A March down Memory Lane
- Having given the audience his thoughts on how they should behave during the march, Dr. King wants to remind them that, yes, this whole nonviolence thing really does work.
- After all, it's won some great victories before. Remember the struggle for civil rights legislation just a few years earlier? Let's revel in that for a minute.
- King recalls the 1963 campaign in Birmingham, site of major demonstrations against segregation, where Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor set police dogs on peaceful protesters and used high-pressure fire hoses to knock them down.
- Just a little water, right? Nope. Those hoses could strip the bark off of trees.
- But, even with his dogs and hoses, Bull Connor failed to end the demonstrations.
- Why? King says it's because ol' bullheaded Bull made the mistake of using physical force to fight mental fortitude, which just doesn't work: "There was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out" (17.11).
- Besides, King says, water was nothing new to the Birmingham marchers: many of them attended church (many civil rights demonstrations were organized through churches), so they'd already been baptized. A little water didn't scare them.
- In fact, he says, they were so unafraid that, even when the dogs were biting them and the hoses were blasting them and they were being packed into police vans and taken to jail, they sang and prayed and maybe even made some of the jailers see their side of things.
- So they beat Bull Connor. Actually, what Dr. King says is that they "ended up transforming Bull into a steer" (18.7). The difference between a bull and a steer is that a steer has been castrated. It was Rocky Mountain oysters in Birmingham.
- And Dr. King wants the Memphis marchers to be just like the ones in Birmingham: determined but nonviolent. Just like the example he's always tried to set.
- Unfortunately, for the time being, it's technically illegal for him to set that example by participating in the march. But actually, the illegality might be illegal. Got that?
- Basically, the mayor of Memphis, Henry Loeb, had convinced a federal court to declare any outsider participation in the upcoming march illegal.
- This is the "injunction" King refers to (19.4). It meant that anyone not from Tennessee—especially King and his posse—would be breaking federal law if they marched.
- But King is having none of it and declares that his team is going to fight this ruling in court, because he thinks it's clearly unconstitutional.
- It's right there in black and white, he says; he's referring to the First Amendment (that's the "somewhere" where he read about all those freedoms), which guarantees the right to peaceful assembly.
- It covers things like Chess Club, sure, but it's mostly designed to protect people's right to protest.
- Which is exactly what MLK and company want to do. And he says stopping people from exercising their rights is something you might expect from totalitarian governments like China or Russia or your swim coach, but not the land of the free and the home of the brave. Which is some serious shade when the Cold War is still going on.
- So Dr. King is saying that the court has it all wrong and the marchers have every right to do what they're doing and they're going to do it, injunction or not.