Editor’s note: This is an abridged version of a speech delivered at Durham’s Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Church for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon, on Sunday, January 19, 2025.
Dr. King loved Durham. He loved coming to Durham. He had close friends in Durham, like the Michauxes, McKissicks, and grad school classmate Rev. Douglas Moore, who was the pastor who led the boycott of the Royal Ice Cream Parlor here in Durham in 1957, three years before the much better known Greensboro Woolworth Sit-In.
Dr. King traveled to Durham five times for official engagements from 1956 to 1964. This was significant because King was in such demand, from his rise onto the scene as a national leader in December 1955 as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott to his assassination 12.5 years later in Memphis, Tennessee, marching for the wages and rights of sanitation workers, that he rarely visited places multiple times unless he was engaged in active work there such as protests and marches. Yet King did not travel to Durham to hold protests or marches.
His first visit was on October 15, 1956, two months before the triumphant conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott, which successfully launched the civil rights movement. He had been invited by the Durham Business and Professional Chain, an organization that still exists today. He spoke at Hillside High School. During that visit in 1956 he promised the crowd that “doors will open to you now that were never open in the past.”
King returned to Durham for the second visit when he flew in on a cold Tuesday morning, February 16, 1960, at the request of his friend Reverend Moore. Though the attempted 1957 Royal Ice Cream Parlor sit-in had not caught on, nor did similar attempts in Oklahoma and Kansas in 1957 and 1958, when the Greensboro Four of North Carolina A&T did gain traction on February 1, 1960, Reverend Moore did not pout about who should get credit for the first sit-in within North Carolina; he instead engaged and asked King to engage as well.
Within a week of the Greensboro sit-in, similar activities had spread to Durham and Winston-Salem, followed by places across North Carolina like Charlotte, Raleigh, Elizabeth City, and my hometown of Fayetteville, before reaching Virginia and spreading across the Southeast.
Moore immediately asked King if he would come to Durham for a strategy session on how to expand the movement with sit-in representatives from across North Carolina. Durham would be where they met to plot next moves. King agreed, and two weeks later was in Durham surveying Durham’s downtown lunch counters that had been involved in sit-ins, and meeting with these leaders from across the state—many of them college student leaders. Thus, King’s first engagement with the sit-in movement was in Durham.
King told those gathered to remember that this fight was not about Black versus white but about justice versus injustice. King suggested to the gathered strategists that they tell the store owners that if the lunch counters were not opened on an integrated basis, that the protesters would recommend that people of goodwill boycott the entire store. This was something he had learned in Montgomery during the boycott. It was not the moral or legal argument that won the day, but the economic loss of the city bus service that brought an end to the boycott.
That same evening of February 16, he spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of more than 1,000 at Durham’s White Rock Baptist Church. King told those in attendance that night that “they stood at a crucial point in the freedom movement.” He stated: “At a certain point in every struggle of great importance, a moment of doubt or hesitation develops.” He finished by saying, “When you have found by the help of God a correct course, a morally sound objective, you do not equivocate, you do not retreat—you struggle to win a victory.” He emphasized that the personal cost might be high, but one must resolve to bear it, because the goal wasn’t simply integration but true personal freedom, because “freedom is necessary for one’s selfhood, for one’s intrinsic worth.”
Any follower of King’s life knows that he experienced deep depression, as anyone would in his position with constant death threats and incredible pressures related to the movement. Yet it was widely reported that this 1960 visit to Durham renewed King’s hope in the future of the movement.
Nevertheless, I want to focus on King’s final visits to Durham. More specifically, I want to concentrate on his very last visit, which happened in 1964. Actually he made several visits to Durham in 1964, a monumental year for King—the year that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed and that he won the Nobel Peace Prize—and a year after his seminal 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington and a year before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Just weeks before traveling to Oslo, Norway, to receive his Nobel Prize, King made his last ever official stop in Durham.
Early on November 13, 1964, King spoke at Duke University’s Paige Auditorium. At Duke he said, “[Human progress] comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be coworkers with God …. The time is always right to do what is right.”
However, that night at eight p.m. Dr. King addressed an overflow crowd of some 5,000 people of all races in North Carolina Central University’s McDougald Gymnasium. His final speech ever in Durham.
The title of his talk at NCCU that night was “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”
It was not the first time that he had given that speech. It was also not the last—which would be on March 31, 1968, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Four days later he would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. But four years before his untimely death, he gave a unique version of the speech to Durham.
What were the last two words that Dr. King told Durham, North Carolina, on November 13, 1964?
REMAIN AWAKE!
In his “Remaining Awake” speech at NCCU, King began by declaring that the most important fact of the Rip Van Winkle story, for those of us who remember it from our childhood, was not that he slept for two full decades but that he had slept through a revolution, specifically one that went from having a king to one that elected the first president of the United States. Perhaps an even more relevant observation in 2025, as some seem to advocate for a return to such a monarchy.
King spoke of a triple revolution. Of living during a time of technological revolution, what he called the impact of automation and cybernation. He talked of the revolution of weaponry. Also, of the human rights revolution. Today we are in somewhat parallel times. In the midst of technological revolution—have any of you heard about the rise of artificial intelligence? Though atomic and nuclear weapons remain, our cell phones and social media accounts are becoming the weapons of choice in cross-national and geopolitical battles: Anyone heard of the battle over TikTok? On the subject of the human rights revolution. Well, it seems that revolution peaked with the response to the public murder of George Floyd and that we are going through a reverse revolution of sorts.
This speech was filled with some of King’s most famous quotes:
- He said that we must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.
- He said we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
- He said whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
- He said for some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.
- He said that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.
- He said that the time is always right to do right.
- And he said, “We shall overcome because the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
But his speech was more than a series of sound bites. He talked about the challenges faced at the moment … but also talked about the opportunities. He said that “it is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.” Even if one was to lobby in 2025 to take out the word “vast” or to say that it is not the historical racism we have known but “vast indifference,” his next point still holds true. He said, “I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.”
In his speech, King talked about the concept of time. In fact, he called it the myth of time, responding to the oft-argued sentiment by both enemies and allies of the civil rights movement that time itself will solve all of our racial and economic ills. King proclaimed: “No … time is neutral and can be used either constructively or destructively.”
But he followed this with an apology, by saying: “And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill.” Does that sound familiar?
He said that without hard, tireless, and persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be coworkers with God, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And in 2025, evidently social reversion.
Mostly, King said over and over again that we must remain awake during a great revolution.
What the antiwar King failed to mention in any of the texts under this title is that the prime decider of the revolution that Rip Van Winkle slept through was a war. The Revolutionary War. An eight-year battle that took place from 1775 to 1783.
I believe we can overlook this oversight by King. But I believe if he had the opportunity to look at it anew, he might understand it differently. Sometimes, revolution can only be achieved on the other side of a war.
No. I am not suggesting that King would instruct anyone to pick up guns or launch bombs. I am not suggesting that he would tell folks to engage in violent hand-to-hand combat. I don’t believe he would veer from his commitment to nonviolence. But I do believe that King would support at least one war, as he encouraged us during his last visit to Durham, to remain awake during a great revolution.
It’s what I’ll call “The Woke War.”
What does it mean to be “woke”? By historical definition, “woke” is the past tense of “wake.” “Woke” is the Black synonym for the word “awake” and has been around since the early 1900s and used to refer to the “awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans,” as in to “stay woke.”
It means to be informed, educated, and conscious of social injustice and racial inequity. Many trace its prominence in the Black vernacular to a song in 1938 by the acclaimed folk and blues musician Lead Belly referencing the Scottsboro Boys, nine teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train in Alabama in 1931, with eight of them originally sentenced to death from an all-white jury, with one as young as 12. Lead Belly instructed his listeners to “best stay woke,” in other words, to be aware of potential for racist violence and legal injustice in the South.
But even before Lead Belly, young supporters of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election formed a popular national movement called the Wide Awakes, campaigning for workers’ rights and the abolition of slavery.
A decade ago, around 2014, “woke” found a resurgence after the killing of Michael Brown, as death after death of Black unarmed citizens from police brutality and injustice rose, most prominently used as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Isn’t this exactly what King told us to do? To remain awake. To stay woke. Yet somehow, we have allowed that term to be co-opted and turned into something negative. To be woke. Or what is termed as wokeism.
Yet, oddly, even by those who try to disparage it, they define it accurately. They describe it as “an umbrella term for progressive values.” By their own admission they have said that “woke” is “the belief there are systematic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” However, they follow this with the statement that “we reject woke ideology.” Saying, “We will never ever surrender to the woke agenda.” I don’t know about you, but woke sounds like exactly what I aim and intend to be.
As a result of this “anti-woke movement,” we see the rejection of education based on historical facts, the overturning of curative legislation aimed at equity, and most recently a backtracking of corporate policies concerning diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility of people inclusive of lenses such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. It’s become a dog whistle or rallying cry for racism, sexism, and any other -ism you can imagine, and a justification for overt and public discrimination, oppression, and suppression.
Because of this, the only way to win this fight is through the “Woke War.” Think of the Woke War like the Cold War. No bombs have to be launched, and no guns have to be drawn, no geographic invasion has to take place. However, intentional action is imperative. It is a battle of ideas expressed through how we make decisions: whom we engage with; how we hire and build teams; who gets access to educational and professional opportunity; and most importantly, where we decide to spend our money. Science, technology, arts, humanities, culture, markets, and policy will all be used as our tools of this war. Most importantly, truth must remain our greatest weapon. And we must battle to the end.
I want a world where difference is appreciated and celebrated. Not feared and mocked.
In his “Remaining Awake” speech, King spoke of making America great, decades before anyone else co-opted the sentiment as a veiled slogan of subjugation. He asked God for “the strength to be Davids of truth against the Goliath of injustice and neglect” and to “go on with the determination to make America the TRULY GREAT America that it is called to be.” He said that “ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.” But he also said: “I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion.” He said “it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference.”
So I believe that King would approve of this war. The Woke War. Because to be woke is to be aware and alert. And like King told those student leaders at the Durham strategy session in 1960, if business leaders won’t listen to reason, by giving everyone a place at the counter, at the table, in the boardroom, along the supply chain, then your dollar doesn’t deserve a place in their bank accounts.
We must remain awake and drive this revolution. We must win “the Woke War.” I am proud to be called “woke.” In what other environment is being woke a bad thing? If you are asleep at your desk at work or on the Zoom or Teams meeting? Is that a good thing? Is being asleep on a dinner date good? Is being asleep driving your car a good thing? Some corporate oligarchs may say that self-driving cars will allow for that, but we are not there yet. If I were standing up here at this pulpit asleep, would that be a good thing? Then why should we accept sleeping in our politics and in our society?
Moving to conclude his speech, King said, “Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair.” He said, “I’m going to maintain hope.” He spoke of confronting Washington, while admitting that “the cards are stacked against us.”
I don’t believe that it was a coincidence that King’s last speech in Durham was to tell us to remain awake through a great revolution. Because Durham was the place that he came to talk strategy. Durham must step up now and lead this revolution. We can’t sleep through it. It must start with each of us. People around the world know of the world class institutions that make up Durham and our unique history of equity leadership. We must draw on that history now. Don’t let anyone force us into some hibernation.
In his speech King spoke of the critics and reporters who reminded him as he spoke against unpopular notions of the time, that it was a perilous road for him. King’s response was: “Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? Conscience asks the question: Is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that it is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.” He said, “I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience.”
King was scheduled to come to Durham once more, four years after his “Remaining Awake” speech at NCCU, but it would not be. Dr. King was originally scheduled to be in Durham on April 4, 1968. However, he felt compelled—at the last minute—to be somewhere else, where he wouldn’t be talking about strategy but implementing it. He changed his travel plans for April 4 from Durham to Memphis for the sanitation worker march. April 4 is the day that King would ultimately be assassinated while in Memphis.
We always ask the questions of what would MLK say if he were alive today, or what would he do in a particular situation. Well, my answer is that I hope that at age 96 he would be sitting somewhere relaxing and resting, and that we wouldn’t have to call him every time we need saving or an answer. The greatest tribute that we can pay to Martin Luther King is to be the solutions to our own challenges.
After his death, one of his leading pupils from the movement, Diane Nash, said, “If people think that it was Martin Luther King’s movement, then today they—young people—are more likely to say, ‘Gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us’ …. If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would ask themselves is, ‘What can I do?’”
I am here to tell you what you can do, Durham, or any place that is watching this or hearing these words. You can STAY WOKE!!! And enlist in the Woke War.
Still, King left us with plenty of ammunition for this war, his words from his final visit and final speech in Durham.
He reminded those gathered on that late night at North Carolina Central University that our challenge remains “the legacy of slavery and segregation.” He said: “He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front. This is at one and the same time our dilemma and our challenge.”
In 2025, the question is whether we were expected to wipe out all of that legacy and deficit in just 60 years?
Lastly, Dr. King said to the crowd: “If we will remain awake, standing up against evil in our societies, struggling in every creative movement to get rid of the evils that cloud our days, then we will see that brighter day; then we will see that new America …. I have faith in that new day. I believe it is coming.”
God bless you.
Dr. Henry C. McKoy Jr. is a former presidential appointee of the Biden administration, a former assistant secretary of the North Carolina Department of Commerce, and a former professor at North Carolina Central University.