Ron Young
I met Martin Luther King, Jr. several
times when he came to speak at Wesleyan University 1960-64. On one occasion, my
sister and I drove him and his wife, Coretta, from Middletown, Connecticut down
to New York City where he was to speak at Jewish Theological Seminary at the
invitation of Rabbi Abraham Heschel. I
met him more personally in the home of Jim and Dorothy Lawson in Memphis during
the year 1962-63 when I worked as Youth Associate with Rev. Lawson at Centenary
Methodist Church.
In March 1965 I
marched and worked briefly with Dr. King in Selma during events which led to
passage of the Voting Rights Act. A year later, I marched with him in Chicago
and ducked bottles and bricks hurled at us by white onlookers, as part of the
conflict over the movement’s challenge of discriminatory patterns in housing -
patterns which, despite the 1968 Fair Housing Act, continue today in many areas
of the country. In 2013, a Supreme Court decision gutted the Voting Rights Act
and Republican Party voter suppression aimed at blacks resulted, among other
effects, in new voting restrictions and 900 fewer polling places in 2016 than
in 2012. The struggle for a better, more inclusive, egalitarian America goes
on. What lessons might we learn from Martin Luther King, Jr.?
“It really boils down to this: that all life is
interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all
indirectly. . . .Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you
are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what
I ought to be.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., A Christmas Sermon for Peace, 1967
All of us,
regardless of party, should throw ourselves into the joyous work of
citizenship. Not just when there's an election, not just when our own narrow
interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime.
Barack
Obama, A Final Thank You Letter to the
American People, 2017
A first and fundamentally important
lesson we can learn from our brother, Martin, is about unity, the intricate inter-relationship
of all people everywhere, indeed the interrelatedness of all creation. One way
many of us learn this lesson is by having a direct personal encounter with
people, here at home or abroad, with very different experiences and facing very
different circumstances than ours. Having such an experience, especially with
more marginalized and vulnerable people often leads us to stand, sit or walk
with them. This lesson certainly is part of the story of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom. For many young people today the lesson may be learned from
participating in local community service projects honoring Dr. King’s birthday
or walking in one of hundreds of Women’s Marches on the day after Trump’s
inauguration. As King taught, “We must learn that there is nothing greater than
to do something for others.” Think of experiences with others that you’ve had
and how they changed you.
If this lesson of our interrelatedness and
caring for others is learned well and flourishes, it naturally grows in two
ways: the circle of neighbors with whom we identify and for whom we care
becomes larger, more inclusive and soon goes global. Dr. King told how he was influenced by Thich Nhat
Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, and how that led him to speak empathetically
and eloquently about the aspirations and suffering of the Vietnamese people and
to speak-out against the American war in Vietnam. Second, the lesson expands
our understanding of how (in President Obama’s phrase) “the joyous work of
citizenship,” includes not only supporting community service projects and
protests, but publicly and politically advocating for new local, state and national policies to make our country better for all. And we come to understand that this work of
citizenship must be carried on not only at election time but year round.
Reading and studying Dr. King’s famous April
4, 1967 speech at Riverside Church, “A Time to Break the Silence,” we learn another lesson about interrelatedness,
not just of people everywhere, but about the interconnectedness of issues. In the simplest sense, King understood and
explained how as the US war in Vietnam escalated, human and economic resources
dedicated to the War on Poverty radically diminished. He saw militarism and war as enemies of the
poor. At an even more tragic level, King saw how “the war was doing far more
than devastating the hopes of the poor. It was sending their sons, brothers and
husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the
rest of the population.” Today, poor,
less educated whites, African-Americans and Hispanics continue to be
over-represented in the military and among homeless Veterans.
Interconnectedness of issues is partly about our country’s priorities. The
Seattle-based Borgen Project, reports, in
dramatic contrast with what many Americans believe, the United States allocates
20% of the Federal Budget to defense, but only 1% to the State Department and
foreign aid, which is the equivalent of spending $73 per American citizen each year on foreign aid,
while spending $1,763 per person each year on defense.
King’s understanding
of the interrelatedness of all people and creation itself led him as a follower
of Jesus to a commitment to nonviolence. Neither violence nor nonviolence are
simple matters. King understood, and we need to learn this, that the problem of
violence is not only the violence of war but the violence of radically unequal access to and use of world resources. The US represents only 5% of the world’s
population, but consumes almost a quarter of the world’s energy and contributes
disproportionately to environmental damage. According to the Sierra Club, “a child born in the United
States will create thirteen times more ecological damage over the course of his
or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil.” Challenging the unequal use and
distribution of resources and limiting the human effects on climate change, in
our own country and globally, is fundamental to challenging violence.
And King
understood the necessity of being consistent in his commitment to nonviolence. Growing out of his experiences walking
and working in Chicago and other Northern ghettos in 1965-67, King declared, “I
knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the
oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” Some believe that this declaration, one of
King’s most challenging and controversial even among other Civil Rights leaders,
may have led directly to his assassination on April 4, 1968, one year to the
day of his Riverside Church speech denouncing the Vietnam War.
King believed and taught the deeper lesson that our nation needed --
and still needs -- “a radical revolution of values. . .from a thing-oriented to a people-oriented society.”
He said, “When. . . profit motives and property rights are considered
more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and
militarism are incapable of being conquered.” So, positively permeating our politics we need
a set of values imitating the lives of prophets, poets and contemporary spirit
leaders. Whose lives inspire you and why?
Dr. King and Rev. Lawson believed that ultimately the goal is the
“beloved community,” founded on justice and mercy, inclusive of all people, and
capable of conserving creation.
Acknowledging our own anger and fear about what Donald Trump will do as
President and committed to resisting assaults on vulnerable communities, dangers
to creation, and threats to the Constitution, one of the hardest challenges we
face is how to have communication with people across the deep divisions in our
country. A tough teaching by Epictetus
often quoted by rabbis says, “We have two ears but only one mouth so we can
listen twice as much as we speak.” Listening to others when we may not want to,
there’s a challenge, no matter how we voted or didn’t, that we all need to work
on.
A.J. Muste, who was one of King’s mentors,
wrote about communication between people with very different views. “It goes
back to something very fundamental in the nonviolent approach to life. You
always assume there is some element of truth in the position of the other
person, and you respect your opponent for hanging on to an idea as long as he
believes it to be true. On the other hand, you must try very hard to see what
truth actually does exist in his idea, and seize on it to make him realize what
you consider to be a larger truth.” That’s a lesson easier to describe than to
implement, but it’s a necessary lesson to practice and pursue, especially in
these trying times.
Dr. King said, “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and
spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and
brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and
the creation of the beloved community.”
An indispensable element of nonviolence, as Muste wrote, is engaging the
other, even the radically different and oppositional other, listening, and
seeking a common truth we both can confirm. It’s a way of acting that's essential to the health
and healing of America.
Though none of
us know what Martin Luther King, Jr. would do or say today, we do have clues
from what he did and said while he was alive, and almost certainly we know that
he would keep on keeping on in faith and hope, resisting evil and reaching out
across deep differences for others to work with for the good of all – and so
should we.
RESOURCES
We all need to study Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy. As the calendar moves toward the fiftieth
anniversary of Dr. King’s “Breaking the Silence” speech at Riverside Church on
April 4, 1967, Rev. Jim Lawson, Rev. Phil Lawson and the National Council of Elders are urging us to arrange
opportunities to read and study King’s speech in schools, churches, synagogues,
mosques and community forums. There also is a new website being developed, M.L. King Jr.+50, with the full text of King’s Riverside speech,
a list of upcoming events and other resources