please PARDON THE CAPS, IT APPEARS THE REQUIRED MODE OF DELIVERY......

With regard to people's response to MLK. Perhaps you had to be there when it all unfolded, when people really didn't understand that black southern christian culture had its own methodologies and points of referance.

Many white middle class people found king and his followers offensive and resented his speaches; not for their specific content, but for the manner in which they were delivered and the confontational context in which they occured. For the majority of white middle class citizens King and his people were trouble makers. They didn't reject the message but they were offended by the reality of that message's fruitation, by the bloody, dirty, messy manner in which people gained their rights.

Many of these negative feelings persist in our culture to this day.

If one was to find out how many people have actually listened to the entire 'I have a dream' speach I believe it would not be more than a few percent of the entire population of the united states. Even to this day few people understand what King was saying because they can not be bothered listening. They have already made up their minds, or again it calls for exposing ones self to unsettling rhetoric.

I listened to it in full for the first time this year and have to say that I thought it one of the most beautiful speaches any american has delievered in the last 50 years. but now I understand the context in which it was delivered much better than when I first heard parts of it in the mid sixties.

It may be decades before people accept the reality of King as a national hero and the middle class feelings born around the tV in the 60's are fully transcended.