This chapter focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speaking style. King’s style did not mirror a mysterious and inaccessible “inner man,” nor what King would have called his “personality.” Instead, it reflected a strategy for the public presentation of a message, which in turn was related to a larger strategy of social change. He did not preach and speak the way he did because “that is the sort of person he was,” but because he had a mission no less calculated or comprehensive than Demosthenes’s appeal to Athens or Lincoln’s to America. His mission was, as he put it simply in a 1963 sermon, “to make America a better nation.” Paradoxically, he pursued his high and serious purpose with a style whose first principle was the achievement of pleasure.
Toward a Liberated Learning Spirit