Constitutive Community, the Social Gospel, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “A Time to Break Silence”

Abstract

Highly controversial at the time that it was delivered, lay and scholarly critics have treated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 4, 1967 “Speech at Riverside Church,” (“A Time to Break Silence”) as rhetorically eloquent but pragmatically problematic. This essay argues that King’s speech marked an important discursive turning point, as he crafted a signal message using a Social Gospel frame as he adapted previous antiwar discourse to his own purpose. In doing so, King blended a call to individual and collective conscience in a manner that seems to have resonated throughout the antiwar discourse and subsequent reactions to his speech during the last year of his life. While the speech was uniquely King’s, an analysis of its Social Gospel framework suggests that this landmark speech provided a rhetorical vocabulary that helped call forth an important discursive community.