I've Been to the Mountaintop

Bull Connor was an American politician who served as commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, for over two decades. As a “Dixiecrat” Democrat, he strongly opposed the civil rights movement of the 1960s and played a significant role in enforcing legal racial segregation. During the Children’s March of 1963, he infamously employed aggressive tactics against young civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, directing police officers to use dogs and fire hoses on the peaceful protestors. The disturbing images of young activists being hit with water and attacked by dogs turned public opinion in favor of the Black demonstrators.

King references Connor several times in his discussion of the events of Birmingham, ultimately painting him as someone who failed to grasp that those united through nonviolent action in the face of injustice will inevitably prevail. He says, for example, that Connor “knew a kind of physics that somehow didn’t relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out” (Paragraph 20). Here, King metaphorically compares the protestors’ passion to fire to depict the desire for justice as a law of nature in its own right—one that rendered Connor’s violence impotent. King underscores the point by punning on Connor’s first name, saying that the demonstrators “transform[ed] Bull into a steer” (Paragraph 21), a steer being a castrated bull.

James Lawson was born on September 22nd, 1928, in Pennsylvania. He studied sociology at Baldwin Wallace College. His studies were interrupted by a year in prison when he refused to be drafted into the US military for mandatory service. While still a student at BWC he became involved in the nonviolent civil rights movement. He then studied theology at Oberlin College in Ohio, and later at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He had met Martin Luther King during his time at Oberlin and, with King’s encouragement, continued to advocate for nonviolent resistance during his time at Vanderbilt. He finished his education in theology at Boston University after Vanderbilt expelled him for his activism, becoming a Methodist minister in Memphis at the Centenary Methodist Church.

It was Lawson who invited King to Memphis to speak on the plight of Black sanitation workers during the 1968 strike, the occasion that became King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” address. In the years after King’s assassination, he moved to Los Angeles to continue his ministry, where he has remained active in social activism ever since. In 2023, the James Lawson High School opened in Nashville in his honor.

Ralph Albernathy was born on March 11, 1926, in Alabama. He served in the US Army during World War II before studying mathematics at Alabama State University. He then received an MA degree in sociology at Atlanta University. Albernathy was ordained a Baptist minister and spent the early years of his ministry in Montgomery, Alabama.

Albernathy became friends with Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-1950s. Together, they helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, in protest against the segregation on public transit in the South. In 1957, he and Martin Luther King were two of the co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which became closely involved in various desegregation campaigns of the civil rights movement.

It was Albernathy who introduced King before King delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech to the sanitation workers in Memphis, as King acknowledges (Paragraph 1). Albernathy was also with King in their hotel room when King was assassinated the following day, April 4, 1968. He continued his activism throughout the 1970s and 1980s, campaigning for racial justice, the rights of the poor, and world peace. In 1989, his autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down was published to much controversy and criticism from fellow civil rights leaders, who accused Albernathy of slandering King. Albernathy died the following year, on April 17, 1990.