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PART 5 Where Do We Go from Here? Although Martin Luther King experienced moments of discouragement when it seemed that progress toward the attainment of civil rights and equality was not occurring quickly enough, or the changes that were occurring were not deep enough to make a real and lasting difference in the lives of the vast majority of blacks and the poor of all races, he believed fundamentally—right up to his last speech the night before he was assassinated—that racial equality and the beloved community were on the horizon and were in fact achievable. Remember his words that night at Masonic Temple in Memphis? Repeating words he uttered in a sermon in early 1957, when twelve unexploded sticks of dynamite were found on the porch of his house, King told the huge crowd that he had been to the mountaintop; that he had looked over and seen the Promised Land (or beloved community). Because of the level of hatred and moral insensitivity in the nation, along with the increasingly credible threats against his life, King went on to say to the crowd that he might not get to the Promised Land with them, but that he wanted them to know that as a people they would get there.1 King was assuming that even in his absence from the 1. After twelve sticks of unexploded dynamite were found on the doorsteps of his house in early 1957 (approximately one year after his house was bombed), King preached a sermon in which he anticipated the “mountaintop” and “Promised Land” language of his very last speech in Memphis the night before he was assassinated. The Pittsburgh Courier (February 9, 1957) reported him saying: “Tell Montgomery that they can keep shooting and I’m going to stand up to them; tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I’ve been to 307 scene blacks would continue on the path to freedom and equality, and would also continue to do those things, such as engage in organized nonviolent direct action campaigns, that would ensure the actualization of racial equality in a racism-free society. All of this, he believed, would contribute to saving the soul of the nation. Having read deeply in the King corpus of published and unpublished papers, speeches, and sermons, I have seen nothing to suggest that King believed that white people in the United States would not admit blacks to full equality, and that racism would not be a permanent fixture. But as I say this, I want to be careful not to imply that this was because King possessed an overly optimistic view of human nature in general, or that he was naïvely optimistic about the possibilities of human beings’ achievements in the area of human relations, more specifically, race relations. I most certainly do not want to imply that King was unduly or uncritically optimistic about whites’ intentions regarding the race problem. Nor do I want to suggest that King had such trust and faith in white people that he was convinced that they would eventually do the right thing in the matters of race and equality. He was much more realistic than that, and he learned a great deal from experience, history, and current events. He knew, for example, that it did not matter which political party controlled the White House, for historically, presidential administrations have consistently betrayed blacks, Native Americans, other people of color, and the poor. He knew that whether Democrats or Republicans controlled Congress, the traditionally left out and excluded in the nation remained left out and excluded. The only difference, King knew, was that one or the other political party—usually the Democratic one since the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt—shelled out more crumbs for the historically excluded, and not more than that. However, neither party was committed—then or now—to admitting them to full equality and living-wage employment. Indeed, Martin Luther King knew that white religious people and their pastors, not unlike most white people generally, were committed to going only so far in the struggle for equality of the races; that their commitment was not to total equality between the races and a racism-free society. King was realistic enough to know that as human beings white people—like all other human beings—had their own interests, and as finite and limited beings they...

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