We don’t treasure everything even about the people we like. MLK was a man, and therefore it is safe to assume a complicated person who developed and changed his beliefs a lot throughout his life. When he seized the opportunity to deliver a speech to the nation, it wasn’t “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and it wasn’t sympathy for rioters, it was “I Have a Dream”.

This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live. It’s seen as representative not because he thought it was a unique opportunity to make an impact, but because it’s what people chose to highlight once he was gone.

Yes.

> The reason that speech is cherry-picked to be the cornerstone of public school education — the reason it’s the “breakthrough hit” — is that it allows people to avoid confronting the radical and uncomfortable aspects of MLK’s demands.

Sure it’s cherry picked, but it was also the message he delivered with the most weight to the largest audience with the largest resonance to that audience that we valued enough to continue carrying forward.

We don’t carry forward every message by every person, and we don’t carry forward every message for every person we do carry messages forward for. This was what he had to say that we valued the most.

> This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live.

It’s not just survivorship bias though. This was the culmination of the March on Washington. It was kind of a big deal. You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess? Nowadays we can post on YouTube and get tens of thousands of hits every day as long as we’re better than mediocre. Limited opportunities for engagement force you to focus on what you think is most important to say at that moment.

I agree, but I don’t think it reflects particularly well on the audience! Like, carry this one step further. Why is this the message that resonated with everyone? Why not white moderates being the stumbling block to racial justice, or capitalism being evil?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because people actually want or care about racial equality.

> You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess?

I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.

I can think of several reasons:

1. It was sincere.

2. It was likely the only speech anyone had ever seen from MLK, statistically speaking. It’s not like they were serialized.

3. It was correct. If we are to judge people at all, we should do so on the basis of their character, not the color of the skin. One takes consideration and trust in one’s own judgment, the other you only need at least one working eye for.

4. It was non-confrontational: “I have a Dream” not “I have a Problem”.

5. It was the culmination of the 1963 March on Washington. Marching on Washington wasn’t exactly a common affair back then: it drew attention, as it was designed to.

6. It was the speech he chose to deliver to the largest audience he had ever had in his life and was likely to ever have as far as he knew. Basically in effect “do or die” for at least that set of participants. If it had been a failure, there were no take-backsies, no second chances, no just trying again next year. So the right message, at the right time, delivered to everyone he could to try and compel them to at least meet in the middle.

I mean, he could have said something else, but he also probably wouldn’t have been as effective and I probably wouldn’t have learned about him in school. Maybe you have a case to make that it would have been better that way.

> I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.

Best line in the speech and you would want him to gut it! Who knows, maybe with foresight that matched your hindsight he would have. The problem isn’t that he said it, the problem you have is that people are citing that specific passage to make an argument about what his position would be.

He’s dead, and has been for a long time. He doesn’t have any arguments to make anymore, not against capitalism and not for affirmative action and not about how the moderate whites in his opinion just might on a bad day need some non-non-violent direct action shaped suspiciously like the good Reverend’s boot. The tradeoff against people misrepresenting his words to argue against something he probably would support decades into the future is that he got to be persuasive when he needed to be persuasive, but feel free to hop in the TARDIS and tell him that his needs at the time are less significant than your needs in the potential future. Only the living get to keep arguing, for everyone else the case is submitted.

Right now, though, right now some of us are moving at a good pace, while others aren’t even moving in the right direction. Some of us are incapable of moving on our own. Others are being held back. Helping those who are struggling most right now makes sense, right?

You wouldn’t interrupt a marathon to object that encouraging the slowest runner isn’t fair, since the dream is for everybody to have a medal and cake.