MLK scholar Clayborne Carson talks about what people choose to focus on about King

Possibly the extent of many Americans' knowledge of Martin Luther King Jr. is his "I Have a Dream" speech, given during the March on Washington in 1963.

A familiar line is this one: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of the character. I have a dream today."

Less often quoted from the speech is this line: "There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."

Both from the same speech. And King gave other speeches and did other things.

Clayborne Carson was among the 200,000 in Washington, D.C., when King gave the speech. He later became a King scholar, charged with editing King's papers. Carson, a retired history professor from Stanford University, was the keynote speaker Wednesday for MU Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. at the State Historical Society of Missouri.

The founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford, Carson also met earlier with reporters.

"For a kid who grew up in a small town in New Mexico, it was a big deal," Carson said of the March on Washington. "It was more Black people than I had ever seen in my life. I'd never been to Washington before."

He told his parents that he was going to a National Student Association conference. He did go to the conference, but made the side trip to Washington, he said.

He was acquainted with Stokely Carmichael, at the time a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who he said told him not to go to the "picnic" in Washington.

King's speech that day was important, he said.

"It's the first event of the Civil Rights struggle that got that kind of attention," Carson said, adding that was on all three networks during the nightly news.

King was drafted into the Civil Rights movement by Rosa Parks, the Black woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus designated for Black people.

"What Martin Luther King did was inspire people to continue," Carson said.

King spoke out against the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly a year before he was killed.

"When Martin decides to oppose the war in Vietnam, he doesn't want to make a public statement," Carson said. "It would burn his bridge to the White House."

It was Coretta Scott King, who first spoke against the war, Carson said.

A reporter asked King if he helped his wife with her speech, Carson said.

He said King responded, no, but she would help him with his speech.

At the Riverside Church, King said people warned him that speaking out against the war would hurt their cause, without realizing it went hand-in-hand with their cause.

"Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home," King said. "It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.

"We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

King called it a "cruel irony" that Black and white boys were killing and dying together, but they were unable to sit together at school.

Carmichael joined the congregation in a standing ovation for King at the church

"King was caught in between," Carson said of the Riverside Church speech. "By that time, he knew from '65 on that something dramatic had to happen with economics and poverty and the war."

There's the "Mountaintop speech" delivered in Memphis the day before he was killed. He was there to support striking Black sanitation workers. It's known for its prophetic conclusion.

"Because I've been to the mountaintop," King said. "And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live along life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

In another section of the speech King said society was being forced to grapple with important issues.

"And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed," King said.

When he's asked what King would say or do if he were alive now, Carson said King laid it out in his mission as a minister in the first volume of his papers he edited. They are addressing unemployment, poor housing and poverty.

"That's the through-line of his life," Carson said.

Before becoming an academic, Carson was an early computer programmer and and activist reporter for the LA Free Press while all while attending the University of California, Los Angeles.

There, he covered the Black Panther Party, of which Carmichael was now a leader.

"They became big when they came to the state capitol with guns" in 1967, Carson said.

There wasn't any law against it, but they were arrested anyway, he said.

He has edited a volume of Black Panther papers along with the King papers, he said.

Eryka Neville, principal of Frederick Douglass High School won the "Keeper of the Dream Award" for service. In accepting, she said it was an honor to be associated with King's legacy.

"We get to serve our most struggling students in Columbia, Missouri," Neville said. "Intellect is not their issue. It's opportunity and access."

After the event, Neville was asked about the narrow focus on a single King speech.

"It's a function of studying history," Neville said.

There are efforts in Jefferson City to make the focus on history is even narrower, she said.

"We're going to start cutting more people out of history," Neville said.

In his talk, Carson linked the movements of King in the U.S. and Gandhi in India, while saying that sometimes we honor them too much.

"Stop honoring them," he said. "Start emulating them."

Roger McKinney is the Tribune's education reporter. You can reach him at rmckinney@columbiatribune.com or 573-815-1719. He's on Twitter at @rmckinney9.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Scholar was at the March on Washington in 1963 for King's speech