The Other America (Martin Luther King, 1967)
This post is a reading of Martin Luther King's speech The Other America , given on the 4th April, 1967. It can be found online at https://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/mlk-gp-speech.pdf , or watched on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJu_YDgw9rU *** ‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’ – Martin Luther King (1967, p.2) Recently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this quote from Martin Luther King has been shared widely on social media. But, as is often the case with quotes used online, this approach means we lose the all-important context, and so this post aims to explore the wider context to understand what King intended. Context The quote comes from the 1967 speech The Other America, which King gave at Stanford University. It came ten days after a speech he gave in New York City where he expressed his opposition to the Vietnam War (Hartford, 2007). The Other America set out how King perceived there to be ‘two Americas.’ ‘One America is beautiful