Ring Out Freedom!: The Voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement

Introduction: “There Must Be Somebody to Communicate . . .”

Introduction 1 1 Introduction: “There Must Be Somebody to Communicate . . .” Between Cultures The name Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) is recognized around the world. Many millions have heard his baritone voice cry out “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi .From every mountainside,let freedom ring”in his“I Have a Dream” speech.1 This voice, in its many different aspects and in the widest possible sense, is what this book is about. The period 1955 to 1968 has been called “the King years” of American history.2 From the Montgomery bus boycott to the garbage workers’ strike in Memphis, King and his words occupied a central place in American society and awareness during these years.This public figure and his position(s) are my focus, since I believe that they illuminate a set of specific and interrelated problems that have yet not been fully investigated. How is his rhetoric constructed? What meanings are embedded in this construction? In which ways are these meanings related to the creation of a certain understanding of the struggle and ultimately the world, in short that which can be called the civil rights movement discourse? And finally, what happens to the ideas embedded in King’s rhetoric when they are uttered?What ideological meaning do they come to have in and due to the contemporary situation? We all know King the brilliant orator and activist who preached nonviolence, who willingly (albeit filled with anxiety ) went to jail, and who, until at least 1965–1966, had the 2 Ring Out Freedom! rhetorical ability to makeAmerica listen,to take note of a problem , to understand that something was happening and that something needed to happen. I want to arrive at a deeper and new understanding of this rhetoric. King was a part of and in certain ways also a product of several historical traditions, the specific historical contexts of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and the international climate of those decades. His relationship to those contexts is essential to our understanding of him. As one of his associates said, “The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement.”3 Obviously,there is a relationship between these contexts and the rhetoric King produced in both spoken and written forms— in sermons; in books; and in speeches at movement mass meetings in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and Chicago; before labor unions;at fund-raising events,to the whole nation, and— ultimately—to the whole world.This rhetoric, this voice, was a focal point of the civil rights movement and it deserves attention both in and of itself and in social and historical context. In this study, I survey King’s rhetoric from a different angle than many other studies do. I am not primarily focused on discovering its building blocks or on constructing a fully rational and coherent political or, as some have tried to do, philosophical project from these words. Instead, I view King’s rhetoric as a whole both in itself and from the outset. I will argue that King created a specific civil rights movement discourse through a process in which he named and ordered the world, the civil rights struggle, and the “us” inside particular frames. In a sense, we can view King’s rhetoric as a painting, a work of art. The frame around the painting both demarcates the area of the painting and is part of what determines its meaning. If you change the frame, something also happens to the way you view the objects on the canvas. King used politics, religion, science, psychology, and history to frame the images he drew on the canvas of his civil rights rhetoric. Each time he changed the frame, we are able to see those images in a new way. Through this framing discourse, he created layers of meaning. He established an understanding of the civil Introduction 3 rights movement that is discursively situated within a context of particular rules of speaking, thinking, and acting. I will argue that this has ideological effects; it is not a process that is an end unto itself but one that has several meanings in and for the society within which it is created. This means that I will analyze King’s rhetoric as it is expressed and as creating meaning through its...