There is an old political story from the days of Ronald
Reagan’s election. A well-off Park
Avenue liberal was bemoaning to her friends that Reagan won a landslide
reelection. “I don’t know how”, she
said. “I don’t know anyone who voted for
him.” And so it goes for most of the
young Black men I know in here.
“I don’t know anyone who respects King,” said Will, a
normally very bright studious twenty-eight year old. “He sold out. He isn’t a leader of our community.” As he spoke, three or four other equally
young bright Black men nodded in agreement.
“White people like King.” I could
only smile.
I then pointed out that according to surveys among Black Americans;
Dr. King is the single most revered figure in American history. No other person even comes close. Whites, on the other hand, hold mixed
feelings, partly out of the battle over enshrining his birthday as a national
holiday and partially over the ugly strains of prejudice that somehow continue
to lie just below the surface.
“How can that be?” My
young friend asked. I don’t know anyone
who likes him. I thought of the wealthy
liberal in New York who couldn’t grasp that her view wasn’t the norm. And I wondered how so many could miss the
true meaning of Dr. King’s words, how so many miss the message.
Imagine a young Black man who graduates college in his
teens. He comes from an educated family
of ministers in the segregated South.
He heads to Boston to begin graduate studies in Theology, and he
discovers the words and works of a half-naked Indian lawyer named Gandhi. King reads Gandhi’s words and sees in Gandhi’s
message of peaceful, nonviolent protest the Christian response to oppression.
All during his time in Boston King honed his message of
using a nonviolent response to evil. At
age twenty-six, King earned his PhD. He
and his young bride accepted a call to a church in Montgomery, Alabama. It is difficult to imagine America, the South,
back in the 1950’s. Most of the young
men in here are quick to use the term “Jim Crow”, but they know nothing of
it. Theirs is a world of Rap singers
being number one on the charts, of interracial couples, of a Black President
winning a second term. They know nothing
of “colored only” bathrooms and water fountains. They can’t fathom that you could be arrested
for sitting at a lunch counter in a public restaurant or refusing to give up
your seat to a white person on a public bus.
This was the world Martin and Coretta King ventured into in
Montgomery, a world of separate but woefully unequal. King preached nonviolence, and forgiveness,
and mercy while his flock was regularly embarrassed, humiliated, or worse by
their white counterparts. It didn’t take
long for King to find an issue to rally the Black community.
It came in the package of a petite, quiet Black woman who
refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery public bus to a White
passenger. When asked year’s later why
she subjected herself to arrest and death threats, Rosa Parks simply replied, “I
was tired.”
“I was tired.” Tired
of indignity, and disrespect, and disobedience to the laws of her God, that all
men and women are God’s precious children.
In those three words the Civil Rights movement found their direction and
Dr. King became the movement’s Moses.
Dr. King led marches and boycotts and protests – always nonviolent
protests – to challenge the conscience of a nation. So often he and his followers were met with arrest
and violence, horrible violence.
“You must love your enemy,” he would tell anyone who would
listen. Loving your enemy, seeing the
Godliness in the most evil of men, is usually easier then liking your
enemy. It’s tough, he would say, to like
someone who is beating you, or opening up a high-powered fire hose on you, or
lynching you. “Love your enemy. Do not return his evil with evil.”
No American orator or writer captured the affirmative duty
of a man of faith to nonviolently challenge evil – even to the point of death –
as Dr. King did. His “Letter from
Birmingham Jail” stands as one of the great written statements of Christian
faith in action. His, “I Have A Dream”
speech eloquently captures the Biblical dream of America as a land where all
God’s children are truly free.
Freedom. I watch
these young, Black men miss the poetic beauty of freedom. Freedom isn’t about purchasing power or the
ability to say and do whatever you want.
Freedom is a peace that is given by the Almighty that no tyrant, no
nation, can suppress. Dietrich Bonheoffer
knew real freedom even as the Nazis hung a noose around his neck. Martin Luther King knew freedom even as he
understood his life would be cut short.
“You have to fight back.”
“We need to live separately.”
Over and over I hear these young men utter the same words Dr. King faced
from his own community. Violence, he
knew was never the answer. We are called
to be better, to be merciful even when confronted by evil.
And Dr. King provoked anger.
He condemned America’s involvement in Vietnam. War is never the answer he courageously
argued. Inmates who are confronted each
day by violence and “might makes right” just shake their heads in bemused
wonder. “He was so foolish”, they’ll
say, and I can’t help but think he was the wisest man alive during my lifetime,
a man whose vision of America and the world was so much closer to God’s view
than most of our national leaders.
This is not to say he was without faults. King, like all men and women, had foibles and
sins and failures. But the mark of a man
is how he behaves in the worst of circumstances. In that, King proved himself heroic.
So it was with this year’s MLK Day. They showed a documentary on his life, his
legacy on our internal movie channel. I
noticed many TV sets turned to his story.
A few of the guys came by afterward.
“Did you know all that?” they asked.
I did. And I gave out my dog
eared copy of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, so a few could read it and
understand the message. It’s always been
about the message.
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