Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial
The church and the civil rights movement
Two hundred and fifty thousand people stand before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, and the march that has brought them here is, at its core, a church meeting.
The civil rights movement is soaked in the Black church — its songs, its rhetoric, its organizing structure, its theology. The leaders who stand at the podium are almost all ordained ministers. The marchers who have walked from Selma and Birmingham and Montgomery have been sustained by congregations that prayed and sang and fed them. The movement's idiom is the idiom of scripture — Exodus, Isaiah, the Sermon on the Mount — applied with precision to the specific injustice of American segregation.
Martin Luther King Jr. comes to the podium last. He has a prepared speech. He delivers most of it. And then the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby, urges him aloud to tell the crowd about the dream.
He puts the papers down.
What follows is not on the page. He describes a hope he carries for the nation — that it will one day truly inhabit the promise written into its own founding creed, that all men are created equal. He describes a hope for his own children — that the country they grow up in will measure them by their character rather than their skin.
The speech lasts seventeen minutes. It draws on Amos and Isaiah and the spirituals and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. It is the most consequential sermon in American history.
“I dream, with the prophet Isaiah, of a day when every valley is lifted and every mountain laid low, and the glory of the Lord is revealed for all flesh to see together.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., at the March on Washington, 1963, taking up Isaiah 40 — paraphrased
“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the uneven shall be made level, and the rough places a plain: and the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together; for the mouth of the LORD has spoken it.”
King's vision that day was Isaiah's vision — the prophet who foresaw every low valley raised, every high mountain brought down, and the glory of God laid open for all flesh to behold together. King reached back into that ancient oracle and made it his own.
He aimed an eight-century-old prophecy at a specific American injustice with such precision that two hundred and fifty thousand people recognized it as true. Not as poetry — as description. As the way things are supposed to be and are not yet.
The prophetic tradition has always done this: taken the ancient vision and aimed it at the present failure. Not as comfort but as indictment. Not as reassurance but as demand.
The vision is still unrealized. It is still ahead of us. The church that carries it is still called to aim it at the specific gap between what is and what should be.
What is the specific valley in your world that needs lifting? And who is the Isaiah you are waiting for — or are you it?