U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II has served on the State of Missouri’s commission for observing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday for all 30 years of its existence, so he knows that the keynote speaker for the commission kick-off event finishes a long night of official declarations, community awards and student performances.
As the keynote speaker for the commission’s 30th anniversary kick-off on Saturday, January 9, he knew he would speak last in a long program. Further, as a seasoned United Methodist pastor and elected official – he was a Kansas City councilman when he started on the commission, and was that city’s first black mayor before his election to Congress in 2005 – he always knows his audience. He would rightly have anticipated a mature crowd in Harris-Stowe State University’s main auditorium.
So he was prepared to address a drowsy crowd. “We’re talking about Dr. King’s dream,” Cleaver said, when he finally took the podium, “but we don’t want you to dream right now.”
Cleaver endeared himself to an audience that was already prepared to love him with effective use of humor; he is a very funny man. But his humor was purely strategic in setting up a speech that was full of rhetorical fire, moral fervor and direct challenges to change – and he indicted his audience right along with their common enemies on the racist, xenophobic right.
His discussion of sleep moved, first, from humor to science and poetry. He pointed out that scientists still don’t understand what physical system triggers sleep, the way the pancreas produces insulin. “Sleep,” Cleaver said, leaping to poetic expression, “is an exquisite mystery.”
The political drift of the speech was first foreshadowed by the mention of President Ronald Reagan – whose administration undermined many civil rights advances – among the sleepers. “President Reagan slept through many meetings,” Cleaver said – adding, later in the speech when he had started to heat up, Reagan slept through “many meetings in the War Room.”
By the time we had encountered Reagan as commander in chief sleeping while American military actions were plotted, it was clear that this thoughtful speech about sleep was stirring into a dramatic wake-up call.
“Martin Luther King Jr. did not dream his life away,” Cleaver said. “He lived his dream. It is not enough to dream. Any drunkard can do that.”
Cleaver pivoted from Dr. King to the common critique that the Civil Rights Movement got stalled somewhere between his “I have a dream” speech and – to choose a moment referred to many times from the podium – August 9, 2014, when Michael Brown Jr. lay dead on Canfield Drive for four and a half hours while the Ferguson and St. Louis County Police departments fumbled.
“He finished his speech,” Cleaver said of Dr. King’s most famous speech about his dream, “we said, ‘Hallelujah’ – and went to sleep.”
We are sleeping, Cleaver said, while people are killing each other. “There are 9,000 African Americans killed every year,” Cleaver said, “and 90 percent of them are killed by African Americans.”
But if we use that statistic to cast shame over “black on black” violence, he said, that’s also sleeping. “While we were napping,” Cleaver said, “we’ve fallen into black self-condemnation.” As many (or more) white people are killed each year in America, he said, with nearly as high a rate – 84 percent – of “white on white” killings.
“When we talk of ‘black on black’ killings, we’re asleep,” Cleaver said. “We need to stop killing. I don’t care if you are white or black.”
It was at that moment that Cleaver referred – subtly, but unmistakably for this audience – to Brown’s iconic death in Ferguson.
“You should not be killed and your dead body left in the street five hours. I don’t care what color you are!” Cleaver thundered, rising in volume to his peak for the night. It is wrong, wrong, WRONG!”
He then brought the audience up to the present moment, referring to President Barack Obama’s recent executive orders designed to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals by imposing more thorough background checks for gun sales.
“We are the most violent society on the face of the Earth,” Cleaver said. He was close to the mood of despair that brought Obama to tears while he announced his gun control measures. “Maybe we shouldn’t even be talking about a ‘dream,’” Cleaver said. “Maybe we should say, ‘I had a nightmare today.’”
Without naming names or political affiliations, Cleaver indicted the opponents of gun control.
“We are more anti-Muslim than anti-murder,” Cleaver said. “Muslims are not killing us. We’re killing us. Americans are killing Americans. That’s the crisis.”
Cleaver rallied the majority-black crowd to rise to the defense of Muslims as the new American criminalized outsider.
“We condemn Muslims who go to work every day, who join the American military,” Cleaver said. “We have been targeted as a group. We should oppose anyone being targeted as a group.”
As Cleaver knew, his audience was aware that Republican presidential contenders, led by real estate and entertainment executive Donald Trump, are competing against one another to out-demonize Muslims and Mexicans. Trump has captured the mood of many ageing – and raging – white Americans and stoked their rage.
Cleaver ridiculed this anger as a distraction by comparing it to more valid reasons for outrage.
The economic crash following the mortgage-back security debacle: “We should be angry that no one who drove the American economy into the ditch went to jail – rob a 7/11, go to prison for life, but rob the U.S. Treasury and …”
Grand juries that always exonerate police officers: “We should be angry we have a broken grand-jury system.”
Uninsured people: “We should be angry the Missouri General Assembly won’t take a vote to expand Medicaid.”
Low pay for teachers: “We should be angry the worst wide receiver for the St. Louis Rams makes more than the best school teacher.”
Throughout the speech, Cleaver wove in a piece of scripture about the shame of sleeping through the harvest – the shame of sleeping when vital work to sustain the community must be done. At the end of his speech, he explicitly made the connection to his audience.
“We must awaken from this dangerous sleep,” Cleaver said. “Too many who were blessed by Martin Luther King Jr. are asleep. I want to make sure you’re awake. Folks of good will must stand up at this point in history.”
