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The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me
Jonathan Rieder
The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Belknap Press
April 2008
On Sale: April 4, 2008
408 pages
ISBN: 0674028228
EAN: 9780674028227
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
“You don’t know me,” Martin Luther King, Jr., once declared
to those who criticized his denunciation of the Vietnam War,
who wanted to confine him to the ghetto of “black” issues.
Now, forty years after being felled by an assassin’s bullet,
it is still difficult to take the measure of the man:
apostle of peace or angry prophet; sublime exponent of a
beloved community or fiery Moses leading his people up from
bondage; black preacher or translator of blackness to the
white world? This book explores the extraordinary performances through
which King played with all of these possibilities, and
others too, blending and gliding in and out of idioms and
identities. Taking us deep into King’s backstage discussions
with colleagues, his preaching to black congregations, his
exhortations in mass meetings, and his crossover addresses
to whites, Jonathan Rieder tells a powerful story about the
tangle of race, talk, and identity in the life of one of
America’s greatest moral and political leaders. A brilliant interpretive endeavor grounded in the sociology
of culture, The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me delves into the
intricacies of King’s sermons, speeches, storytelling,
exhortations, jokes, jeremiads, taunts, repartee, eulogies,
confessions, lamentation, and gallows humor, as well as the
author’s interviews with members of King’s inner circle. The
King who emerges is a distinctively modern figure who, in
straddling the boundaries of diverse traditions, ultimately
transcended them all.
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