Fifty-four years and two months ago, Rev. Martin Luther King kicked off a semester-long lecture series/course at The New School called The American Race Crisis. His address was called "The Summer of our Discontent," and its text has only recently been rediscovered. (A Lang student contributed to this rediscovery, and put together a fascinating exhibition about it four years ago.) I had a tiny part in a recreation of the talk this evening, after 61 seconds of silence marking the 50th anniversary of his assassination at 6:01pm, April 4, 1968.We were a large "cast." In our reading, the director told us not to try to speak as Dr. King did - nobody can - but to speak as ourselves, make the words our own. I approached preparing my brief paragraph with a fear and trembling that reminded me of the preparation for being a Lector at church: my voice, yes, but in service of another's message.
I gave voice to the conclusion of a section of the speech explaining why 1963 was so important for the civil rights movement, describing disappointment at the way Brown v Board of Education had been effectively railroaded, the centenary of an emancipation still to be fully experienced - and then the events of Birmingham, Alabama. Here's the text I got, with the highlights the director suggested: people will hear words more than sentences, she said.
The victory of the theory of nonviolent direct action was a fact. Faith in this method had come to maturity in Birmingham. As a result, the whole spectrum of the civil right struggle would undergo basic change. Nonviolence had passed the test of its steel in the fires of turmoil. The united power of southern segregation was the hammer. Birmingham was the anvil. And so, in a real sense, 1963 was a year of challenge, stemming from the civil rights movement.
I suspect I was given this nugget because it seems a little professorial, with its talk of theory, fact and method; the director encouraged me to switch to a conversational teaching tone in the last sentence, as a professor might. I also felt like someone outside Birmingham, interpreting and assessing it, not untrue to my professorial existence. I know I was given this part by a sort of courtesy for work J and I have done on New School, not civil rights, history.
I can't, to tell you the truth, say whether the event was successful. Our large cast filed onto the stage at a cue we could barely hear from the stage (we missed the 61 seconds of silence), performed to an audience we could barely make out in the spotlights, bowed, then filed off again as another group waited in the corridor to take the stage. I've no idea how the event began or ended, or what it felt like to be in the auditorium. (How did the years 1964, 1968, 2018 mix, resonate? Dr. King was alive and dead and perhaps alive again, in our bodies and voices.) I guess that's the performer's lot; you never see the performance. If there was an experience of collective mourning, remembrance and resolve in the auditorium, I didn't get it. What I got instead was a brief sense of common purpose with the other performers, and the joy of collective concentration as we heard each other speak, with occasional frissons of "this is the very stage from which Dr. King delivered these very words!" Our hour-long reading felt a lot shorter, and I can't even really remember making my way through my few words: the power of (even a little) rehearsal!What I am remembering is being in the stage "audience" as actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, emerging from the back (rather than going to one of the lecterns at stage front where the rest of us had spoken), read the last section of the speech. The rest of us reacted to him as an audience of Dr. King's might have, finally joining him when he recited famous words from the Declaration of Independence; as we spoke we rose "popcorn style" as words moved us, turning and addressing these words to the audience. We were supposed to move towards the edge of stage at that point, evoking the March in Washington (and positioned for curtain call), but the students who were supposed to get there first didn't make it and we missed our cue. No problem, I think: the audience didn't know what we didn't do. And the words, resonantly intoned, were terrific.
In every academic discipline there are certain technical words that soon become clichés and stereotypes. And I need not mention to you that every academic discipline has its technical vocabulary. And certainly modern psychology has a word that is used probably more than any other word in psychology. It is the word, “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry of modern child psychology. And certainly we all want to live the well-adjusted life, in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.
But I must say to you as I move to my conclusion that there are certain things within our social order to which I’m proud to be maladjusted, and to which I hope all men of good will, will be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.
... And so I say that there is a need in a real sense for a new organization in our world, and that is, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women who will be maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who, in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
With such maladjustment, we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. With this kind of work and with this faith, 1964 can be a great year of achievement.
Had he lived, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be eighty-nine this year. The need for Creative Maladjustment is as great as ever.
