there are lots of great speeches that are forgotten. To have a sense of what gets it remembered you have to understand what comes next. There’s the Civil Rights Act in ’64, the Voting Rights Act in ’65 and then King moves on to refocus his energies on poverty, and calls for more government intervention to deal with poverty. And he then moves on to the Vietnam War and calls America the greatest purveyor of violence in history. And then he dies. And actually when he dies, he’s not that popular. And so as America casts a way to remember him and that period, they can’t remember him as the guy who campaigns against the Vietnam War and American militarism because that’s still happening. They can’t remember him as a the guy who rallied against poverty and called against government intervention because that’s still going on. But to remember him as that man who articulated that great moment where America decided to get rid of codified segregation, well he articulated that moment like nobody else had, and that’s a very convenient way to remember him. So part of the reason that the dream is remembered in the way that it is, is because it’s a way Americans can forget the rest of the stuff he said.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 23:07:21 +0000
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