King had preached the parable of the Good Samaritan in many of his Sunday sermons.7 He had done so just six weeks before. Then he had added another thought. Good deeds were admirable, he said, but they were not enough. Stronger laws were essential as well.
He had a keen sense of what messages and symbols would resonate with which audience. Relying on biblical tropes was very much in tune with the makeup of the crowd at Mason Temple. Ingrained in the marrow of most everyone in that auditorium was a biblical heritage and Christian belief. Thus far into the speech he had invoked the name of God (or “Almighty”) fourteen times, and he had summoned parables from the Old and New Testaments. He would refer to God twice more before he finished.
Religious motifs came naturally to him. Even when King was a small boy, his father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., had him memorizing scripture and reciting it at the dinner table. His mother, a church organist, instilled a religious spirit through the power of song. Every Sunday he sat in a wooden pew of his father’s church. Before his eyes were the biblically themed stained glass windows above the pulpit. Into his ears poured Gospel-laden sermons and the voices of the white-robed choir, all radiating the Christian faith and the African American Baptist tradition.
From a young age he had displayed a knack for public speaking. He was only fifteen, in his last year of high school (he skipped two grades in high school), when he won a statewide oratorical contest for African American students. When he was eighteen, his father invited him to deliver a trial Sunday-afternoon sermon at Ebenezer. Though he had no formal training in the ministry, he obliged. King biographer Taylor Branch described what happened: the novice preacher “seemed to project his entire being in the expression of his sentiments,” and the worshippers “rose up in celebration.”8
As a graduate student in theology King honed and refined his speaking style. He mastered the charismatic techniques and sermonizing of African American Baptist preachers, such as C. L. Franklin, and white clergymen Emerson Fosdick and George Buttrick. He scrutinized and memorized their mannerisms until he could do dead-on imitations. He had a repertoire of them, and years later he would amuse his aides with exaggerated renditions of one preacher’s style or another.
He was alert to the possibilities of metaphor and imagery and systematic in building a stock of rhetorical material. In a brown pocket-sized spiral notebook he jotted down witticisms that caught his eye. “Nothing so educates as a shake” was one scribbling. Another was from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Above the logic is the feeling of the heart.”9
Flashes of his mastery with words were on display at Mason Temple that Wednesday night. As he often did in his speeches, he elevated a local issue into a sweeping, transcendent national cause. He implored his listeners to support the garbage workers of Memphis. By doing so, he said, they would not just shape their city’s future; they would also transform the nation with their example.
Then his speech took a highly personal turn. He told of being stabbed in 1958 by a crazed African American woman while he was signing books in Harlem. The tip of the blade lodged in his chest a fraction of an inch from his aorta. Surgery removed the knife and repaired the wound. He later learned that he had been extremely lucky. If he had so much as sneezed while the knife impinged on the artery, he would have died. He told of receiving a letter from an eleven-year-old girl. King quoted from the letter in which the girl said she was glad that he had not sneezed.
The story of the stabbing and the girl’s letter served as a rhetorical lead-in for a recap of his career. “If I had sneezed,” he sang out over and over in a melodic refrain, each time citing a key event in the civil rights movement that he would have missed had he died from the stabbing in Harlem. If he had sneezed, he said, he would have missed the sit-in protests to desegregate lunch counters. If he had sneezed, he would have missed the Freedom Rides to end Jim Crow on interstate buses, the Birmingham campaign, the enactment of the federal civil rights bills, the chance to deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, the showdown in Selma over voting rights, and the outpouring of community support in Memphis for the strike that had brought him there.
Reciting the story about his near death seemed to transport him into a profound gloom about mortality—his mortality. Still fresh on his mind was the death threat that forced the delay of his flight from Atlanta that morning, and he could not let it go now. He told his listeners how the airline had taken the threat seriously because he was on board, had guarded the plane during the night and checked all the passengers’ bags for explosives. Upon his arrival in Memphis, King said, he had heard yet more talk about death threats against him.
He continued in a melancholy, self-reflective mood, saying he was facing some difficult days ahead. But he said he was prepared for anything, no matter what might lay ahead, because he had “been to the Mountaintop.”10
His words reflected a soul searching as he contemplated the specter of death. He had talked many times before about his fear of dying a violent death. But it was unusual for King to dwell openly on the depth of his despair as he pondered his fear of death.
