Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, TN. The night before, on April 3, 1968, he gave his final speech at a public gathering - a prescient, almost prophetic presponse to his killing and, seemingly, to the murderers that would carry out that killing. Forty years on, the video of MLK on that night, giving that speech remains an eerie, spine chilling event of a man who seems to be staring straight into the eyes of god. Or perhaps straight out from the eyes of god. And the echo of his words as he turns and walks off the stage that night seem to still echo forth into our own time. Here is a clip of the final minute and a half of that speech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8&feature=relatedThere is much that rings out in this extraordinary speech. Particularly, at the :59 second mark of the clip, it seems something flashes, then settles in MLK's eyes. Some kind of sudden knowledge, and then an equally sudden reckoning. He takes a quiet breath, and the words that come out of him after that moment (though they are more than words, they are something more like an energy that animates those words) seem to well and spring from a source that is so deep inside of him, that we are ourselves for a moment driven deep into some kind of primitive knowledge that we are listening not to a man, but to an expression of god and creation itself.
I do not mean to speak in hyperbole. But in those seconds at the end of that speech, he seems to embody in a single moment an entire lifetime's work of study, practice, and struggle. He strikes a sudden, total expression of absolute freedom. Which is the freedom from fear. We in the modern world, especially in the U.S., have created a toxic definition of freedom. We have begun to define freedom as an ability to control - to shape and dictate and do whatever we want, whenever we want. But this is not freedom. This constant drive to manipulate and shape and affect is the highest, subtlest of all prisons where we are never, for even one moment, free.
As Dr. King spits out those last thundering sentences, it's as if he knows what's coming the next day. It's as if he's looking straight into the eyes of his killers, and saying, 'you think you can touch me?' Because what he has in those last moments of that speech - in his eyes, in his voice, in the camber of his shoulders, the setting of his jaw and facial skin, that final defiant flare of the nostrils - cannot be touched. And lest we think for a moment otherwise, he tells us straight, '...so I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing ANY man, mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord...'
Surely, in that moment, MLK has found what we all seek. Freedom. A true, pure freedom. Which is not the power to control or manipulate circumstances. But the power to express our deepest, truest state of being, no matter the circumstances. And the best part of all, the part that gets me every time, the part that brings back a sly smile to blend with the chills and the lump in the throat turning to tears, is that as he reaches the crescendo of that spectacular moment, as he's about to slam some kind of exclamation mark down onto the lectern and out across his audience, he can't take it anymore. Just before finishing, he turns away from the crowd and the microphone and all that might have been, still muttering and preaching, still lit up in that rarest of lights. And we'll never know what he said in the end. As if that's the point entirely. As if his words were meant to rise up into that echo, saying to us forever, 'My work here is done. You people have got to get up off your asses and start figuring the rest of this out on your own.'
Forty years after those who could not stand to be unmasked by his light snuffed him out, his words, his life, that moment still echo and reverberate. To get off our asses and live. Truly live. Not in reaction to others around us and the things and circumstances they, out of habit and repetition, think we should concern ourselves with. But in a simple, honest expression of our deepest, truest selves - no matter the chaos and turbulence around us.
Whatever it was shining from inside Dr. King on that night forty years ago still exists, in equal abundance, on this day here. It is all around us. May his speech, and that which animated his speech, bless us all - the tyrants, initiates, and fellow travelers alike.
********************************(A side-note to this piece: few people know that ten years ago, there was a re-trial of James Earl Ray - the convicted killer - and of the MLK assassination in general. The King family - yes, the whole King family and not some splinter group - sued Loyd Jowers (the owner of a restaurant next to the Lorraine Motel who participated in the assassination) and other 'unknown conspirators'. Not surprisingly, Ray was officially exonerated, Jowers indicted, and the assassination deemed an open and unsolved plot to murder the voice of a generation. A two-part audio interview with the lead King family attorney can be found here):
http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=24212and here:
http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=24329
The trial can also be watched on video.
Here is a source and a clip:
http://www.911blogger.com/node/14256
