In my annual, ritual meditation on King, I keep thinking about those misused,spontaneous references to his “four little children” in “I Have a Dream.” As many have noted, this passage has been pressed into the work of domesticating King’s radical project, into inserting him 1/

into a reactionary, progressivist narrative emphasizing just how far “we’ve” come & overcome. Thinking too about the fact that King’s most enduring rhetorical tropes—the touchstones of American memory of the Civil Rights struggle—the dream, the mountaintop, the Promised Land, 2/

are all chosen from the end of the addresses in which they appeared. The beginnings of these speeches are seldom emphasized, although they are rich with suggestions for thinking about time and tense, ending and beginning, past and present. In his last sermon, 3/

“I See the Mountaintop,” widely considered his most apocalyptic, King took as his point of departure, the matter of time. “If I were standing at the beginning of time, “ he began, “with the possibility of a general, panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and 4/

The Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” King then takes the reader on an imaginary journey through the ages, pausing at historic sites and momentous occurrences, ending with Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Then /5