Chalice Art by Selma Blackburn
THE REV. ROBERT J. KLEIN
Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock
January 16, 2005
A REMEMBERANCE OF THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Dr. King’s legacy is alive in the progress our society has made, but there is so much yet to do that we dare not forget!
In December of 1955, Dr. King spoke to the Montgomery Improvement Association:
MIA (Montgomery Improvement Assoc.) Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church
5 December 1955
Montgomery, Ala.
My friends, we are certainly very happy to see each of you out this evening. We are here this evening for serious business. [Audience:] (Yes) We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens, (That’s right) and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. (Yeah. That’s right) We are here also because of our love for democracy, (Yes) and because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action (Yes) is the greatest form of government on earth.
And as we stand and sit here this evening and as we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, let us go out with a grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. (Yeah) [Applause] We are going to work together. (Yeah) [Applause] Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, (Yes) somebody will have to say, "There lived a race of people (Well), a black people, (Yes, sir) ‘fleecy locks and black complexion,’ (Yes) but a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. [Applause] And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization." And we’re going to do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late.
The Rev. James M. Lawson, Pastor Emeritus of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, friend, colleague, and advisor to Dr. King, remembered King at the 18th Annual Prayer Breakfast in his honor in 2000, saying he doesn’t want Martin Luther King remembered as a dreamer or solely as a civil rights leader or even as a black leader. Lawson wants King to serve as a reminder for all people to speak out against injustice and to encourage “radical social change”. Also at the breakfast, Rabbi Susan Laemmle, dean of religious life at USC, said that the best way to memorialize is to make things better. (LA Times B10. Thurs. 1/13/2000)
Ever since Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, we have been remembering his efforts to make our nation better, healthier, more just. We remember that King’s approach was different, non-violent resistance taken from the teachings of Gandhi and Jesus. We remember King’s charismatic leadership of the civil rights movement. We remember the marches, the speeches, the way our nation faced its shadow and changed. We remember that change came quickly under King’s leadership even as we know it has slowed and faltered ever since.
Though as a third generation preacher, King came from the black middle class, he came to embody the call for justice from disenfranchised blacks all around the nation. King was brilliant as well as articulate, born in 1929, he entered college at 15, and completed college and seminary degrees in rapid succession, concluding his education with a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955.
King quickly rose to prominence, being elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association as the bus boycott began in Montgomery after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on December 1st, 1955. Progress in the civil rights movement did not come easily, but Martin Luther King taught a non-violent path of resistance in which planned civil disobedience and legal challenges to Jim Crow laws within a few years brought down the walls of segregation. In 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed, electing Dr. King its president.
In the 1950s and 60s, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson as well as the federal courts took significant actions to break down the barriers in education, housing, and voting. March after march, demonstration after demonstration, speech after speech, the rights of Blacks were affirmed and the barriers fell. Many people were injured and killed at the hands of white supremacists. On April 4, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. James Earl Ray was later convicted of the murder.
In December of 1956, Dr. King told the 1st Annual Institute on Non-Violence and Social Change in Montgomery, that:
“We must blot out the hate and injustice of the old age with the love and justice of the new. This is why I believe so firmly in nonviolence. Violence never solves problems. It only creates new and more complicated ones. If we succumb to the temptation of using violence in our struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.” (from King’s address before the First Annual Institute on Non-Violence and Social Change, Montgomery Alabama, December 1956, in I Have A Dream, ed. James M. Washington, p.21)
In June 1957, in an address at UC Berkeley, King said:
… “there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things.” (address at UC Berkeley, June 4, 1957, in I Have A Dream, ed. James M. Washington, p.33)
From 1955 to 1968, Martin Luther King was at the forefront of the civil rights movement. In those years, he alone insured that change came with a minimum of violence from blacks. King powerfully articulated the reasons that the hypocrisy of segregation must end before the United States could live up to the values of liberty and equality. King also spoke against the Vietnam War and in 1966 agreed to serve as co-chair of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam.
At a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church in New York City in April of 1967, Dr. King said:
…a few years ago…it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program…Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.
King went on to say:
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented” society to a “person oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world—a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
(from Dr. King’s address to Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 in I Have A Dream, ed. James M. Washington, pp. 137-151)
How true his words ring today about the current war we wage against Iraq.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a visionary leader, a modern prophet calling for justice. He was committed to the highest values of honor, justice, equality, and acceptance. He was a spiritual and religious man, finding comfort, encouragement, and empowerment in the life and teachings of Jesus. He was also a wise and worldly man, seeing that equality must not put the blacks over whites, but rather bring all persons to the status of equals. Dr. King’s efforts brought our nation to a new place.
It is almost amazing to me that well over 3 decades have passed since Dr. King died. He remains the theologian of civil justice, the great hero of several generations of liberal, progressive, and moderate religious practitioners. Dr. King was an agent for change in a turbulent and challenging time. If he had lived the changes might have gone further. Unfortunately, there was no one else who could so ably give language and energy to the process of change. Several black leaders have had an impact, but none have accomplished so much so quickly.
And now, there are so many challenges to what King and the civil rights movement accomplished. The dismantling of affirmative action and school de-segregation as well as the devolution of the safety nets of welfare and anti-poverty programs may be more classist than overtly racist, but the impact can be devastating. Neither blacks, nor Latinos, nor Asians, nor Native Americans are truly equal yet in our society. Whites and especially white males still hold most of the power economically and politically. There are more legal protections for non-whites than there were previously, but Police regularly practice racial profiling and black males disproportionately fill the nations prisons.
In his letter from the Birmingham jail, Dr. King said:
“I must make 2 honest confessions to you…. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”…… “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” (from Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, in I Have A Dream, ed. James M. Washington, p.91)
We who are white have privileges of which we are hardly aware. We are rarely stopped by the police for anything. We act as if we have a divine right to go anywhere or do anything we want. We are better paid in almost any position than non-whites. College entrance tests are oriented toward the educational experience of the white middle-class suburbs. We have little to fear from lynch-mobs, unless we are gay. We have easier opportunities for work, housing, and life. The laws may have changed, but racist attitudes are still widespread. I would be very surprised if any of us here did or said anything overtly racist. I think most of us would be surprised how often we each do or say things which indicate the privileges we enjoy and of which we are not even aware.
To be a truly inclusive congregation, to be multi-cultural, we would need to make some changes. Do we truly hear the concerns and ideas of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans? Do we sing songs and play music that appeal to persons of color? We can find ways of inviting persons of color and making them welcome. Justice and equality are lacking in our society, and we are called to change ourselves, our religious community, our nation, and the world so that all persons will be accepted and treated with compassion and justice. To move forward with the dream of a just society, we must remember Dr. King and all those who came before us in the fight for civil rights. We must remember the lives lost in the cause of racial rights, and in the cause of women’s rights, and in the cause seeking the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender individuals. We must not forget the injustices permitted under the Patriot Act and the Arab Americans and the Muslims who have suffered since 9/11. We must be ready to march and demonstrate, to protest and go into the courts to protect the rights of all persons. We must make ourselves aware and avoid complacency, for if we do not stand up, who will?
In closing hear this part of Dr. King’s
Acceptance Speech at the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony
10 December 1964
Oslo, Norway
Your Majesty, your Royal Highness, Mr. President, excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.
I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs, and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.
Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle, and to a movement which has not yet won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize. After contemplation, I conclude that this award, which I’ve received on behalf of that movement, is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.
Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
May we never forget the call to peace, justice, and love that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., issued to the people of our nation. We honor his memory by the works of compassion and justice that we do, and by the acceptance that we practice! So may it always be. Amen.