There had been no time to prepare, even if he had intended to do so. He often spoke without notes, even when the stakes were extremely high. He was doing it again on this night.
He had an astonishing knack for speaking off the cuff. He seemingly had a photographic memory. In his first big moment as a civil rights leader, during the kickoff rally to commence the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, he had twenty minutes to compose his remarks.4 He had delivered a riveting speech that had his audience clapping and howling their support. The “I have a dream” finale of his speech at the March on Washington in 1963 catapulted him to legendary heights. That stunning riff was famously a spur-of-the-moment departure from the prepared text.
The first theme of his remarks at Mason Temple that Wednesday night seemed far removed from Memphis. Imagine, he said, still speaking quietly, that the “Almighty” was transferring him back in time. King’s first stop, he said, would be Egypt in biblical times. He would visit classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Christian Reformation under his namesake Martin Luther, and Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.5
King said he would not stop his trip through history there. No, he would ask the Almighty to allow him to live in current-day America.
The specifics of the trip through time, of course, were not the point of King’s speech. They were a rhetorical device to lend emphasis and gravity to his words. It was the kind of flair that King employed to infuse his speeches and sermons with dramatic power. In the Memphis speech he was mixing the simplicity of a children’s story, a bird’s-eye view of history, with references to lofty historical figures.
As he imagined the stop in ancient Greece, he spoke of his expectation that he would bump into Pluto, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes. If few of his listeners would have recognized all those names, that did not matter. King was burnishing his speech with a dash of intellectual gloss. It was not just Martin Luther King speaking. It was Dr. King, the theologian with a PhD from Boston University. It was a learned man who could rattle off the names of ancient philosophers and dramatists to poetic effect.
His voice built in intensity and rose in volume as he went on. That voice, a rich baritone, seemed to emerge from deep within him, as though rumbling from an oak barrel. His voice was almost musical in its harmonic rise and fall. It was at once lucid and richly ornate. On another occasion the timbre of that voice had bowled over the newspaper columnist Mary McGrory. Writing in the Washington Evening Star on December 16, 1966, she noted how “baroque phrases” slid off his tongue in “mellifluous, mesmerizing tones.”
King’s voice could, depending on the race or sophistication of his audience, exhibit the clipped diction of a lofty academic or the earthy vernacular of African American speech. For example, on one occasion, in 1965, when he was speaking in the vernacular, he proclaimed from the steps of the Alabama statehouse at the conclusion of a triumphant march from Selma to Montgomery: “We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.”6
As he moved to a major theme of his speech at Mason Temple, King turned darkly pessimistic. He said that the choice for humankind was no longer between violence and nonviolence. Tapping his fingers on the rostrum, he said the choice, rather, was between nonviolence and “nonexistence.” Unless the government moved swiftly to alleviate the poverty of African Americans, he said, the nation was doomed.
It was not a momentary lapse into overstatement. King had been saying much the same thing for months. He was warning of catastrophe. Nothing less. It was why he saw poverty as an issue of overriding urgency.
King shifted to another message, a plea for unity. He urged the strikers to stick together, invoking a passage from the Old Testament. Just as the slaves of ancient Egypt united against the Pharaoh to escape their bondage, so the strikers had to stay together, united.
In a jab at the mayor he insinuated that Loeb was not just wrong to defy the strikers. He was sick, King said. King sympathized with the strikers’ hardship, as they struggled to feed their families and put their livelihood at risk without knowing if their strike would succeed or fail.
To signal that victory was at hand, he recounted the familiar story of Birmingham: how his legion of protesters had withstood fire hoses, police dogs, mass arrests, and jail sentences. Just as the power of the nonviolent movement had worked in Birmingham, he said, that same spirit could win the struggle in Memphis.
Then his words took on a sharply defiant tone. He declared that neither Mace nor a court injunction would defeat the cause of the Memphis strikers. He repeated the call for an economic boycott of certain stores and products in order to exert business pressure on the mayor. Ever more animated, his right hand slashing downward, he extolled the boycott as the force that would win the day. He said it would cause downtown businesses to demand that Loeb grant the rightness of the strikers’ cause.
King shifted his focus again, from the immediacy of the strike to a second biblical theme. This time he drew on the parable of the Good Samaritan to urge people who had no vested interest in the strike to support it anyway. The story, told by Jesus and recorded in the Gospel of Luke, speaks of a traveler on the dangerous Jericho Road who is robbed and beaten by thieves. A priest and a Levite pass the man as they hurry on their way. Then a Samaritan, who belonged to a different ethnic group, stopped to aid the injured man. King
