How Martin Luther King Jr. Changed His Mind About America

More than fifty years after his death, Martin Luther King Jr.

The I Have a Dream speech gives us the standard story of America.

According to this story, America starts with the Declaration of Independence, which states our foundational values, particularly equality.

The Founders’ Constitution turns these values into law—imperfectly at first, but American history is a progress towards redeeming the “promissory note” of the Declaration, and one day we will “live out the true meaning of … ‘all men are created equal.’”.

This story is comforting and reassuring, but it is actually a barrier to progress, as the King of The Other America came to see.

For one thing, it supports what he called the indifference of the good people, the idea that social progress “rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.” For another, it tells us to look to Founding America and the Declaration of Independence as the source of our fundamental ideals.

As a junior in high school in 1944, competing in a debate contest, he delivered a speech called The Negro and the Constitution.

Like I Have a Dream, this speech examined whether the treatment of Blacks in America was consistent with American values.

He ignores the Founding entirely—the first moment of American history that gets a reference is the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The last line of the last speech that King ever delivered is not from the Declaration or the Constitution.