When Martin Luther King, Jr. Rode to Grosse Pointe High School with the Police Chief Sitting on His Lap

On March 14, 1968, just three short weeks before he was shot and killed, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., rode to Grosse Pointe High School with the Grosse Pointe Farms Police Chief sitting on his lap. The police chief insisted upon this arrangement to shield Reverend King in the event that one of the 200 angry protesters, was carrying a gun. He was on his way to deliver the stirring, poignant and sadly still relevant speech, "The Other America," which described a part of every city where "children grow up in the sunlight of opportunity"; while at the same moment just blocks away, children struggle in substandard housing, "go to schools so inadequate, so over-crowded, so devoid of quality, so segregated if you will, that the best in these minds can never come out." The Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council, a group of concerned citizens who worked for things like fair housing, invited Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak at Grosse Pointe High.

Reverend King could not have found a better example of this contrast than in Grosse Pointe, a beautiful, lake-front, upper-middle-class town that borders Detroit on two sides. Anyone who has driven the few miles east on Jefferson Avenue from downtown Detroit over Alter Road to Grosse Pointe does not need stirring speeches or statistics to grasp the reality of the two Americas of which Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke. East Detroit is littered with closed businesses, abandoned houses, over-crowded schools, and peopled with the unemployed, the homeless, and the untreated mentally ill. All of this is blatant on the Jefferson drive, but contrasted with the green lawns, large homes, private parks and clubs of Grosse Pointe, as Jefferson turns into Lake Shore Drive, it is shocking.

In 1968, in this small, overwhelmingly white community, 2700 people sat in the Gymnasium of Grosse Pointe High to listen to the Reverend Martin Luther King, describe how when "there is mass unemployment in the black community, it's referred to as a social problem, and when there is mass unemployment in the white community, it's referred to as a depression." In the transcripts of this event, it is indicated that he is interrupted several times by hecklers who called him "traitor" among other names. With a nearly divine graciousness, he stops and allows someone yelling something out to "have her say"; moments later, as he is again interrupted, with admirable strength, he replies: "Now let me relieve you a bit. I've been in the struggle a long time now, (applause) and I've conditioned myself to some things that are much more painful than discourteous people not allowing you to speak, so if they feel that they can discourage me, they'll be up here all night."

The Reverend Doctor spoke out against the Viet Nam war in this speech. He explained: "if we're to move ahead and solve this problem (of the two Americas) we must re-order our national priorities. Today we're spending almost thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight what I consider an unjust, ill-considered, evil, costly, unwinable war at Viet Nam. I wish I had time to go into the dimensions of this. But I must say that the war in Viet Nam is playing havoc with our Domestic destinies." In a segregated country, with widespread poverty in the black community, as well as in many others, Dr. King felt that spending many billions of dollars on an "unwinable war" was sabotaging America's future. Breakthrough, a right-wing organization, brought 200 picketers to protest this speaking engagement. Today, many people relate spending billions on the Iraq war while there are millions of U.S. citizens who are homeless and uninsured with the similar dynamics described by Dr. King of the Viet Nam war.

Although, since 1968 there have clearly been many positive changes moving the United States closer to its ideal of a true democracy of equality and liberty for all, sadly the contrast between Grosse Pointe and Detroit still illustrates what the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., called the "Two Americas"; and we are again in what many believe to be an "unwinable war" while our domestic problems rage on. It is time again to read "The Other America" speech. Find the transcript, audio clips and photographs from the event at: http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/index.htm.