Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
New Paltz Celebrates The Real Dr. King

by Erin Quinn
First published by New Paltz Times on 2-14-2006

“…but, I don’t know what will happen now…
but, it really doesn’t matter with me now,
Because I have been to the mountaintop…

And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
Longevity has it’s place, but I’m not concerned with that now.
I just want to do God’s will.
And he has allowed me to go up to the Mountain, and I’ve looked over,
And I have seen the Promised Land.

I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people,
Will get to the promised land.
So, I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.

My eyes have seen the Coming of the Lord…”

 –Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968.

The last words of his last speech given in Memphis Tennessee before striking sanitation workers and their families. He was assassinated the next morning.

At approximately 6:30 pm, Monday evening, February 6^th, 2006, dozens of students, faculties and community members burst out of Shango Hall on the SUNY New Paltz Campus, carrying signs and singing a familiar tune. “We Shall Overcome.”

It was a frigid evening. The wind was blowing, but their voices strong. Led by veteran Black Studies professor, Dr. Margaret Wade Lewis, the march of a hundred, turned into two hundred as the group inspired a graduate class in the Lecture Center to join them.

This was the kick-off to the college and community celebration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his recently deceased wife, Coretta Scott King. Their signs were simple, their message unchanged, their desire to justice as raw as it was in Selma, Alabama in 1968?.

“We need education.”

“The Three Evils—Poverty, War and Racism.”

“Non-violent action works.”

 “Build a new civil rights movement—Clean Money, Clean Elections.”

“George Bush Jr. don’t like black people.”

“We still haven’t reached the Mountain Top.”

The march wound its way around campus, voices strong chanting, “The People United, Shall never be defeated.” And dropped ranks at the Student Union Building, SUB 100 where another hundred people were seated, waiting for the guest lecturers and songs to begin.

Asked what inspired her to march in the winter air in honor of a man who had died more than three decades ago, SUNY New Paltz freshman, Dominique Gracia of Brooklyn said, “Any day we have to celebrate Black History is a wonderful day to come out. Martin Luther King Jr. had a powerful message. Every year I watch and re-watch the tapes of his speeches, and they still teach you something, they still touch you. We need these functions to keep our Black History alive and to keep our inspiration strong.”

New Paltz Village Deputy Mayor Rebecca Rotzler also marched alongside students, faculty and residents. “I was just reading a wonderful quote by Coretta Scott King where she basically condemns the War in Iraq and said, ‘war is a poor chisel for carving out peaceful tomorrows.’”

“These are difficult and dangerous times,” continued Rotzler, “and the one thing we can do is to get out and march. We did that the night of [President George Bush Jr.] Bush’s State of the Union the other night in Kingston. We need to stay strong and unified and keep our spirits up so we can continue to fight against this unjust war, against the profits of huge oil conglomerates and against the poverty and racism rife in this country.”

The event, sponsored by The Black Studies Department, The English Department, Democracy Matters, the Radical Cheerleaders, NAACP, VOU, RHSA, Black Student Union Sigma Gamma Rho, Kappa Alpha Psi, Alpha Phi Alpha, Concerned Parents of New Paltz—was standing room only and opened with the Voices of Unity Choir singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The audience stood and sang with them and then sat as Dr. Wade-Lewis took to the lectern.

“King would be proud of you today,” she said. “It is marvelous to see so many of you here. Those who marched, who came from their classes, the dining hall, the community. I see many faculty here and President Poskanzer…”

Dr.Wade-Lewis went on to reflect on Dr. King Jr. and the pace and speed and intensity in which he worked during the Civil Rights Movement to achieve justice and peace.

“Dr. King would have been 77 year old today had he lived,” she noted. “We know he was not an ordinary man,” she said. “But had it not been for the Civil Right’s movement he might have been a Pastor of a large church, a college professor, maybe a college President. But it was the Civil Right’s movement that catapulted him into fame and as the movement grew, so did he.”

According to Dr. Wade-Lewis, between 1955 and 1968 Dr. King “marched and picketed with foot soldiers, ordinary people to fight laws that were unjust, treatment that was immoral. He was twice imprisoned, he was stabbed in the chest, he received daily letters and phone calls of death threats, obscenities…he worked twenty hours a day, traveled 325,000 miles, gave 450 speeches, and continued to assist the poor, visit the sick, and preach to his congregation.”

As then President Jimmy Carter noted in the posthumous Presidential Metal of Freedom awarded to Dr. King on July 4^th, 1977, “He was the conscious of his generation.”

 “His life informed us, his dreams sustain us still,” said Dr. Wade-Lewis.”

Cory Davis, the vice-president of Voices of Unity and a SUNY New Paltz student who co-hosted the event with Tiffany Hanes, remembered his parents watching clips of Dr. King and talking about him as if he were still there with them, long after he died.

“Dr. King did a lot for this world,” said Davis. “If it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t all be sitting in this room together today. He fought for so much. He fought for education, he fought to end poverty, he fought against the Vietnam War, he fought for us as a people being together—Black, White, Latino, Asian…”

When Davis asked the members in the audience to share their own reminiscences or thoughts on Dr. King. Village resident Ellen James stood up.

“I was a teenager taking an ethics class in high school,” she recalled. “They told us about Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama and her determination not to move from her seat. Then they told us about whole towns of black people, who wouldn’t ride the bus, and how this was changing things. That forever altered my view about how change could happen. Imagine, ordinary people, who just decided not to get on the bus because the law was unjust and then the change and uproar that followed.”

A provocative tape was played which explored the sanitation workers strike in Memphis Tennessee, the strike the encouraged King, against the advice of his advisors, to attend. The tape interviewed two of the pastors that were with King the night before and the morning that he was assassinated. They questioned the security of Dr. King, the leaking of the information through the press of his room number and the hotel where he was staying. The tape interviewed authors who had written extensively on the details surrounding his death and their belief that James Earl Ray was not the man that killed Dr. King, that the assassination was part of a larger conspiracy, possibly rooted deep within the American intelligence community and government.

 The pastors [which included Reverends Jesse L. Jackson, Samuel Billy Kyles, Ralph Abernathy] talked about Dr. King’s odd behavior the night before. His prophetic last words, that the man who went to bed sick earlier in the evening, but was called out to give the speech that he promised to give, was not the same man who had gone to bed with the flu.

These sentiments were echoed by the former Black Panther, SUNY New Paltz College Professor, and activist, Kaba Kamene.

“He [Dr. King] was a prophet, not a psychic,” said Kamene, who printed out the last one minute and thirteen seconds of King’s final public speech. “A prophet is a good historian. A prophet knows the past, understands the present, and therefore can see the future. He knew where we were headed. And a prophet, before they are to leave this world, will tell you what they’re here to do and what they believe needs to be achieved when they’re gone…In the tape we just watched, Reverend Kyles talked about that night as being ‘mystical.’ It was mystical.”

Kabene went on to describe King’s illness that night, how he sent the other Reverends to fill in for him and give a speech to the sanitation workers. But when they arrived at the hall, the audience, believing Dr. King was on his way, began to chant his name. The two reverend’s summoned King at his hotel, woke him up, and said, “They want you Martin.”

“We know about King’s last minute and a half. But what we often forget is that he spoke that night for two hours. Two hours. He spoke of the time he was stabbed. The doctors had said that if he had sneezed after the stabbing, the blood would have filled his lungs and he would have died. He repeated over and over that night, “If I had sneezed, I would have missed, the march in Selma. I would have missed…’” Of all the years and speeches he could have said this, he never did. Why that night? He also never finished his last line. He said, ‘Mine eyes have seen the Coming of the Lord and all…’ He left that last line for you to finish. The message I’d like to leave the students with is, ‘don’t get caught in the bushes.’ That’s why I come up here two times a week from the Bronx to be with you. Because I love you. And we didn’t learn enough from King. We are back in another conflict similar to the one he spoke out against. Yes, we are tired of war, we are tired of poverty, we are tired of fighting. But we shall overcome by any means necessary!”

Professor Dr. Jerry Persaud of the Communications and Media Department was the last to speak. He talked about the lineage of powerful black leaders that became “too powerful, too educated and thus too dangerous” for our government. “WEB Dubois, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Muhammad Ali…They were dangerous black men, because they talked too much. They challenged too much. They were radical and don’t ever be afraid of being called ‘radical.’ That’s when you’re really powerful because you do not except that which is unjust, immoral…Exxon just posted $38 billion in profits. The greatest profits in history. And we were paying $6 a gallon for gas. Chevron posted $30 Billion, Shell, $25 Billion…and now there will be congressional hearings, conducted by the same plantation owners. We are in a plantation mentality…where are our black Senators? They forced the blackest union in the country, the most powerful black union, the transit workers, to go back to work and end the strike…It is essential that we raise a base of leaders. When there is a soul leader, like Dr. King and Malcolm X…they can decapitate them. And they will, and they do. We need a base of leaders. We need clean money and clean elections so that minorities and people without great means can run for political office without being paid for and controlled by large campaign contributions and the companies that give them…”

Dr. Persaud also spoke of the “commercialization” of black leaders by corporate America. “Now Ali is invited to the White House for ‘ethnic breakfasts.” He is invited to the Olympics, the World Economic Summit. When he spoke out against the Vietnam War, when he spoke out against racism in this country, he was not sanctioned by our government, he was ostracized. He was considered ‘dangerous.’”

“Now, in our public schools, they attempt to give our children one day where they focus on the “I have a dream” speech by Dr. King. “They say, ‘he had a dream,’ ‘you have a dream’ ‘what’s your dream?’ ‘Go fill in the picture.’ And they say, ‘my dream is to get a dog, or I dream of being on the Fortune 500 list of being on a reality TV show…’ This is not enough. Dr. King’s dream has not been fulfilled.”

Persaud encouraged the audience to think about a message he imparted at a conference recently entitled “Nocturnal Echoes.”

 “We must take him [Dr. King] into our dreams. What are nocturnal echoes? They are the will of the people and will of history in our body and memory, 50 years after Montgomery…you can kill the person, but you can’t kill the will of the people.”

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