“I make an inadequate note in this conversation that on the enflamed subject of religion in American life these days, the amazing grace of African-American church life is a vastly underrated treasure.”

Chris- I read that after I had listened to this interview. I came here to post specifically that it was that observation and insight that you made in the interview that stood out for me.

Of course there is much more to say about MLK and how way ahead he was of the times and still is today.

I read and have still a copy of his ” TheTrumpet of Conscience”- which made quite a mark on me years ago.

Somehow this year MLK’s birthday seemed more meaningful–haven’t figured out why.

On The Importance of Jazz
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Opening Address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival

“For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”

And I love how he connects MLK and Barack Obama. He was a confidant of MLK, and a preacher, and a civil rights activist. And he had immigrant parents similar to Obama (whose father hailed form Kenya), and he chose to work on civil rights from the inside (politics), something MLK encouraged, and something Senator Obama is taking to the next level.

I was standing close to Senator Obama as he sang those words in the climax of his concession speech in New Hampshire. I will never forget it. When he evoked Suffrage I felt a rush of elation, and then as he finished the sentence I felt something else.

I was not alive for MLK…my generation has grown up in his wake. I was educated in a vacuum of languid disillusionment that has permeated the void he (and the fallen Kennedys) left – a whole country with PTSD. The symptom was to immediately relegate him to nostalgia. You see I was taught that MLK was a great man who had accomplished an amazing feat, and we should all be thankful for it. What Barack Obama reminds us and what MLK tells us (if we listen to him and not our teachers) is that the mission was far from accomplished. MLK could only point us in the right direction, he could only take us to the water, he couldn’t make us drink. As he ends his last speech on his last day in our midst, he bellows out his last words and falls back toward a chair behind him, his arms and body go limp…they can crucify him now, he has said his seven words, and we must do the rest.

So when Senator Obama spoke of the King and the mountaintop, for the first time in my life, Martin Luther King Jr. jumped off the pages of my high school history books and into “the fierce urgency of now.” (MLK’s words) I was bearing witness to the fruits of his labor all those years ago…his spirit was in that room, and all at once I believed in that promised land he pointed us to.

We have been telling ourselves we had already reached that land (at least the white people conveniently have), but oh no my friends, it’s not that easy…MLK is not the only one that’s gonna have to sacrifice for this. Prepare yourselves for a harsh dwindling of Anglo hegemony.