A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King Jr.

And now, as national heroes of all sorts are being reassessed, the question is usually not whether King was great but, rather, which King was the greatest. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, over the objection of twenty-two senators. Johnson had grown frustrated with him, and he was beset by detractors who found him either too much or not enough of a troublemaker the year before, an article in The New York Review of Books had referred to his “irrelevancy.” But in the years after his death the skeptics grew quieter and scarcer. When King was assassinated, in 1968, he was generally viewed as a leader with a mixed record. He was quoting the Old Testament (Amos 5:24: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”), but really he was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., who put a version of that phrase at the center of his speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

“We look forward to continuing to fight, continuing to advocate, until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” he said at the meeting, thrusting his index finger for emphasis. Pearson is only twenty-eight, but his Afro evokes the Black Power era of the late nineteen-sixties, and the preacherly cadence he sometimes uses reaches back even further than that. He and a fellow-representative were expelled, but the commissioners in Shelby voted to reinstate him. Pearson had recently taken part in a gun-control protest on the floor of the state’s House, in violation of legislative rules. Pearson delivered a familiar-sounding speech at a meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Not long ago, a Tennessee state representative named Justin J.

A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King Jr.