Dr. King's Legacy

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a fairly new holiday, and we don't really have any widespread traditions of how to commemorate and celebrate it (at least for those who get the day off work--which doesn't include me at my present job). Its official name is Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, so getting involved in a service project of some kind would certainly be appropriate. But what would be a perfect activity for everyone--it could even fit into a work schedule--would be to listen to Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Unfortunately we can't easily do that.

The King family and estate holds the copyright for that and Dr. King's other speeches, so the rest of us have to pay for the privilege of hearing it. (And arguments for public domain are not tolerated--when CBS included it in a news documentary, they sued for copyright infringement and won). I mostly have no problem with the concept of copyright (despite my weekly pointers to free copies of Frank Rich's columns), but it can easily result in unintended consequences.

As The Washington Post explored yesterday, a large number of young people have never heard the "I Have a Dream" speech (unless they saw the Alcatel ad that featured part of it a few years ago). The speech works as prose, no question about it, and a reader will come away with the power of its ideas, but it was the delivery of that prose that transformed the speech into a seminal moment in U.S. history. Without audio or video, that speech and Dr. King himself become more boring facts in the long list of dates and names that too often passes for teaching American history. It's been almost forty-three years since Martin Luther King told us about his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, so if we've heard the speech at all, our memories are fading (although I will grant that its power is such that if you've only heard it once or twice, that may be enough). But what about the children, teens, and even many young adults who don't have those memories? In protecting their right to control the audio recordings of this and other speeches, the King family is actually contributing to the marginalization of Dr. King and his legacy. And that's not at all how we should be commemorating this day.