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The World’s Least Likely Revolutionaries
Let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be.
Martin Luther King Jr.
In his final speech on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. had traveled to Memphis to speak to striking sanitation workers. Eight weeks prior, two of these workers, Robert Walker and Echol Cole, had died in a horrific accident, crushed by a defective sanitation compactor. Earning low wages and lacking insurance, overtime pay, sick leave, or pensions, the 1300 workers found themselves in a precarious circumstance.
Facing threats from the Mayor of Memphis and not members of a union, the workers nevertheless went on strike and received several visits from Dr. King, including that night. In the throes of tornado warnings and inclement weather, he spoke extemporaneously, but eloquently to the audience of around 15,000, many of whom were descendants of slaves from the region of the South called the Delta. Author, journalist, and political philosopher Garry Wills, who is 89 years of age today, called the striking workers “the world’s least likely revolutionaries.”
Most presciently, Dr. King ended the speech with this:
I’ve been to the mountaintop …I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
He would be dead less than a day later.
I often say that as educators, we prepare people for a world we will not see. This knowledge requires us to exist wholly in the present, but with an eye toward an unknown future. It also demands we understand the past.
I recently undertook a national research investigation with my co-principal investigator, Dr. Jill Perry, who is the Executive Director of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate and a professor at University of Pittsburgh. In this study, we are seeking to understand how CPED-influenced doctoral programs have prepared and now sustain scholarly practitioners.
One of my participants, an African American woman who is now an admissions leader at US-based medical school, talked with me about the intersections of being black, being a woman, and being a medical professional. Lillian (a pseudonym) described how selecting students for medical school is far more than high MCAT scores. Possessing dispositions of ethics, justice, and equity lead to medical providers who demonstrate care of their patients.
But it is more than dispositions that matter, Lillian pointed out. She lost her mother, grandmother, and sister-in-law in medical circumstances that could have had far different outcomes if the medical providers had simply listened to these women.
Representation matters.
Black female medical professionals help foster values of listening to black women who suffer disproportionate silencing when they seek medical care.
Nearly 56 years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech of encouragement to African American sanitation workers, a young, Black woman commits her days to advocacy for a new generation, seeking to give all medical professionals and their patients a future America beyond merely what ought to be. Every day we have opportunities to be more than the world’s least likely revolutionaries.
Looking forward,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth C. Orozco Reilly
N.B. Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.
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