Constitutive Community, the Social Gospel, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “A Time to Break Silence”

Abstract

Highly controversial at the time that it was delivered, lay and scholarly critics have treated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 4, 1967 “Speech at Riverside Church,” (“A Time to Break Silence”) as rhetorically eloquent but pragmatically problematic. This essay argues that King’s speech marked an important discursive turning point, as he crafted a signal message using a Social Gospel frame as he adapted previous antiwar discourse to his own purpose. In doing so, King blended a call to individual and collective conscience in a manner that seems to have resonated throughout the antiwar discourse and subsequent reactions to his speech during the last year of his life. While the speech was uniquely King’s, an analysis of its Social Gospel framework suggests that this landmark speech provided a rhetorical vocabulary that helped call forth an important discursive community.

Keywords:

• African American discourse
• Constitutive Rhetoric
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Social Gospel
• Vietnam War

Notes

1 Taylor Branch’s (2006) biography of King is representative. Branch discusses the turmoil caused by the speech over the next two months, but then focuses on the political jockeying around the issue of Vietnam both internally to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and externally. He is quiet about the discursive conversation begun by the speech and continued throughout that year (pp. 605-771). See also Dyson (2000), pp. 51–77; Vanden Heuvel (2017); Garrow (2017); and Sunnemark (2004).

2 Emphasis mine; a paraphrase of Isaiah 9:2 and Matthew 4:16.

3 Emphasis mine. Although I am arguing that King’s discourse is grounded fundamentally in the language of the Social Gospel, I recognize that immediately following this passage he explicitly expands his argument to extend to all religions: "I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not."