The Forthtelling Voice

Prophecy in the Present Tense

You cast out the stranger,

Shackle the poor,

Christen it law and order—

I cry: injustice.

Outside the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis—where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down—a plaque reads, “Behold, here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him and we shall see what becomes of his dreams.” The words are lifted from Genesis, where Joseph’s brothers, fed up with his lofty visions, plot against him and sell him into slavery. The modern echo is clear: another dreamer, another peril.

There are hints of prophecy here. In the traditional logic of faith, we might argue the ancient scripture predicted the modern martyrdom—that the writers of Genesis, guided by divine foresight, saw all the way to a twentieth-century hotel balcony in Memphis. More likely, the plaque’s authors were retrofitting: overlaying a sacred story onto a modern one to give it symbolic heft. Joseph’s story gains relevance; King’s an enduring gravity.