Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day

Today is one of those strange half-holidays. We don’t have the day off at Zillow, but we’re the outlier, judging from the lobby of our office building (the 46-story Wells Fargo building in downtown Seattle). These are the times that I miss living and working in New York – there are at least half a dozen holidays that are commonplace in NY which are ignored in Seattle: Rosh Hoshana (2 days!), Yom Kippur, Good Friday, President’s Day, MLK Day, and a few others. Ah, to get bank holidays off! Not that it matters much anyway – it just changes where you work (the office vs home) not if you work.

Back to MLK Day…Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture by Drew Hansen, one of the world’s leading experts on MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Talk about specialization – this guy wasn’t an expert on 1960s American history, nor on the Civil Rights Movement, nor on Martin Luther King. His area of expertise was specifically on that one speech. What an interesting guy – Harvard undergrad (summa cum laude), Yale Law School, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and now he’s a partner at a Seattle law firm. He has literally written the book on this speech: “The Dream: MLK and the Speech that Inspired a Nation”. And since I know you’re curious but think it’s not appropriate to ask: Drew is white. He seemed to be in his early 40s, was wearing jeans, and seemed like a very normal (but extremely smart) guy.

Here are a few of my takeaways:

• First, I was extremely impressed with Drew as an individual. He studied this topic and published the book solely because of his personal interest in MLK’s speeches. This is not his vocation; this is his hobby. Some of us have hobbies like golf or fishing, but Drew’s hobby is to become the foremost scholar on one of the most important moments in history. Makes me feel like a slacker.

• We’ve all heard about J Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s wiretaps in the 1960s. Drew was quick to point out that despite the obvious illegality of needless wiretaps, there ended up being a significant upside to Hoover’s paranoia: most of the phone calls that King made for almost a decade are tape recorded and available to scholars. Drew listened to thousands of hours of King’s phone conversations with other civil rights leaders, friends, and others, giving him extraordinary insight into King’s thoughts. Imagine the huge scholarly boon if a similar treasure trove of information became available for other historical figures.

• Third, I was surprised to learn some of the details about the background of that day. I was always taught that it was a seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement, when 300,000 people marched on Washington and gathered in front of the Washington Monument. But until last week, I did not know that the day was really as much an economic protest as a racial protest. In fact, the official name of the march was something like “The March on Washington for Jobs and Economic Prosperity” – someone in the audience showed us the button which he bought that day at the march.

• Finally, Drew went to great lengths to describe what made MLK such a brilliant orator. He made use of cadence and language with the fluidity and expertise that a violin player manipulates his instrument. His training as a preacher allowed MLK to draw on Biblical language which made his language larger than life. In fact, many of his speeches (including “I Have a Dream”) contained large portions which were improvised, in which MLK strung together Biblical passages with a modern civil rights twist. He perfected the use of oratory repetition long before modern politicians made it a cliché. (Think of any politician’s repetition in speeches – “I believe in jobs, I believe in the middle class, I believe in securing our borders,” etc

It was a very fascinating lecture – a welcome break in the middle of a busy day.