Thursday, January 11, 2007
What Manner of Man? Meditations on the Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
OP-ED
Once again it is time to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. This coming weekend, vote-seeking politicians will make annual pilgrimages to churches in black neighborhoods. Their orations will reveal how little they really know of the black experience in these United States in the 1950s and 1960s. They will praise a man they never knew. Sadly, generations of young people also have grown up with no knowledge of the one whose birth is being celebrated. Nor do they have any perception of the quiet revolution in constitutional rights he sparked.
Revisit with me now the troubled times a half-century ago when there were two Americas, one white and one black: In the South, restaurants, movie theaters, public toilets and parks are racially segregated. Even separate drinking fountains are provided for whites and blacks. Everywhere in the South, blacks must occupy seats at the back of the bus. If these are filled, they are forced to stand, although seats at the front reserved for whites may be empty. It is a December day in 1955. The telephone rings in the home of the obscure 26-year-old pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. A tired black woman, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a department store tailor's assistant, has just been arrested after she politely refused to leave the seat she had taken at the front of the bus. The caller, a Pullman porter, asks the pastor, a Montgomery resident of only two years, to join a committee organizing a boycott of the city's bus lines. The pastor reflects for a moment and then agrees. This fateful decision will catapult the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the leadership of a crusade of nonviolence, and bring him worldwide attention and acclaim. The boycott will last 381 days. It concludes a year later when the Supreme Court rules that Alabama's racial segregation laws are unconstitutional.
Before his mission ends with his assassination little more than a dozen years in the future, this old-fashioned preacher with extraordinary rhetorical skills will be beaten, reviled, jailed. His home will be bombed, and even blacks will scorn him. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who represented Harlem in Congress for many terms and who was himself a minister, will call him a failure and refer to him contemptuously as Martin "Loser" King. But he will be in distinguished company when he is awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the twelfth American, the third black, and--at age 35--the youngest person ever to receive this coveted honor. The first black to be so honored had been Ralph Bunche, the American diplomat who won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the United Nations Palestine Commission. A decade later, South African Zulu leader Albert Luthuli, who advocated nonviolent resistance to apartheid, would win the 1960 Prize.
In a journey that will start in Montgomery, Ala., and end in Memphis, Tenn., Martin Luther King Jr. will do more than any other American--white or black--to expose the hypocrisy of de facto segregation in a land dedicated to freedom, equality and justice. Strikingly in contrast with his message of nonviolence, upon his martyrdom in 1968, more than 130 cities in the nation will explode in a turbulent Götterdämmerung of rioting. In the end, 34 blacks and five whites will be dead. Property damage will reach the millions of dollars. Yet this frenzy of fire and destruction marks no failure of his philosophy. Rather, it only confirms the message he preached about the emptiness and malignity of violence, the uselessness of riot.
Who was this remarkable man that almost singlehandedly stirred the conscience of America in a dozen short years? Born in Atlanta, Ga., Martin Luther King Jr. experienced none of the economic deprivation of his race. Two years after his birth, his strong-willed father succeeded to the pastorship of that city's prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church. Nevertheless, young Martin was acquainted with the indignity of racial discrimination at an early age. Riding with his father, who had been stopped by a white traffic cop and addressed as "Boy," he heard the elder Rev. King's correction. "That's a boy," his father said emphatically, pointing to his young son. "I'm a man."
Martin Luther King Jr. was educated at Atlanta's Morehouse College, entering at 15 after skipping the final year of high school. Crozer Theological Seminary, a Baptist institution in Chester, Penn., followed. At Boston University, he received his Ph.D. in systematic theology. The philosophies of three seminal figures played a part in his spiritual development: the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist religious leader; the civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau; and the nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi, who sparked the nonviolent disobedience that forced Great Britain to grant independence to India in 1947.
Walter Rauschenbusch was a social prophet and pastor of New York's Second German Baptist Church on West 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen, a poor and dangerous neighborhood. Here he worked to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Although he died in 1918, his writings provided the theological basis for King's social activism, giving him hope that the church could play a pivotal role in correcting the inequities of American society. Rauschenbusch insisted that the gospel required the church to concern itself with the whole man, not just his spirit. King would write: "It has been my conviction that any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting to be buried. It has been well said: 'A religion that ends with the individual, ends.'"
In 1846, the 29-year-old Henry David Thoreau moved into his famous cabin on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. After Thoreau refused to pay his taxes as a protest against slavery in America, he was remanded to jail. His aunt paid his taxes for him, and he was released the next morning. He then wrote his essay "Resistance to Civil Government." Published in 1849, and known as "Civil Disobedience," it argues that a person has a right--even an obligation--to disobey any law that is evil or unjust. King later recalled: "I became convinced that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest."
As a theological student, after hearing a lecture on the life of Mahatma Gandhi given by the president of Washington's Howard University, he felt moved. "His message was so profound and electrifying," King said, "that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi's life and works. My skepticism about the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."
He came to believe that nonviolent action is different from simply ignoring an evil. Instead, it is a "courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it." Martin Luther King Jr. adopted Gandhi's dictum: "If cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight." Nonviolence was thus not synonymous with cowardice or the passive acceptance of evil. A victory won through nonviolence was preferable to one achieved through violent means. Early in 1959, he made a trip to India to visit the land that Gandhi had freed. King regarded it as a special trip. "To other countries I may go as a tourist," he said, "but to India I go as a pilgrim." The following year, he resigned as pastor of his church in Montgomery, telling the congregation that the time had come for a broad, bold advance against injustice in the South. He then prepared to move with his family to Atlanta and to commit the rest of his short life to the struggle for freedom.
King's speeches and public statements all had their roots in the traditional sermonizing characteristic of black churches--a time-honored ritual consisting of the pastor's measured affirmations and the congregation's spirited responses. Taking an active part in the struggles of an America in turmoil, after the boycott of Montgomery busses, he participated in the Albany, Ga., confrontation in which he was arrested in an attempt to desegregate public facilities. He witnessed the horror of Birmingham, in which black churches were bombed and Sunday School children murdered. He also took part in the ultimately successful march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. His targets were the many forms of discrimination and segregation practiced in the South, and his weapons were dignity and self-respect. "A man can't ride your back unless it's bent," he noted.
Nothing highlights King's character more than an incident in 1961 during a Freedom Ride through the South by young people to integrate interstate buses. Their bus had been firebombed in Anniston, Ala. Set upon and beaten upon reaching Montgomery, they hesitated, considering whether to go on to Jackson, Miss., where death threats had been made. King had not been on the bus ride, but he hastened to Montgomery to become the lightning rod, as he always did, to draw trouble. He told his assistants to caution the young people not to continue. "I will go to Jackson, and Ralph [Ralph Abernathy, King's principal assistant] will go," he announced. "But I was not put here on this earth to send children to get hurt." When the adults got to the bus station the next morning, the young bus riders were there in full strength, waiting to accompany King on the bus. His willingness to take risks on their behalf had strengthened their resolve. As a result of the Freedom Rides, the federal Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation on buses and trains.
Upon receiving word that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. announced that he would donate the $54,123 prize money to the civil rights movement. Soon after, Archbishop Paul Hallinan of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Atlanta visited King to offer his congratulations. As he concluded his visit, he asked, "May I give you my blessing?" King consented and received the traditional blessing as the archbishop made the sign of the cross. Then, to King's surprise, the Catholic leader sank to his knees and said, "May I receive your blessing?" King obliged but felt humbled at this sign of respect and encouragement from the leader of Atlanta's Catholics.
Ultimately, King made the discovery that the nonviolence he preached nationally had a wider aspect. Despite the admonitions of black leaders that he "stick to civil rights," he began denouncing the Vietnam War. King's reasons were basic. He felt that the war was morally wrong, and he was keenly aware of its diversion of funds from poverty programs. Moreover, it made no sense for the nation to be "guaranteeing the vote" for Asians while black and poor white Americans were being denied these rights. His death almost 39 years ago came at a critical time, just as he was beginning to form a coalition of racial, populist, intellectual and national groups.
Southern whites had always insisted that blacks be submissively nonviolent. King's unique contribution was a new and realistic black attitude--a policy of cautiously modulated militancy in demanding long-overdue civil rights, but one that expressly disavowed physical violence, even in the face of vicious provocation. Many parts of the South did not willingly surrender the outdated segregation of hundreds of years. Reluctant to accept social change, they had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. Worse yet, malfeasance and violence on the part of local officials were common. The civil rights struggle was not without its senseless casualties. On Aug. 4, 1964, FBI agents found a grave under 15 feet of dirt in a new earthen dam on the farm of Olen Burrage, near Philadelphia, Miss. In it were the bodies of three civil rights workers who had been missing for six weeks. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were Jewish and from New York, and James Chaney was an African- American from nearby Meridian. They had been engaged in voter registration. Chaney had been brutally beaten, and all three had been shot. Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price, were arrested and charged with violating the victims' civil rights. The deputy and six others were convicted; the sheriff was found not guilty.
The parallels between Martin Luther King Jr. and another apostle of love and nonviolence some two thousand years earlier are too striking not to record here. Both had a wide knowledge of Eastern wisdom gleaned from their study of systematic theology, and both made frequent use of metaphors and parables. Their typical mode of public address was not the secular oration but the sermon. Each spent his early years in relative obscurity. Both were often assailed with doubt about the rightness of their actions. Each had a close relationship with his disciples--and was denied by them. (Some staffers referred to King privately as "little Lord Jesus" or "de Lawd.") Each also exhibited an uneasy apprehension about the police and the courts, and often voiced a premonition of death.
Prophetically, King spoke at a rally at the Memphis Masonic Temple on April 3, 1968, just before his assassination. Outside, it was raining heavily. Thunder reverberated in the hall. Lightning flashes eerily punctuated his words. It was a night to remember. "Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you. I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me, now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will, And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I am happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." In less than twenty-four hours he would be dead.
His funeral service five days later in his father's church in Atlanta was attended by dignitaries from the worlds of politics, entertainment and sports, including four candidates for the American presidency. The tape of his own eulogy--a sermon he had delivered in this same church exactly two months before--was played at the service for the sobbing crowd in the church and the tens of thousands gathered outside. "Yes, if you want to say I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody that he's traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought. If I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not have been in vain." His coffin was carried outside the church and placed on a farm cart drawn by two mules. The assembled multitude, a veritable river of humanity filled the streets and followed it in a slow procession to South View Cemetery. His body was later transferred to Atlanta's Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.
During his short life, King's faith in the power of redemptive love was frequently put to the test. After his home was dynamited in Montgomery, he told the angry crowd that gathered in front of his home, "We must not return violence under any conditions. I know this is difficult advice to follow. We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: 'Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.' This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love."
At a mass meeting after four Montgomery black churches and several homes were bombed, he was heartbroken at the wave of white violence that followed successful local bus integration. Blacks, he said, had been the "victims of the most startling and appalling expression of man's inhumanity to man. To have bombed the homes was unpardonable, but to have attacked a house of God was tragic barbarity, devoid of moral sensitivity. "Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery," he intoned. "Certainly, I don't want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me." Cries of "No! No!" came from the audience. Some wept openly. It would be the first of his premonitions of death.
Upon the publication of his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, he began an author tour to promote it. As he was autographing copies of his book at Blumstein's department store on 125th Street in Harlem, a deranged black woman stabbed him with a letter opener, piercing the outer wall of his aorta. As the anesthetic wore off after a three-hour operation to repair the damage, he inquired about his assailant. "This person needs help," he said. "Don't do anything to her; don't prosecute her. Get her healed." The woman, Izola Curry, who had never met King, was eventually committed to a mental hospital.
In 1963, upon hearing the news of President Kennedy's assassination, he told his wife, Coretta, "This is going to happen to me, also. You know, I don't think I will live to reach forty because this country is too sick to allow me to live." His wife was speechless. "I had no words to comfort my husband," she recalled. "I could not say, 'It won't happen to you.' I felt he was right." Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, and lived exactly 39 years, two months and twenty days. This gentle, humble man walked among us all too briefly--until his cruel murder at the hands of his fellow men. He was called to teach us while he lived; in death he can teach us, too. The impact of his message can now only be perceived in the long-term results of his ministry. It is our behavior, individually and collectively as a nation, that alone can show whether his legacy lives on.
The dark and bloody years of the 1960s spawned a mean climate of violence that led to the assassinations of a succession of public figures: Medgar Evers, Jack and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Those who committed these foul murders never understood a simple truth that has resounded down through the years: They may succeed in killing the dreamer, but they can never kill the dream. Rest in peace, great heart.
Once again it is time to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. This coming weekend, vote-seeking politicians will make annual pilgrimages to churches in black neighborhoods. Their orations will reveal how little they really know of the black experience in these United States in the 1950s and 1960s. They will praise a man they never knew. Sadly, generations of young people also have grown up with no knowledge of the one whose birth is being celebrated. Nor do they have any perception of the quiet revolution in constitutional rights he sparked.
Revisit with me now the troubled times a half-century ago when there were two Americas, one white and one black: In the South, restaurants, movie theaters, public toilets and parks are racially segregated. Even separate drinking fountains are provided for whites and blacks. Everywhere in the South, blacks must occupy seats at the back of the bus. If these are filled, they are forced to stand, although seats at the front reserved for whites may be empty. It is a December day in 1955. The telephone rings in the home of the obscure 26-year-old pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. A tired black woman, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a department store tailor's assistant, has just been arrested after she politely refused to leave the seat she had taken at the front of the bus. The caller, a Pullman porter, asks the pastor, a Montgomery resident of only two years, to join a committee organizing a boycott of the city's bus lines. The pastor reflects for a moment and then agrees. This fateful decision will catapult the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the leadership of a crusade of nonviolence, and bring him worldwide attention and acclaim. The boycott will last 381 days. It concludes a year later when the Supreme Court rules that Alabama's racial segregation laws are unconstitutional.
Before his mission ends with his assassination little more than a dozen years in the future, this old-fashioned preacher with extraordinary rhetorical skills will be beaten, reviled, jailed. His home will be bombed, and even blacks will scorn him. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who represented Harlem in Congress for many terms and who was himself a minister, will call him a failure and refer to him contemptuously as Martin "Loser" King. But he will be in distinguished company when he is awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the twelfth American, the third black, and--at age 35--the youngest person ever to receive this coveted honor. The first black to be so honored had been Ralph Bunche, the American diplomat who won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the United Nations Palestine Commission. A decade later, South African Zulu leader Albert Luthuli, who advocated nonviolent resistance to apartheid, would win the 1960 Prize.
In a journey that will start in Montgomery, Ala., and end in Memphis, Tenn., Martin Luther King Jr. will do more than any other American--white or black--to expose the hypocrisy of de facto segregation in a land dedicated to freedom, equality and justice. Strikingly in contrast with his message of nonviolence, upon his martyrdom in 1968, more than 130 cities in the nation will explode in a turbulent Götterdämmerung of rioting. In the end, 34 blacks and five whites will be dead. Property damage will reach the millions of dollars. Yet this frenzy of fire and destruction marks no failure of his philosophy. Rather, it only confirms the message he preached about the emptiness and malignity of violence, the uselessness of riot.
Who was this remarkable man that almost singlehandedly stirred the conscience of America in a dozen short years? Born in Atlanta, Ga., Martin Luther King Jr. experienced none of the economic deprivation of his race. Two years after his birth, his strong-willed father succeeded to the pastorship of that city's prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church. Nevertheless, young Martin was acquainted with the indignity of racial discrimination at an early age. Riding with his father, who had been stopped by a white traffic cop and addressed as "Boy," he heard the elder Rev. King's correction. "That's a boy," his father said emphatically, pointing to his young son. "I'm a man."
Martin Luther King Jr. was educated at Atlanta's Morehouse College, entering at 15 after skipping the final year of high school. Crozer Theological Seminary, a Baptist institution in Chester, Penn., followed. At Boston University, he received his Ph.D. in systematic theology. The philosophies of three seminal figures played a part in his spiritual development: the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist religious leader; the civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau; and the nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi, who sparked the nonviolent disobedience that forced Great Britain to grant independence to India in 1947.
Walter Rauschenbusch was a social prophet and pastor of New York's Second German Baptist Church on West 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen, a poor and dangerous neighborhood. Here he worked to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Although he died in 1918, his writings provided the theological basis for King's social activism, giving him hope that the church could play a pivotal role in correcting the inequities of American society. Rauschenbusch insisted that the gospel required the church to concern itself with the whole man, not just his spirit. King would write: "It has been my conviction that any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting to be buried. It has been well said: 'A religion that ends with the individual, ends.'"
In 1846, the 29-year-old Henry David Thoreau moved into his famous cabin on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. After Thoreau refused to pay his taxes as a protest against slavery in America, he was remanded to jail. His aunt paid his taxes for him, and he was released the next morning. He then wrote his essay "Resistance to Civil Government." Published in 1849, and known as "Civil Disobedience," it argues that a person has a right--even an obligation--to disobey any law that is evil or unjust. King later recalled: "I became convinced that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest."
As a theological student, after hearing a lecture on the life of Mahatma Gandhi given by the president of Washington's Howard University, he felt moved. "His message was so profound and electrifying," King said, "that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi's life and works. My skepticism about the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."
He came to believe that nonviolent action is different from simply ignoring an evil. Instead, it is a "courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it." Martin Luther King Jr. adopted Gandhi's dictum: "If cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight." Nonviolence was thus not synonymous with cowardice or the passive acceptance of evil. A victory won through nonviolence was preferable to one achieved through violent means. Early in 1959, he made a trip to India to visit the land that Gandhi had freed. King regarded it as a special trip. "To other countries I may go as a tourist," he said, "but to India I go as a pilgrim." The following year, he resigned as pastor of his church in Montgomery, telling the congregation that the time had come for a broad, bold advance against injustice in the South. He then prepared to move with his family to Atlanta and to commit the rest of his short life to the struggle for freedom.
King's speeches and public statements all had their roots in the traditional sermonizing characteristic of black churches--a time-honored ritual consisting of the pastor's measured affirmations and the congregation's spirited responses. Taking an active part in the struggles of an America in turmoil, after the boycott of Montgomery busses, he participated in the Albany, Ga., confrontation in which he was arrested in an attempt to desegregate public facilities. He witnessed the horror of Birmingham, in which black churches were bombed and Sunday School children murdered. He also took part in the ultimately successful march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. His targets were the many forms of discrimination and segregation practiced in the South, and his weapons were dignity and self-respect. "A man can't ride your back unless it's bent," he noted.
Nothing highlights King's character more than an incident in 1961 during a Freedom Ride through the South by young people to integrate interstate buses. Their bus had been firebombed in Anniston, Ala. Set upon and beaten upon reaching Montgomery, they hesitated, considering whether to go on to Jackson, Miss., where death threats had been made. King had not been on the bus ride, but he hastened to Montgomery to become the lightning rod, as he always did, to draw trouble. He told his assistants to caution the young people not to continue. "I will go to Jackson, and Ralph [Ralph Abernathy, King's principal assistant] will go," he announced. "But I was not put here on this earth to send children to get hurt." When the adults got to the bus station the next morning, the young bus riders were there in full strength, waiting to accompany King on the bus. His willingness to take risks on their behalf had strengthened their resolve. As a result of the Freedom Rides, the federal Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation on buses and trains.
Upon receiving word that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. announced that he would donate the $54,123 prize money to the civil rights movement. Soon after, Archbishop Paul Hallinan of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Atlanta visited King to offer his congratulations. As he concluded his visit, he asked, "May I give you my blessing?" King consented and received the traditional blessing as the archbishop made the sign of the cross. Then, to King's surprise, the Catholic leader sank to his knees and said, "May I receive your blessing?" King obliged but felt humbled at this sign of respect and encouragement from the leader of Atlanta's Catholics.
Ultimately, King made the discovery that the nonviolence he preached nationally had a wider aspect. Despite the admonitions of black leaders that he "stick to civil rights," he began denouncing the Vietnam War. King's reasons were basic. He felt that the war was morally wrong, and he was keenly aware of its diversion of funds from poverty programs. Moreover, it made no sense for the nation to be "guaranteeing the vote" for Asians while black and poor white Americans were being denied these rights. His death almost 39 years ago came at a critical time, just as he was beginning to form a coalition of racial, populist, intellectual and national groups.
Southern whites had always insisted that blacks be submissively nonviolent. King's unique contribution was a new and realistic black attitude--a policy of cautiously modulated militancy in demanding long-overdue civil rights, but one that expressly disavowed physical violence, even in the face of vicious provocation. Many parts of the South did not willingly surrender the outdated segregation of hundreds of years. Reluctant to accept social change, they had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. Worse yet, malfeasance and violence on the part of local officials were common. The civil rights struggle was not without its senseless casualties. On Aug. 4, 1964, FBI agents found a grave under 15 feet of dirt in a new earthen dam on the farm of Olen Burrage, near Philadelphia, Miss. In it were the bodies of three civil rights workers who had been missing for six weeks. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were Jewish and from New York, and James Chaney was an African- American from nearby Meridian. They had been engaged in voter registration. Chaney had been brutally beaten, and all three had been shot. Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price, were arrested and charged with violating the victims' civil rights. The deputy and six others were convicted; the sheriff was found not guilty.
The parallels between Martin Luther King Jr. and another apostle of love and nonviolence some two thousand years earlier are too striking not to record here. Both had a wide knowledge of Eastern wisdom gleaned from their study of systematic theology, and both made frequent use of metaphors and parables. Their typical mode of public address was not the secular oration but the sermon. Each spent his early years in relative obscurity. Both were often assailed with doubt about the rightness of their actions. Each had a close relationship with his disciples--and was denied by them. (Some staffers referred to King privately as "little Lord Jesus" or "de Lawd.") Each also exhibited an uneasy apprehension about the police and the courts, and often voiced a premonition of death.
Prophetically, King spoke at a rally at the Memphis Masonic Temple on April 3, 1968, just before his assassination. Outside, it was raining heavily. Thunder reverberated in the hall. Lightning flashes eerily punctuated his words. It was a night to remember. "Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you. I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me, now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will, And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I am happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." In less than twenty-four hours he would be dead.
His funeral service five days later in his father's church in Atlanta was attended by dignitaries from the worlds of politics, entertainment and sports, including four candidates for the American presidency. The tape of his own eulogy--a sermon he had delivered in this same church exactly two months before--was played at the service for the sobbing crowd in the church and the tens of thousands gathered outside. "Yes, if you want to say I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody that he's traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought. If I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not have been in vain." His coffin was carried outside the church and placed on a farm cart drawn by two mules. The assembled multitude, a veritable river of humanity filled the streets and followed it in a slow procession to South View Cemetery. His body was later transferred to Atlanta's Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.
During his short life, King's faith in the power of redemptive love was frequently put to the test. After his home was dynamited in Montgomery, he told the angry crowd that gathered in front of his home, "We must not return violence under any conditions. I know this is difficult advice to follow. We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: 'Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.' This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love."
At a mass meeting after four Montgomery black churches and several homes were bombed, he was heartbroken at the wave of white violence that followed successful local bus integration. Blacks, he said, had been the "victims of the most startling and appalling expression of man's inhumanity to man. To have bombed the homes was unpardonable, but to have attacked a house of God was tragic barbarity, devoid of moral sensitivity. "Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery," he intoned. "Certainly, I don't want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me." Cries of "No! No!" came from the audience. Some wept openly. It would be the first of his premonitions of death.
Upon the publication of his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, he began an author tour to promote it. As he was autographing copies of his book at Blumstein's department store on 125th Street in Harlem, a deranged black woman stabbed him with a letter opener, piercing the outer wall of his aorta. As the anesthetic wore off after a three-hour operation to repair the damage, he inquired about his assailant. "This person needs help," he said. "Don't do anything to her; don't prosecute her. Get her healed." The woman, Izola Curry, who had never met King, was eventually committed to a mental hospital.
In 1963, upon hearing the news of President Kennedy's assassination, he told his wife, Coretta, "This is going to happen to me, also. You know, I don't think I will live to reach forty because this country is too sick to allow me to live." His wife was speechless. "I had no words to comfort my husband," she recalled. "I could not say, 'It won't happen to you.' I felt he was right." Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, and lived exactly 39 years, two months and twenty days. This gentle, humble man walked among us all too briefly--until his cruel murder at the hands of his fellow men. He was called to teach us while he lived; in death he can teach us, too. The impact of his message can now only be perceived in the long-term results of his ministry. It is our behavior, individually and collectively as a nation, that alone can show whether his legacy lives on.
The dark and bloody years of the 1960s spawned a mean climate of violence that led to the assassinations of a succession of public figures: Medgar Evers, Jack and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Those who committed these foul murders never understood a simple truth that has resounded down through the years: They may succeed in killing the dreamer, but they can never kill the dream. Rest in peace, great heart.
Labels: Civil Rights Struggle, Martin Luther King Jr., Op Ed
