Excerpt

I open with how Martin Luther King, Jr., closes his 1968 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?: “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”¹ In this, the third and last of his “political autobiographies,”² King strikes a tone more radical and melancholic than the King of public memory. His future-orientation is complicated, even subdued, by mathematical metaphors, with the static geometry of lines and distance, but also the dynamic calculus of movement and change. We learn “the line of progress is never straight”³ but rather that it bends and is recursive. We learn, moreover, that the world is out of joint, that the temporal and eternal are not aligned, and that this disjuncture organizes the problem of action and calls for a politics of faith. What, then, does King’s warning of belatedness signal for our current moment? Why read King now? Would he see our political present as already “too late”?