening.  They toss you out the door. ^[iii]

I hijacked this passage from literary theorist Kenneth Burke.  Burke used the metaphor of "the unending conversation" to describe the dialectic of history.   Midway through the passage, I diverted Burke's flow by revoicing his third-person character.   I converted his "you," or the voice of his "you," into a hybrid voice with shape of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and the perspective of novelist Alice Randall.  

Burke's understanding of the dialectic of history in this passage is a logical one.   The dialectic takes the form of an argument between speakers;  an opposition, a conflict between two sides.  In contrast, Bakhtin-Randall, the double-headed pronomial third-person guest I invited to the party, discovers, invents, asserts a dialectic within the side, the voice, of her opponent.   She represents the possibility, the necessity, of taking up her opponent's voice and vision, of re-accentuating it, of subverting its will from within and redirecting it to serve her ends.   She finds that the game at this particular party is, unfortunately, rigged against her -- unauthorized citation is labeled and disallowed -- and she is tossed out the door. 

The voice of "you," the double voice of Bakhtin-Randall, represents the theme of this essay.  What happened to Bakhtin-Randall in Burke's parlor as a result of what she said resembles what happened to the real Alice Randall before the publication of her novel The Wind Done Gone.   And what Bakhtin-Randall did to Burke's disquisition on the dialectic of history resembles what Martin Luther King, Jr. did to the two major American Protestant sermonic traditions he revoiced throughout his preaching career.   Both moves are instances of what Bakhtin called double-voicing.  Randall's double-voicing was parodic; King's was radically improvisational.   My focus here is also on Bible-based preaching more generally.  I argue that Bible-based preaching is a double-voiced practice, a willfully polyphonic practice of great force, one that generates great preachers and, under some circumstances, rearranges social boundaries, moves peoples to extreme action, and changes the direction of history.    My interest is in exploring the mechanisms, the mechanics, of generativity in speech, and also in foregrounding language practices that link and enmesh, rather than separate and distance, distinct social worlds. 

    According to her publisher, Alice Randall is the daughter of a biracial marriage who went from Harvard student, to Washington DC journalist, to Nashville country songwriter.  Her first novel, The Wind Done Gone, unfolds in the narrative world conjured up by Gone With the Wind and parodies that world by retelling it from the point of view of a character absent in the original, Cynara, Scarlet O'Hara's mulatto half-sister.  Randall said she wrote the book to give a voice to those whom history has silenced.  She wanted to know, where were the mulattos on Tara?^[iv]   She changed names -- Tara is Tata.  Rhett is R.  Scarlet is Other -- but openly derived places and characters and plot lines from Margaret Mitchell's novel.   For Randall's point was to repopulate and respeak Gone with the Wind's universe in order to interrupt, criticize, and dramatically reinscribe its iconic social vision.

In the spring of 2000, an U.S. federal district court judge stopped publication of Randall's novel in response to a suit filed by the Mitchell trust, which owns the copyright to Gone with the Wind.   The copyright has earned Mitchell's nephews millions of dollars from licensing adaptations of the book since Mitchell died in 1949.   The trust's lawyers and the federal judge who ruled in their favor argued that The Wind Done Gone drew too heavily on Gone with the Wind.   It seemed to them that not only its words but also its characters, the plot, and scenes were copyrighted.  Randall's book was an "unauthorized sequel."  The judge said that if the work tells the same story through different eyes, then it infringes on the copyright owner's right to create and control derivative works.^[v] 

            Randall's lawyers argued that The Wind Done Gone was a parody, not a sequel.  It was not the same story and therefore not protected by copyright.   Licensing agreements stipulate, further, that Scarlet O'Hara may not die in any sequel;  nor may interracial or homosexual sex occur.  All three take place in The Wind Done Gone.^[vi]  Randall's lawyer observed that it was preposterous to suppose that the Mitchell trust would ever have authorized a slave narrative told by the illegitimate half-sister of Scarlet and that reversed so many of the themes, depictions, and stereotypes of Gone With the Wind.^[vii]

            The artists and intellectuals who filed briefs in defense of Alice Randall argued, in effect, that citation without quotation happens.   All writers, all speakers are cultural impersonators.^[viii]   All words are double-voiced.   This final formulation is Bakhtin's, and it is the core of his theory of the modern novel.  Bakhtin argued the novel is fundamentally double-voiced -- or dialogic, multi-voiced, polyphonic, heteroglossic.  It is not monologic, not single-voiced -- the essence of the novel is the staging of different voices or discourses and thus of the clash of social perspectives and points of view.^[ix]  Double-voicing is also at the center of his thought about the utterance, speech genre, and types of prose discourse.   Any speaker…is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe….He presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances -- his own and others' -- with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes with them, or simply presumes they are already known to the listener).  Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances.^[x] While every sphere of human activity develops its own type of utterance, or speech genre -- distinct in content, style, and compositional structure -- they interpenetrate and absorb and digest elements from other genres to varying degrees which leads to a more or less fundamental and continuous restructuring and renewal of speech genres.^[xi] Individuals furthermore may re-accentuate genres  or deliberately mix genres from various spheres.^[xii]

            The unique speech experience of each individual is shaped and developed in continuous and constant interaction with others' individual utterances.  This experience can be characterized to some degree as the process of assimilation -- more or less creative -- of others' words…Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including our creative works), is filled with others' words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of  "our-own-ness" ....These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate.^[xiii]  Double-voicedness -- the interpenetration of voices -- takes many forms, ranging from parody to stylization;  from direct discourse (or quotation) to free direct discourse (or paraphrase) and free indirect discourse (or improvisation).

I think the ubiquity of  double-voicing is why Bakhtin could not devise a list of speech genres or even discern the principle on which such a list might be based.   Speech genres, like words and utterances, are less things in themselves than they are in-between, always intersticial, overlapping, intersecting, things.   Speech genres cannot be bounded.  They are all, to varying degrees, boundary objects, to borrow a phrase from Susan Leigh Star and others in science studies.   A boundary object inhabits…intersecting social worlds.   It is plastic enough to adapt to local needs…, yet robust enough to maintain an identity across sites.   It  lives in multiple social worlds…and has different identities in each.^[xiv]  Donna Haraway, in her far-flung intertextual explorations of science, technology, and culture, adds further dimension to the notion of boundary objects as she zeros in on  boundary actors, actors who specialize in traffic across boundaries and who generate trading zones along the borders of discrepant social worlds.^[xv]  These are organic intellectuals, not of peoples, but of interpeoples.  They trouble categories and classification schemes as they sample and remix genre practices.  The point of focusing attention on boundary objects and trading zones is not to deny difference.  Rather, it is to foreground crisscrossing and co-habitation, productive tensions and hybridity within and between social worlds.  

    The myriad kinds of Bible-based Christianity in America are social worlds linked by legions of boundary objects and subjects, practices and sites.  And the speech genre of Bible-based preaching is at once a boundary object and a trading zone linking Christianity's social worlds.  Preaching functions in this way in no small measure because it is a speech genre untrammeled by concepts of intellectual property, copyright, fair use, or licensing fees;  because it arises from exceptionally free and unlimited citational practices.  

            The Baptist preacher Michael Eric Dyson tells the story of delivering a speech to a conference on black males one year during black history month.  When Dyson came to a crucial passage in his message, one that usually won uproarious guffaws and penetrating "humhs," he was greeted with sprinkled laughter and moderate "huhs."  He found out a few weeks later why the passage flopped.  The preacher who spoke before him that night -- whose message he'd missed because he arrived late -- had gone through the same routine in his speech.   Dyson's ego was briefly piqued because the other preacher, who had heard a message Dyson delivered a few weeks earlier, had ripped him off, not vice versa!   But he couldn't stay sore because, as he says, Baptist preachers are always ripping each other off and using the stories, illustrations…verbal tics, mannerisms, phrases  --  and in some cases, whole sermons -- we glean from other preachers.  That's how we learn to preach -- by preaching like somebody else until we learn to preach like ourselves, when our own voices emerge from the colloquy of voices we convene in our homiletical imagination.^[xvi]

            Among Bible-believing preachers, words are gifts, not commodities.  They are things to be given, received, and reciprocated in a system of generalized reciprocity.   It's a linguistic regime of primitive communism, and it characterizes the whole Bible-believing church world.^[xvii]  Preachers stand in the gaps between the language of the Christian Bible and the languages, the speech genres, of everyday life.  They convert the ancient speech recorded in the Bible into living speech by blending biblical words and stories with those garnered from each other and from newspapers, books, TV, gossip, public debates, private life, social dramas, workplaces, scandals, structures of feeling, dreams and nightmares.   Church people, in their turn, borrow, customize, and reproduce the Bible-based speech of their preachers and other leaders in their daily lives.  Preachers appropriate each other's sermons piecemeal and wholesale, while church people assimilate their preacher's language at the level of grammar, semantics, style, voice, intentionality, and sentiment.

            The white Baptist preachers I sat under in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the 1980s were all masters of multiple voices.   Among themselves, the exchange of sermonic materials is a given.  They read each other's sermons, listen to them on tape, and sit under each other preaching as much as possible.  They attend preaching conferences many times a year, precisely to give and receive elements of content and style from each other.   Jerry Falwell greets visitors to his sermon web site with the message, You may use these sermons without giving credit to Dr. Falwell.          

            As a nationally renowned public speaker during the late 1970s and 1980s, Falwell dexterously mixed and matched voices to remake, expand, and diversify his reputation and audience.   In crafting his public postures on political and moral issues, he borrowed language from the conservative side of debates within evangelicalism and blended it with certain fundamentalist distinguishing features while discarding others.  He selectively absorbed and Christianized secular rhetorics, thus occupying the terrain of his opponents and particularizing their positions.  Overall, he juggled several distinct and partial identities to command the attention of discrete audiences and to unify them, if only partially.

            The fact that Falwell did not himself borrow and blend most of the language attributed to him -- his ghostwriters did -- further amplified the sense of him as a man of many voices.   His in-house ghostwriters were themselves bicultural, having many times crossed over the line between evangelicalism and fundamentalism in their careers, and it was they who enabled Falwell to flex his identities as much as he did, to remix his styles, to reach across generational as well as folk and official theological boundaries.

          Melvin Campbell, another Baptist preacher I sat under in Lynchburg, did not have Falwell's reach in terms of the social, cultural, and political voices of the day, nor did he have Falwell's talent for deploying biblical figures and frames to amplify his earthly scope.   But he was a far more gifted ventriloquist of biblical language.   He entered the biblical parlor as an equal to many of its ancient speakers.   Toward the end of my first long conversation with Campbell -- a conversation which consisted of his talking to me without pause for over an hour -- he told me what God had done for him, and he said, When I was wretched and naked when I  was borned, the prophets said it was like I was thrown out onto the ground. I had not been washed in olive oil.  I was laying there in my own blood, dying.  And when God saw me, there was nothing about me that really made me desirable.  Yet God looked beyond all of my faults and saw my needs, and God came and he loved me, and he died for me.  When I came to that knowledge, I had no alternative but to want to run to the one that loved me.  Because nobody had ever cared for me like Jesus.   Here Campbell took up  -- he riffed on, he channeled -- the language of Ezekiel, placed Jesus in it, and placed himself in relation to Jesus.  

Typology, or figuralism, is as an interpretative method that reads biblical history backwards;  it interprets the words God spoke to Ezekiel about Israel as foreshadowing, as pertaining ultimately to, Jesus Christ and to oneself.  But as method of speaking and of actively receiving speech, typology does more.  It is a citational practice that opens up the narrative time and space of the Bible and invites both preacher and listener into its stories.   It turns the Bible into an unending conversation.  It enables Bible-believing preachers and believers to talk about biblical characters as if they knew them, as if they had meet them, talked to them, walked with them, sat down and had breakfast with them that very morning.^[xviii]

    Martin Luther King, Jr. was surely the greatest American preacher of this century and perhaps the greatest in the history of American preaching.  He was also the greatest master of this panoply of Bible-based preaching's free-wheeling citational practices.   By citing freely -- by double-voicing or stylization, by free direct and indirect discourse -- King achieved tremendous eloquence and force on behalf of the civil rights movement's struggle to redirect American history.

The language with which King led the civil rights movement was invariably sermonic.  The substance of his sermons he translated into civil religious addresses and fiery mass-meeting speeches, but it was always preaching that he was doing.^[xix]  King's preaching joined two traditions:  an Afro-Baptist evangelical tradition and a predominantly white liberal Protestant social gospel tradition.  King did not invent this conjuncture of traditions, this sermonic trading zone -- he inherited it from his mentors, the black preachers he sat under in the churches he attended growing up and in seminary and graduate school.  Many of those preachers were masters at combining theological erudition and old-time religion, but it was King who enlarged, electrified, and transfigured the boundary genre and used it to propel and interpret a vast social upheaval during the course of his public life.^[xx]

            King drew from black and liberal pulpits selectively.  One thing he discarded from the liberal tradition was its deep and unresolved ambivalence about homiletic borrowing.^[xxi]  The regime of copyright and intellectual property had worked its way into the world of white liberal Protestant preaching by then and was interrupting the unselfconscious free flow of oral and written materials among its preachers.   King's Afro-Baptist tradition harbored no such ambivalence and gave him license not only to circulate its own materials but also to cobble them together with those of other traditions regardless of their conventions of exchange.  King also rejected the critical approaches to the Bible to which he was exposed in his liberal seminary and graduate school in favor of the Baptist evangelical understanding of the Bible as a book of truths -- truths that are repeated and repeatable -- as the Bible itself teaches by recycling its own stories and passages from beginning to end.   Finally, King rejected white liberal Protestantism's preference for topical rather than textual sermons;  for sermons that sounded more like well-organized, written essays or academic lectures in favor of the black pulpit's preference for sermons that sounded more like musical dramas, like cultic performances of a biblical text, like emotionally curved religious vocal events.^[xxii]

            King also rejected or played down some of the formal and expressive strategies of the black pulpit -- such as associationally structured sermons -- and accepted and customized others from the liberal pulpit -- such as formal schemes or templates for organizing sermons.

            Keith Miller describes King's accomplishment as voice merging, a fusion of two traditions, that enabled him to translate black demands into a white universe.^[xxiii]    In effect, Miller describes King as belonging to the black pulpit and borrowing from the white pulpit.   Both Michael Eric Dyson and Richard Lischer rework Miller's formulation, arguing that King did not "borrow" from liberal Protestantism.  He possessed it as much as his black tradition.  He appropriated re-tuned, swerved, and re-mixed materials from both traditions.   Nor, I would add,  did King "translate black demands into a white universe."  Rather he created a universe, a double-voiced universe, in which blacks and whites heard differently his messages of justice and deliverance.   King did not "merge" two sermonic voices or traditions.  He revoiced both and entwined them;  both traditions were audible.  They retained their own orientations and were placed in dynamic tension with each other.  

King "integrated" black and white in his preaching.  The civil rights movement took place in his speech as well as, as much as, in movement meetings, church pews, streets, courthouses, jail cells, schools, lunch counters, and voting booths.   Again, black and white pulpits were "integrated" not in the sense of fused, but in the sense of juxtaposed, interacting, relating, and exchanging.   And this did not mean King submitted to a white code in order to achieve a black end -- as if he were reproducing white hegemony even as he contested it, as if his central project was to convince his white audience that black demands were just, rather than to inspire his black audience to disobey unjust laws.^[xxiv]  King's speech performed – it prophesied in the sense of "spoke forth" – a kind of transcendent leveling through a series of inversions and reversals that if anything submitted, subducted, white to black, rich to poor, master to slave, first to last, fulfillment to foreshadow in order to produce something new.

    All these complexities are played out in "The Drum Major Instinct," a sermon King preached at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, in 1968, two months before he was assassinated.   During the preceding three years, King had become more radical.   He had become an outspoken opponent to the Vietnam War, and he was leading the Poor People's Campaign that sought to galvanize the poor of all races in a March on Washington. ^[xxv]

            As King put it in 1967, the movement must address itself to restructuring the whole of American society. The problems that we are dealing with…are not going to be solved until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.^[xxvi]  

King appropriated the title, the outline, illustrations, and some of the wording for "The Drum Major Instinct" from a published sermon of J. Wallace Hamilton, a white liberal preacher in Florida, who was famous in his day for his stirring messages and charismatic delivery.  King had read Hamilton's sermons first as a teenager, along with the sermons of other well-known liberal, social gospel preachers of the e. 20^th c.   In his 1968 rendition, King updated, intensified, customized, personalized, and revoiced segments of Hamilton's old sermon.  And he radicalized that old sermon, converting it from an appeal for serving others into an appeal for service in the cause for social justice.  

King begins "The Drum Major Instinct" with a reading from 10^th chapter of Mark.  James and John ask Jesus if they may sit on his right hand and his left hand when he comes to rule the world in glory.   Jesus tells them that it's not for him to give, that whosoever will be great among you shall be your servant; and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.   King cautions his audience not to condemn James and John for being selfish or arrogant.  We all have the same James and John qualities, that same basic instinct for recognition, for importance, for attention.   There is deep down within us all an instinct, it's a kind of drum major instinct, a desire to be in front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first.  The baby's first cry is a bid for attention;  as adults we join clubs, and we like to acquire titles and other tokens of status.   When it becomes destructive, the quest for recognition can drive a person to boast, or lie, or steal, or push others down in order to push themselves up.   And it can lead to race prejudice, make a person believe that their white skin ordained them to be first.  It also goes into the bitter colossal contest for supremacy among nations in the form of the nuclear arms race.  It called America to engage in the senseless, unjust war in Vietnam.   If we don't harness it, the drum major instinct destroys us -- as persons, and as nations.^[xxvii]

            Every utterance in King's rendition stylizes white into black.  It respeaks, revoices a white liberal Protestant form and content from an increasingly radical black point of view.  Just after he exposed how the quest for recognition leads to race prejudice, King tells a story about himself that still more forecefully redirects Hamilton's sermonic drift.  The story recalls, and in recalling casts itself as a sequel to, the story of Paul and Silas cast into a jail cell in Philippi.  Paul and Silas were accused of throwing the city into an uproar by their preaching and were thrown in jail.  While in jail, they so impressed their jailer that he converted.   King retells -- respeaks, revoices -- their story in his own in the midst of the civil rights movement.   In doing so, he not only places his mission inside Scripture and fashions it as an further unfolding of Scripture. Through a series of minute moves he also reverses (just as Paul and Silas reversed) the position of jailer and jailed.   By the end it is he, the jailed black man, who is showing his white jailer the road to freedom.   Keep in mind, as you listen, that King was preaching to a black audience.  He was performing this reversal for them, inviting, impelling, them to undergo the reversal with him.  Thus, the story becomes a powerful allegory -- an allegory with power that produces effects -- for the Poor People's Campaign.

            The other day I was saying -- I always try to do a little converting when I'm in jail.  And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem.  And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating.  And they were showing us where segregation was so right.  And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong.  So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking -- we got down one day to the point -- that was the second or third day -- to talk about where they lived, and how much money they were earning.  And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, "Now, you know what?  You ought to be marching with us.  [Laughter]  You're just as poor as Negroes."  And I said, "You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people.  (Yes)  And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.  And you're so poor you can't send your children to school.  You ought to be out there marching with every one of us every time we have a march.

            Now, that's a fact.  That the poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice, (Make it plain) he is forced to support his oppressors.  And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he's superior because his skin is white -- and can't hardly eat and make his ends meet week in and week out.  (Amen)

            After completing his exposé of the perils, both personal and national, of the drum major instinct, King returned to the story of James and John and Jesus.   King said that Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness when he asked us to recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant.   Paraphrasing a formulaic story widely circulating among preachers at the time, King told the life story of a man who just went about serving.^[xxviii]  He was the child of a poor peasant woman and worked as a carpenter until he became an itinerant preacher.  He had no credentials but himself, and just went about serving, until his friends denied him and turned him in to his enemies who had him killed, and he was buried in a borrowed tomb.   King juxtaposed and derived himself and his movement from this man and his movement mid-way in his telling of the story when he said the man was only 33 when the tide of public opinion turned against him.  They called him a rabble-rouser.  They called him a troublemaker.  They said he was an agitator.  He practiced civil disobedience.  He broke injunctions.   With these turns of contemporary phrases, the demonstrations and confrontations of the civil rights movement became sacred re-enactments of biblical scenarios of the life, ministry, persecution, and death of Jesus Christ. 

            King concluded "The Drum Major Instinct" by speaking his own eulogy in a way that once more lodged himself and his movement within biblical space and time and iterated with a difference Jesus' norm of greatness, converting it from a generalized injunction to serve others into a call for service in the name of love and justice and truth so that civil rights activists could remake the world.^[xxix]  The eulogy takes up biblical language from the life of Jesus, revoices a popular hymn, and resonates powerfully with the death threats against King that were circulating at the time.   For us now, it resonates as well with his subsequent assassination, from its being re-played, literally, at his funeral just two months later in the same church, so that King did indeed speak his own eulogy. 

Aside from these allusions and appropriations, I'd like you to attend to the dialectical movements as you listen to this concluding passage.   Hegel's dialectical method of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was a central tool in King's intellectual repertoire, in part, I think, because it seemed a secular version of biblical figuralism.^[xxx]  In King's eulogy we can hear him applying a dialectical method to the drum major instinct as he fashions its alternative -- service -- not as a repudiation of that instinct, but as an appropriation, as its fulfillment.  Within that dialectic, we can also hear echoes of others -- master and slave, white and black, rich and poor, jailer and jailed -- joined and sublimated in dynamic tension to render the possibility of a new being, a new register of possibility, a new world. 

            Every now and then I guess we all think realistically (Yes, sir) about that day when we will be victimized with what is life's final common denominator -- that something we call death.  We all think about it.  And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral.  And I don't think of it in a morbid sense.  And every now and then I ask myself, "What is it that I would want said?"  And I leave the word to you this morning.

            If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don't want a long funeral.  And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.  (Yes) And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say.  Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize -- that isn't important.  Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards -- that's not important.  Tell not to mention where I went to school.  (Yes)

            I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others.  (Yes)

            I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody.

            I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. (Amen)

            I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. (Yes)

            And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. (Yes)

            I want You to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. (Lord)

            I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. (Yes)

            Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.  (Amen)  Say that I was a drum major for peace.  (Yes)  I was a drum major for righteousness.  And all of the other shallow things will not matter.  (Yes)  I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind.  But I just want to leave a committed life behind.  (Amen)  And that's all I want to say.

            If I can help somebody as I pass along,

            If I can cheer somebody with a word or song,

            If I can show somebody he's traveling wrong,

            Then my living will not be in vain.

            If I can do my duty as a Christian ought,

            If I can bring salvation to a world once wrought,

            If I can spread the message as the master taught,

            Then my living will not be in vain.

            Yes, Jesus, I want to be on your right or your left side, (Yes) not for any selfish reason.  I want to be on your right or your left side, not in terms of some political kingdom or ambition.  But I just want to be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world. 

Posted:  January 16, 2003
S. Harding, University of California at Santa Cruz
Copyright 2003
All rights reserved.

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