The American Century: Literature since 1945 657up immersed in the doctrine of Christian love and in the music and rhetoric of the
Baptist Church. Both were to affect him profoundly, as was his extensive reading of
theological and literary texts as a college student and afterwards. King became a
minister of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. Soon after that,
in 1955, he gave his first civil rights address. Between then and his assassination in
1968, he traveled the nation giving approximately two thousand speeches and
sermons: among them “I Have a Dream” (1963), the climactic speech at a massive
civil rights demonstration in Washington, DC and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,”
the speech he gave in Memphis the night before he was killed. “I Have a Dream”
illustrates King’s characteristic rhetorical strategy, learned from the many sermons
he had both heard and given, of using memorable images, verbal play, literary
allusions, and biblical borrowings to communicate his message. As the insistent use
of the phrase which gives that speech its title shows, it also indicates his love of
incremental repetition: using a repeated phrase (“I have a dream”) to build one
statement, one sentence, on another. It is a device at least as old as the King James
Version of the Bible, as American as the poems of Langston Hughes and Whitman,
and it gives to many of his speeches and sermons the irresistible force of a tidal wave.
“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in turn, reviving the old slave identification of
themselves with the biblical Hebrews trapped in Egyptian bondage, shows how
skillfully, and passionately, King could update the religion and worldview of slavery,
making all this relevant to a new struggle for freedom. At the close of the speech,
King boldly compares himself to Moses. “I’ve seen the promised land,” he told his
audience. “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.” King was hardly to know that his death, a few
hours after delivering this speech, was to give his words an additional resonance, an
eerily prophetic ring. But, as the speech indicates, he did know exactly how to weave
different traditions of thought and language, many of them black and some of them
white, into a series of intricate, intense variations on the theme, the message that
concludes “I Have a Dream’: “Let freedom ring.”
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and raised in Buffalo, New York, Ishmael Reed
(1938–) interviewed Malcolm X for a local Buffalo radio program, as a result of
which the program series was canceled. Moving to New York City in 1962, he helped
found the East Village Other, one of the first and best-known alternative newspapers.
He also became involved in the formation of the Black Arts movement. However,
his participation in that movement was always both participatory and adversarial.
A complex, combative thinker, Reed acknowledges that the black element reveals
the permeable nature of American experience and identity. But he also insists on the
permeable nature of blackness. He has made it his aim as a poet, playwright, essayist,
and above all a novelist, to live between cultures and dramatize the exchanges
between them. And he has done so, not only in his own writing, but also in editing
works like MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997) and in
founding the Before Columbus Foundation in 1976, a multiethnic organization
dedicated to promoting a pan-cultural view of America. Reed is not afraid of
controversy. The first of his major novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), forGGray_c05.indd 657ray_c 05 .indd 657 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM