Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
On June 2, 1959, 30-year-old Morehouse alumnus Martin Luther King Jr. returned to his alma mater to give a keynote that would have today’s Republicans bursting into a puddle of white tears.
Although Dr. King was already known as one of America’s most gifted preachers, he eschewed his sermonic style to construct an address that didn’t contain a single scripture. Instead, he leaned heavily on a colloquialism that was well-known in the community in which he served. Nearly three years before writer William E. Kelly’s New York Times article on a “negro idiom” exposed white America to the term, King debuted an early version of a speech that he would give more frequently than any other.
“[T]he great question facing us today is whether we will remain awake through this worldshaking revolution and achieve the new mental attitudes which the situations and conditions demand,” explained the young minister. “… This is particularly true for those of us who are emerging from the yoke of oppression as a result of the present revolution. If we allow ourselves to be content with sheer mediocrity, we will be sleeping through the at a time when we should be fully awake.”
Yes, Martin Luther King was “woke.”
While King liked the “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” speech so much that he recorded it as an album, Ron DeSantis would have banned it for making white people uncomfortable. The Florida governor would’ve probably felt personally attacked when King said, “Let nobody fool you, all of the loud noises that we hear today in terms of ‘nullification’ and ‘interposition’ and “massive resistance’ are merely the death groans from a dying system.” King’s fight against “the perpetrators of the evil system that existed so long” would have been outlawed by DeSantis’…
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