'Practicing Prophecy: Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.’s Radical Vision for Integration' by Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah

“Like anybody, I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will” (King, 1968). 

The words come from Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, delivered in Memphis in support of the 1968 Sanitation Worker’s strike, the speech ends with the image of a man, stood, alone there, at the mountain top, staring into the distance, and seeing etched across an unforeseeable and uncertain horizon, “the glory of the coming of the Lord” (King, 1968).  

I have never stood there, at the mountain top, never seen far enough into the distance to make out whatever it was that Dr. King must have seen from way up there, but as I recall his words, as I recite them from my memory, as I attempt to remember them again, to piece them back together again, to embody his words, which is to imagine myself, not in his body, but in his voice, meeting his moment, practicing prophecy, knowing but not knowing, he was less than 24 hours away from his death, and yet, speaking from on high, without fear:

I’m not concerned 

about that now

I just want to do g-d’s will 

What does it mean to do g-d’s will? What is g-d calling us to do? 

What exactly did Martin see? 

We don’t need to imagine. While he was alive, the man wrote four books. I’ve been sitting with the last of these recently, in an attempt to answer the question it proposes: where do we go from here? 

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? is split into six chapters. The first chapter is titled, “Where are we?”

At the time of the book's publication, we are 2 years removed from the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In those 2 years, civil rights protestors in the suburbs of Chicago have been greeted with rocks and glass bottles, pelted at them by fellow Americans waving Nazi flags. In Watts, California, the brutal beating and murder of Marquette Frye, a Black man, by white police officers, catalyzes a 5 day long uprising that involves widespread rioting, and protests. The unemployment rate for African Americans is twice that of whites, as is the Black infant mortality rate (King, 1968, pp. 2-3). One half of all African Americans in the U.S. live in sub-standard housing, and make half the income of their white counterparts (King, 1968, p. 6). In elementary schools, Black students lag one to three years behind their white counterparts (King, 1968, p. 7). 

That’s where we are, were, are no longer. As of 2025 the unemployment rate of African Americans is down to 1.6 times that of white Americans (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). In 2025, the infant mortality rate of Black Americans has, in fact, increased to 2.4 times that of whites (Eli & Driscoll, 2024), the achievement gap between white and black students in elementary education is “30 percent larger than it was 35 years ago” (Barshay, 2024). We are not where we were, but we have yet to arrive at the promised land either. 

What is felt as ripples in our present, began first as waves fraught with human cargo, as Black bodies crowded onto ships, as a system of imagining people as property, and enjoying the convenience of it. For white Americans, the maintenance of slavery, and the economic relations that grew out of it, required the naming of all things Black, reprehensible, required an attribution of the causes of Black strife to Black people themselves, rather than to the social relationships they were embedded in; a purposeful self-delusion. 

Where we are now is an extension of where King was in 1967. And in 1967, King asked, “Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?” and he reasoned in response, “Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community” (King, 1968, p. 4, 22).

“Where do we go from here?” 

The book’s subtitle presents two answers, chaos or community. Chaos, a state of utter confusion (Merriam-Webster, 2026). Community, a state of caring about and wanting to interact with others in a group (Merriam-Webster, 2026). Chaos or community, the choice seems obvious. But who do we consider as part of our community? Who do we number as members of our group? The question of community is a question of resolve. We know what chaos feels like, but do we have the resolve to draw our circle of belonging so wide it manages to include all of us? 

Reading and reflecting on King’s writing, it is just such a drawing of togetherness that King envisions through the lens of integration. Throughout his writing, and throughout his living, King purposefully distinguished between the mission of desegregation and the mission of integration. At the time of Where Do We Go from Here’s publication, King and the broader civil rights movement had won many battles in the realm of desegregation, but were only just embarking on the grander mission of creating a fully integrated society where African Americans could participate as full citizens. For King, the realization of such a society required the death of the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism, and the birth of an entirely new set of values. 

In the chapter of his book, “The Dilemma of Negro Americans,” King declares, “Our economy must become more person-centered than property- and profit-centered. Our government must depend more on its moral power than on its military power. Let us, therefore, not think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into all the existing values of American society. Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny” (King, 1968, p. 136). A bold call. But in the final years of his life, this was the path King charted forward, what he understood g-d to be calling him to. 

The political, economic, and ethical project King dedicated his life to was the complete reordering of American society. King imagined an America wherein rather than being preoccupied with winning an “ill-considered war” in Vietnam, the wealth of his nation was dedicated to fighting the war against poverty “here at home,” imagined an America, where “the poor could stop being poor if only the rich would be willing to become even richer at a slower rate,” imagined an America where every citizen, not regardless, but given their race, ethnicity, culture, would be able to participate fully in the cocreation of culture (King, 1968). And he saw a unique role for Black Americans in this project, a role that we and only we could fulfill: “in dealing with our particular dilemma,” King wrote, “we will challenge the nation to deal with its larger dilemma If we will dare to see it honestly, historians in the future year will have to say there lived a great people - a black people - who bore their burdens of oppression in the heat of many days, and who, through tenacity and creative commitment, injected new meaning into the veins of American life” (King, 1968, p. 134).

The call is on us even today: a creative commitment to imagining a better world, and then to moving, beyond the realm of imagination, a creative commitment to struggling, against suffering, for the realization of a more just world. The call is on all of us. The work of desegregation has granted us many negative liberties: the right to not be prevented from drinking from a water fountain, the right to not be disallowed from attending a majority white school, the right to not be refused treatment from a doctor. King reminds us that if our work is to be of import for future generations, we must also seek out positive liberties, and he articulates that in our pursuit of such positive liberties, integration is the path forward. 

As Danielle Allen writes in her essay on King, “Integration, Freedom, and the Affirmation of Life,” “King identifies desegregation as ‘eliminative and negative, for it simply removes legal and social prohibitions’ (118). Integration, in contrast, is positive and ‘creative.’ ‘Integration is genuine intergroup, interpersonal doing’ (118). The goal is not merely to establish laws for oneself but instead to complete oneself. And the relevant completion requires fulfillment in and through participation in human community Only integration, writes, ‘unchains the spirit and the mind and provides for the highest degree of life-quality freedom’ (Allen, 2018).

“Where we are going” is the second to last chapter of Where Do We Go from Here. The chapter proposes a plan through which Black communities can amass economic and political power and ends with a clarion call for the abolition of poverty. It is much in line with the work King set himself to the evening before he was assassinated. Reading the chapter, thinking of the title, I can’t help but think of a different speech; not King’s “I have a Dream” speech, or his Mountain Top speech, but the sermon Rev. Dr. King had planned to give four days later, before his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. On the morning of the day he was assassinated, April 4, 1968, King phoned his home church, and let them know the name of this sermon; it would be called, “Why America May Go To Hell.” 

It wasn’t a new theme; it was a topic he’d touched on before. On March 18th of 1968, speaking to another gathering of sanitation workers in Memphis, King stated, “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell” (King, 1968). This was prophecy. Similarly, in Where Do We Go from Here’s final chapter, King writes, "Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words “Too late” This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community ” (King, 1968, p. 191). This was prophecy too. But a prophecy is never final. It lives in the space between reality and "interpersonal doing.” At its best, all a prophecy is, is words shaped to soften the hearts of men. 

America May Go to Hell, and it may not, but if America is going to hell, maybe it is because we’ve repeatedly chosen chaos over community. If America is going to hell, maybe it’s because we’ve failed to take care of the most needy among us. If America has gone to hell, maybe it’s because we’ve failed to embrace a more positive vision of freedom: a basic annual income, the guarantee of affordable housing, active involvement in the decisions that shape one’s life, an end to war and war mongering and a focus on wealth redistribution here at home. These are not projections of what King might have suggested to meet our moment. These are the very suggestions King made to meet his own.

America may indeed go to hell. But in the descent, there is further room for prophecy:

Imagine the future present us. It lives with us now. The embers of what we will become: dying and fading away, to reemerge newly burning. The closest thing we know to wildfire is our own growth. Disastrous, how much burning can overcome the landscape of us. But miraculous to see the newborn trees spring forth from torched earth. To see the coals give way to green embers, newly burning too. The metaphor is too generous. We are neither a wildfire nor a miraculous rebirthing. The metaphor is also weighted with tragedy. So much in our time has been given to fires of human making. The world is warming and we are attempting to live in it still ungiving. So much will change, and yet we change so slowly. The world revolves, cycles again. The end of the world is always coming, but is rarely ever the end of the world itself. There are so many worlds within this one. Each world folding into the other like Russian dolls. Some worlds are unable to be contained within this one. Time and space are paradoxes, especially when contained in a human mind. We have given ourselves to so much suffering. We have suffered relatively little while others have not. So many contradictions become true depending on the vessels that contain them. The doll splinters like cedar wood, or perhaps the flames of all this burning simply overtake it. And yet, from the burning another world surely emerges. Who amongst us will see it, a green ember flickering, still?