Stone of Hope

In elementary school I was cast as MLK for a short play on his life. I didn’t want the role, the pressure of being a focal point. I would’ve rather been a nondescript townsperson or even a tree. But the producer of the play—the school’s well-meaning, white music teacher—believed that I bore the closest resemblance to the Civil Rights hero. I didn’t see it. I tried to. We were both Black. Both our faces were round. Maybe that was enough. I accepted, begrudgingly. I studied my lines: segments taken from talks, interviews, and speeches he gave, paraphrases. I memorized bits and pieces of his “I Have a Dream” speech and came to internalize his plea to be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. But I never seemed to be able to embody his commitment to nonviolence. Long after the accolades I received for that grade school performance, I have yet to become a reflection of MLK.

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I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.

These words, attributed to MLK, were etched into the side of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial near the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The monument sits on four acres in West Potomac Park and includes a crescent-shaped wall with fourteen other inscriptions from MLK’s sermons and speeches. The quotation above was considered important enough to appear on the statue of MLK, a thirty-foot relief sculpted from pale-pink granite. MLK, with arms folded, appears to be emerging from a rock face, like the white heads of American presidents at Mount Rushmore. The giant stone his body pulls from rests in front of two other massive chunks of granite. All together, the elements of the site embody one of the metaphors in “I Have a Dream”: out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. Folks visiting the statue pass through opposing mounds—which resemble a kind of mountain—on the way to MLK’s stony visage looking out over the Tidal Basin lined with cherry trees. They bloom every April around the anniversary of his death.

A lot of thought went into the construction of the memorial, even the decision to etch a misquotation at MLK’s side. The memorial’s architects had planned to use the unabridged version, but when they realized that sculptor Lei Yixin’s design didn’t offer enough space on the granite, they chose to make abbreviations. The executive architect, Dr. Ed Jackson, Jr., said, “We sincerely felt passionate that the man’s own eulogy should be expressed on the stone. We said the least we could do was define who he was based on his perception of himself.”

Following the unveiling of the memorial’s Stone of Hope in August 2011, criticisms arose, many pointing out that the altered quote didn’t reflect MLK’s perception of himself, not really. Maya Angelou, originally listed as a consultant to the project, became one of its chief critics and argued that omitting the “if” clause changed the meaning of King’s statement. Just days after the monument opened, Rachel Manteuffel at The Washington Post advocated for the words to be removed due to their misrepresentation. Her column cited and published the full quotation, which was from a sermon MLK gave in Atlanta on February 4, 1968:^#

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice, say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all the other shallow things will not matter.

The quotation invented for the Stone of Hope is not a distillation of MLK’s understanding of himself, not a kind of self-eulogizing. It’s an example of how King’s words are often reduced or omitted to serve a particular vision of what he ought to mean to us.

The misquotation was removed from the statue in 2013. With permission from the Department of the Interior, Lei Yixin carved deeper grooves that erased the words. A new quotation was not included. Instead, he matched and expanded some of the linear furrows that were meant to resemble geological striation—those horizontal lines that appear naturally in rock formations. This design solution was considered the safest way to preserve the structural integrity of the monument.

I was born in D.C. but have never made time to visit the Stone of Hope on trips home. But I see the memorial often. A tabletop replica of it is in the atrium of the west entrance to the Ellis Library at the University of Missouri, where I teach. A little over a foot tall, the model sits on a slab of the same granite used for the real monument. Resting in a nook, the miniature is flanked by a crescent wall of framed images of MLK and one photograph of the monument. According to the embossed plaque screwed to its granite platform, this replica of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was donated to the students of the University of Missouri by Tyrone Christian, an alum and the chief marketing strategist for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation. The plaque encourages all students to act in accordance with the honor and integrity of Dr. King. Sometimes, I stop to notice the differences between the replica and the memorial in the photograph. MLK is golden in the tiny statue; he resembles a gleaming Oscar trophy. Instead of the alabaster-colored granite, the stone MLK emerges from is a sage green. It evokes a different emotion from the vision of Black excellence cast in a white relief. And the replica still has the paraphrased quote on it, reminding me of MLK’s image, in his own words, but not really.

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In my favorite depiction of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he is unseen, invoked but not shown. It’s a scene from the 1988 film Coming to America, one of my favorites. I can quote the movie nearly from start to finish. The film follows Akeem Joffer (Eddie Murphy), a brave and progressive prince, as he travels from the fictional African nation of Zamunda to the United States. He’s on a mission to find a wife who will not be subservient to him; a woman who might, as he puts it, stimulate [his] intellect as well as [his] loins. When he becomes enamored of Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley), the manager of a fledgling fast-food restaurant in Queens, New York, Akeem is desperate to impress her. He returns to a barbershop that he visited in the film’s first act, a spot owned and operated by a loud, fast-talking curmudgeon named Clarence (also played by Murphy). Clarence and his fellow barbers, Morris (Arsenio Hall) and Sweets (Clint Smith), and their friend Saul (Murphy again, but in makeup and prosthetics to look like an older Jewish man), serve as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the humor of the dramatic action. Akeem points to a poster of a man with a head of glistening ringlets, believing the hairstyle will give him an advantage in winning Lisa’s heart. His request prompts the sequence centered on MLK. Clarence tries to dissuade him, saying it’s good he wears it natural, “like Dr. Martin Luther King did.” This leads to a digression that, while brief, continues to make me laugh:

CLARENCE: You know, Sweets, I met Dr. Martin Luther King once?

SWEETS: You lying, you ain’t never met Dr. Martin Luther King.

CLARENCE: Yeah, I met Dr. Martin Luther King in 1962 in Memphis, Tennessee. I’m walking down the street, minding my own business, just walking off, feeling good. I walk around the corner, a man walk up, hit me in my chest, right, I fall on the ground, right, and I look up at Dr. Martin Luther King. I said, “Dr. King!?” He said, “Oops, I thought you were somebody else.”

SWEETS: Oh man, you lying. You ain’t never met Dr. Martin Luther the King.

CLARENCE: Knocked the wind out of me. Yes, he did.

SWEETS: No, he didn’t.

CLARENCE: Yes, he did!

SWEETS: No, he did not!

This scene is funny because it strikes against MLK’s positioning as a symbol of nonviolence. The care that Murphy and Smith take to always precede the name Martin with Doctor, the way Sweets’s frustration grows, and the shift to “Martin Luther ‘the’ King” evoke the mainstream respectability prescribed to MLK while inviting the viewer to consider the potential absurdity of respectability as a concept. Writer, performer, and producer Eddie Murphy engages in a kind of Black iconoclasm, defacing the cultural and political reverence for the good Dr. Martin Luther King. Not to overexplain the joke, but it’s funny because it isn’t supposed to be. What Murphy might not have intended is that in his irreverence, space is provided for a delegitimizing of MLK’s moral authority. And in that opening, another vision of King—capable of mistakes and animus, a hero more deeply human—is made possible.

I have reveled in Murphy’s reimagining of MLK. I have recited this particular scene from Coming to America ad nauseam. Its dialogue became a kind of shorthand between me and my loved ones. For my mother and me, whenever one of us might suspect the other of embellishing a story—No, he did not! Whenever I might make a small but considerable mistake that leaves lovers or friends feeling like they just got sucker-punched by my behavior—Oops, I thought you were someone else. In 2018, while searching online and hoping to find a thirtieth-anniversary Blu-ray of Coming to America, I found a perfect artifact, a textless meme: MLK and Clarence from the Queens barbershop photoshopped together in black and white. For years after, I would make that fake photograph my profile picture across social media every MLK Day. I’d leave it up on my digital walls through Black History Month, Clarence smiling back at me beside a complicated King every time I logged in.

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I have never managed to adopt pacifism, especially in response to blatant threats against my life. Growing up, I felt like King was weaponized against young Black boys/men with behavioral issues, like me. I resented King for a while . . . No, that’s not it. What I resented was how easy it is to take MLK’s supplication for African Americans to turn the other cheek and employ it to absolve white complicity. I’ve struggled against his preaching for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Some might not know there was an attack on MLK’s life in 1958, ten years before his killing. While on a book tour in his twenties, King had a signing for Stride Toward Freedom at a department store in Harlem. A Black woman named Izola Curry approached MLK and stabbed him in the chest with a steel letter opener. The sharp tip of the opener tapped his heart; his whole chest had to be opened to mend it. He survived hours of surgery. Ten days after the threat to his life, King issued a press release reaffirming his stance on nonviolence. He said he “felt no ill will toward” his assailant. Curry was revealed to have been suffering from paranoia due to schizophrenia. Perhaps Martin—who like me survived at least one suicide attempt and struggled with depression—had real empathy for Curry and her mental health. Still, I’m not sure I would be able to offer the same compassion.

I was near the same age as that young Martin when, in my first apartment, I heard a burglar attempting to break in. It was the middle of the day. No one was expected to be home. The culprit was trying to enter through a back door off the shared rear patio of my duplex. I watched silently as a thin, shiny point jimmied through the vertical space between the lock and the frame. It could have been a letter opener. I grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and yanked open the door. I saw a white, male face. The would-be-robber ran. I chased after him. I didn’t think beyond my rage and a singular desire to ram the blade through the body of this violator. Maybe part of me was embittered that this person shared his skin color with so many who have harmed people I resemble. I would have killed him. But he was faster, thankfully. After a block I began to feel my bare feet burning, about to burst against the asphalt. Wind nipped the hairs of my naked calves and then ran up the legs of my exposed boxers. I came to a sudden halt when I realized how I must’ve looked: a large Black man storming down a public street in his underwear, brandishing a knife. I remember staring down at my fist gripping the hilt of the kitchen blade, my fingers twisted and scarred from the times I have exercised my inner violence on flesh and glass, on bone and plaster, on cartilage, wood and metal. I shuffled quickly back to the safety of my home, still filled with an impotent and unexpressed rage. When I returned to my kitchen, I smashed a pair of porcelain dishes to shards in the sink, envisioning the murder of a thief who stole nothing from me. I confess, King’s image of resolute grace was the furthest thing from my mind.

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The word is, King’s autopsy revealed that at the time of his death he had the heart of a much older man. Pathologists noted that his enlarged ventricles showed a level of stress and fatigue that would be more common for people in their sixties. Once, my chronic anxiety led me into a state of panic so severe I was convinced I had experienced a heart attack. Following testing, the cardiologist told me I was okay, physically. “Your heart works beautifully,” he said. Thinking about King’s heart in relation to my own, I wonder how internalizing violence might reshape one’s physiology. I speculate on the quiet riots MLK must have held in his chest. Does my heart beat beautifully because I’ve externalized the rage I’ve felt? I consider the ways in which my deviations from MLK’s image might save my life.

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riot is the language of the unheard. . . .

I have known these words since I was about eight years old. They fell softly from my mother’s lips as she and I sat transfixed by news footage of riots flashing across Los Angeles in 1992. I heard her echo these words in 2020 as I watched peaceful demonstrations explode into riots across America in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The expression was not my mother’s; I learned that she had been quoting MLK.

On April 14, 1967, King gave a speech at Stanford University titled, “The Other America.” He spoke about being vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause people to riot. “America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air,” he said. MLK implored listeners to consider what it is that America, over and over again, failed to hear.

MLK was fatally shot in April of the following year, 1968. He was leaning over the balcony railing outside his room—306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The named assassin, James Earl Ray, is said to have struck King’s face with a lone bullet from a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle. As I research the killing, an intimate detail of the murder haunts me. The forceful impact of the shot ripped Martin’s necktie from his body—an act of violence so powerful it tore away the dressings of civility.

James Earl Ray was a fugitive at the time of the assassination, an escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary, less than an hour from my home. I took a tour of the decommissioned prison. I walked through the dilapidated wings and branches. Everywhere smelled like dried blood, mildew, and hot, sour-sweet candy. I ducked into its dungeon basements and peered inside the infinite blackness of rooms used for solitary confinement. After studying the disproportionate number of Black faces on a display of executed prisoners and reading about how many of them were exonerated after their execution, I stepped inside the facility’s former gas chamber to offer silent prayers and condolences.

On the tour, we were also shown the cell block from which James Earl Ray escaped in 1967. Ray had a history of ingenious prison breaks, before and after he was charged with the murder of MLK. His escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary involved folding himself into a truck transporting bread. I stood there thinking about Ray, a petty criminal with a litany of burglary, robbery, and fraud convictions. I thought about Martin’s violent murder, and how Ray recanted his confession. I thought about the guilty plea that allowed Ray to avoid a jury trial and a potential death sentence. Then I remembered the 1999 civil jury trial that concluded Ray was framed as a result of a conspiracy among multiple U.S. government agencies, and I remembered how King’s family believed in Ray’s innocence, and remembered how, regardless of whether Ray was the gunman, America killed Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., remembered how over and over again U.S. leaders reinforced the conditions that would lead to the assassination of someone like King; and I didn’t notice that my fists had clenched so tight my fingernails broke the skin of my palms, riotous.

Years after my visit to the prison, I learned about the several weeks of rioting that followed MLK’s death. In the spring of 1968, 110 cities across the United States were engulfed by fire and protest. Included among those municipalities was my birthplace, Washington, D.C., where 20,000 people overwhelmed the Capitol police force. More than 1,000 buildings were reduced to smoldering rubble. Over 900 shops and businesses were destroyed. Reported damages totaled more than $25 million. The rioting came as close as two blocks from the White House. Machine guns were mounted on the steps of the Capitol building and an infantry of well-armed military soldiers was stationed around the West Wing. This military occupation of the District of Columbia was the largest of any American city since the Civil War. It was labeled the Holy Week Uprising. None of this was taught to me in school growing up. There was no mention of ensuing riots in the play I was cast in as a boy. I remember giving a kind of self-eulogy haloed by a spotlight after my MLK character was killed in an off-stage scene. There is a mainstream disinterest in remembering the violence spurred by King’s murder. Omitting the Holy Week Uprisings from the narrative allows his assassination to be made into a call for redemption rather than a tragedy. An almost fated loss, needed to prompt a greater move toward justice and equality.

In the racially charged riots I have witnessed since I was little, over and over there have been calls to remember Dr. King. Many leaders will suggest that MLK would be dismayed to see looting and destruction in the wake of grand injustices.^# So often MLK is invoked as a moral barometer by which the actions of the oppressed can be measured, and judged. His name is used to remind people—particularly Black people—to ignore all the ways they’ve been continually struck down, unheard, and silenced. MLK has become a model for meeting subjugation with endless grace, for offering limitless patience and compassion to one’s assassins. I have heard his name used to suggest that suffering can be redemptive.

Considering King’s refusal to condemn the effect without first blaming the cause, I’m curious what he would have said in response to contemporary riots sparked by disparities of class, race, and gender. I wonder how he would feel. Would he understand?

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When I was younger, I was far more interested in those in conversation with MLK. Like Bayard Rustin. Or Huey P. Newton and the Black Panthers. But most notably MLK’s contemporary Malcolm X. These other Civil Rights heroes revealed an anger that closely resembled mine. They expressed disinterest in protecting a white American mainstream that feared retaliation or comeuppance.

Like many young Black men raised through the nineties, I was deeply affected by Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X. Denzel Washington’s portrayal of Malcolm was so enthralling. I was compelled by the movie even though there was a lot of it I didn’t understand at eight years old. But this created a kind of magic every time I returned to the film and discovered some nuance I had missed. When other Black kids prodded or teased me for reading a lot and “speaking white,” as they put it, I consoled myself by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. When expressing my interest in alternative rock music and Shakespeare led other Black kids to suggest I was a sellout, a house negro, a kind of race traitor, it made me feel better knowing so much of Malcolm’s rhetoric resonated with me too. I was enamored of the narrative and iconography of Malcolm Little’s chosen X—a symbol denoting the loss of his family’s name and identity due to slavery. The X looked so striking on flat-billed snapback caps and on T-shirts accented with the red, gold, and green of the African diaspora. He was so radical, which is how I wanted to identify, how I wanted to be known: special, revolutionary and unafraid to tear down the world as we know it. His red hair, goatee, and knowing smirk. His call to arms and his cold stare. His quick laughter, comparable to thunder—not in volume but in its startling eruption and how it carried the threat of a storm. Radical. As a teenager, I wanted a poster for my room: an enlarged photograph of Malcolm X at a window in a light-colored suit, wearing a skinny tie. The picture was taken in 1964 by Don Hogan Charles for Life and republished in Ebony later that same year. X is in his home in Queens. In one hand he holds an M1 carbine semiautomatic rifle, barrel pointed to the ceiling, his finger hovering over the trigger, ready. The other hand is carefully pulling back a pale curtain to peer through a set of blinds. Months later, that same space—his home—would be firebombed. A week after that, he’d be assassinated in front of his family.

My mother didn’t like the image, the anxious energy captured in the shot. Maybe she didn’t want me, her Black son, staring at a constant reminder of the ever-looming dangers outside our home. Maybe she wanted more hopeful visions to surround me, and that’s why she didn’t approve of me hanging the poster in my room. I eventually moved on. I didn’t consider tacking a large image of Malcolm X to my walls again until my thirties, when an aimless scroll through social media gave me a photo of X shaking hands with MLK.

The pair were smiling, enjoying each other’s presence. This conflicted with a national narrative I hadn’t realized I had internalized. Malcolm and Martin were always presented to me as foils for one another: the sword and the shield, the radical and the redeemer. Even older folks would suggest that these Civil Rights heroes were opposed. The idea that King and X might have admired and fully respected each other was miraculous to me. I discovered that the picture was taken at a Senate debate over the Civil Rights Act on March 26, 1964, the same year as the photo of Malcolm armed, peering past his curtains in Queens. Both men had come to hear and express opinions in defense of the new legislation. MLK and X met in person just before a scheduled press conference. Word is, their meeting lasted little more than a minute. This picture of them, hands clasped and smiling, serves as evidence of the first and only time they occupied a room together. I wanted to frame and hang the photograph as a reminder of all the varying ways one can be a voice for positive, revolutionary change.

MLK was radical too^#—in his speaking out against the invasion of Vietnam, in his leadership of the Poor People’s Campaign, and in the way he broadened his fight against the indignity of capitalism to include communities beyond the borders of race, gender, and nationality. Alongside Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and a group of labor movement allies and economists, King helped craft “A ‘Freedom Budget’ for All Americans” with the goal of abolishing poverty by guaranteeing full employment, fair wages, housing, and healthcare for all Americans. He supported a bold reallocation of war funds—$30–$50 billion to anti-poverty measures—stating that “the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.”^# He had “the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.” But MLK’s message, and the actionable plans he presented, are largely overshadowed by his dreamier rhetoric. In death, King was transformed from a radical challenging the nation to deliver on its promise to a symbol affirming American superiority.^#

By deifying MLK, promoting his murder as a kind of transcendent sacrifice for the moral soul of a country, we confine his vision of a promised land to metaphor. Relegating MLK to a symbol—a stone of hope to which we should all aspire—disempowers those in the shadow of his excellence, particularly Black boys and men. While growing up bookish and articulate, my quickness to outward expressions of anger meant King’s dream never felt like it could be mine. How could I imagine myself as good enough to pick up the work he continued and all that’s left to do? For me, it has become increasingly important to remind myself that MLK was a Black man, no more exceptional than his faith in us. He was not a magical negro alluding to a mythical utopia. King, made of flesh like you and me, advocated for concrete changes, spoke on policy reform, and organized strategies for action. Actualizing the democratic ideals of liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not a matter of resources but of will. We have, collectively, everything available to us that we might need to ensure people everywhere have three meals a day for their bodies and education and culture for their minds. We have all we need to be other-centered, to triumph over war, bloodshed, and famine—all we need is to dream audaciously and to bring those dreams to fruition.

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I’ve known the lyrics of the song “Happy Birthday,” by Stevie Wonder, my whole life. The track appears on his 1980 album, Hotter than July. My mom, despite raising me as a Jehovah’s Witness through most of my childhood, sang Wonder’s chorus to me every year on my birthday. The song was released during Stevie Wonder’s campaign to establish a federal holiday commemorating the life of MLK.

Many resisted getting King’s birthday recognized. Back then, MLK was not as revered as he is now. In the weeks leading up to his death, a Harris Poll survey revealed that Martin had a 75% disapproval rating. Even in the days following his assassination, about a third of Americans polled believed King had spurred his own killing through his actions. Wonder campaigned to change perceptions of MLK and galvanize support for advancing King’s legacy.

“Happy Birthday” affirms King’s moral goodness and superiority. Through buoyant rhythms and catchy refrains, the song acts as both celebration and protest—an anthem insistent on more collective recognition and a national observance of MLK. Each verse features lines that frame the exaltation of King and his life as an ethical imperative. Singing along, one can feel the effort to move a mortal revolutionary into a kind of divinity. It’s so catchy the track makes me want to be a believer too. On a bed of jubilant synths, gospel-infused harmonies, funky basslines, and crisp percussion indicative of Wonder’s 1980s Motown sound, the song became a hit, especially among African Americans, and the campaign succeeded in raising MLK’s profile and popularity. “Happy Birthday” made an incredible impact on national perceptions of Martin Luther King, Jr., and public demand for an MLK Day grew. Over six million signatures were collected to petition Congress.

President Ronald Reagan initially opposed the idea of establishing a federal holiday due to the cost, and an earlier attempt to ratify a MLK Day by the House of Representatives had failed in 1979, by just five votes.^# Some lawmakers were resistant to giving a private citizen who hadn’t served in public office such a large honor, citing the fact that only two individuals had national holidays at the time: Christopher Columbus and George Washington. The most vocal opponent to the founding of an MLK Day was North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Helms, a segregationist, questioned whether King was important enough to have his own holiday, and accused King of being a communist.^# But the overwhelming mainstream support was too strong. The bill passed and on November 2, 1983—a little under a year before I was born—Reagan signed into law Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as proposed by Indiana State Representative Katie Hall. In the years that followed, King was embraced as a national hero. His legend and legacy grew. His message of nonviolence was repeated and disseminated. And every January, in schools across America, MLK’s image became part of the curriculum, with readings and lessons and elementary school plays about his life. Well, not really his life, but about what his life ought to inspire in us.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the boys like me who may have been volunteered to stand in MLK’s image across various stages. Martin Luther King, Jr., died at thirty-nine. Soon I’ll be the same age. My face is still round, but I look even less like him now. I’m fighting for a different kind of peace from Martin; a more internal and personal reconciliation. As I get older, my relationship with King evolves. I learn more about him, not as the ever-patient figure the nation continually positions as a model and a shield, not as an all-too-divine soul meant to guide us to our better angels. I try to learn more about the intimacies of Martin’s life as a mortal man, more about him as a person, father, scholar, pastor, husband, and friend.

I’m planning a trip to my hometown soon. Maybe, between visits with friends and family in D.C., I’ll make time to walk the grounds of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. Perhaps I will stroll through the monument’s symbolic mountains of despair and along its crescent wall. Looking up at the massive statue of King, I’ll admire the curves and craftwork in the granite, and wonder how humanity can be chiseled from such hard substances. I’ll have a silent celebration for the life of a person with flaws and grace who could rouse and inspire good. And maybe, standing in the shadow of King’s Stone of Hope, I might experience a deep sense of gratitude for the shade it offers me. Maybe, when I’m ready to go on, I’ll give thanks as I step out from behind his silhouette.