"WRESTLING WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR"

 “WRESTLING WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.”

Today is the 54th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, where I was a senior in college at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College).  I wrote a column for The Atlantic a few years ago about my memories of that day and that time.  Here is a link to those reflections, if you’d like to see them https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/doubting-mlk-during-a-strike-in-memphis/550118/

       I’ve lived with Martin Luther King, Jr. and his witness all of my life.  I’ve had two major conversions on his work and his ministry, and in both of those instances I had dismissed his work.  I don’t remember when I first became conscious of his public ministry.  In my years as a youth, I was so captured by a belief in white supremacy that I could not imagine that a new wave was flowing on the ocean of the civil rights movement.  The neo-slavery, in which I lived and breathed and believed, seemed to be permanent to me.  My imagination was so captured and so truncated that I could not perceive the fire that was coming, a 1950’s and 1960’s fire that was shaped and led by Martin Luther King, Jr.  I did not have eyes to see or ears to hear or a heart to receive.

When MLK came upon the public scene, I dismissed him as a charlatan who led fools.  That view began to shift when I listened to his speech at the stunning March on Washington in August, 1963, almost 60 years ago.  I was shocked at the number of people who came to that March – 250,000! – and I said to myself:  “They can’t all be fools or dupes.”   It was dawning on me that there was more to the story than I knew.  Then, came Dr. King and his powerful speech, one of the best that I had ever heard.  And, I definitely knew that there was more to the story than the white supremacy in which I had wrapped myself.  Although I wasn’t converted on that day, a window into my consciousness had been opened, and I began to look for new understandings.

Those came in my college years, and indeed by the time of my senior year in college, I had gone the other way.  I had made acquaintances with young Black students at Southwestern, and most of them viewed Dr. King with a sense of irrelevance, if not contempt, because they felt like his doctrine of non-violence would never wrest equal rights from the iron fists of white supremacy.  Though I was not yet prepared to see myself as a white supremacist, I did agree with them that Dr. King was no longer relevant.  When King came to lead a non-violent march on March 28 in 1968 in support of the striking sanitation workers in Memphis, our group of organizers saw his presence as a negative rather than a positive.  That march ended in violence, with police attacking Black youth, and with the youth responding with violence.  For a second time in my life, I dismissed the witness of Dr. King as irrelevant and even harmful to the movement for justice and equity.

The rifle shot on April 4, 1968 that killed Dr. King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis caused another shift in me.  I’ll never believe that James Earl Ray acted alone, but whoever the cabal was, they expressed the deep and abiding power of the White South in American history.  By “White South,” I do not mean a geographical location but rather a spiritual force that believes in white, male supremacy and which seeks to enforce it by any means necessary.  That force always seems to be present in American life, and indeed in our time, it is rising back up. 

     In response to King’s assassination, I have sought to find out much more about his life and his witness, to honor it, and to seek to follow it.  Dr. King not only was spiritual and moral force on the movement for justice and equity, but he also was one of the first leaders to speak out against the war in Vietnam.  As he got more sophisticated in his understanding of the deadly forces in American culture, he understood the three intertwining forces that seek to crush life in America: militarism, materialism, and racism.   He proposed - and was organizing -The Poor Peoples’ March on Washington for the summer of 1968, in which he would emphasize these three forces and their malevolent influence in our life together.  It was likely this insight and this response that took his life 54 years ago.

    I honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on this day – let us all take a moment and pause and give thanks for him, for his witness, and for those who made it possible.  Let us also take a moment and reflect how those forces – militarism, materialism, and racism - still remain powerful in our lives.  Let us not only honor Dr. King.  Let us seek to follow him, not the “saintly” MLK who will be honored by major corporations and thus dismissed once again.  Let us seek to follow the dangerous Dr. King, who sought to bring all of us to a vision of justice and equity, a vision so dangerous that he had to be taken out.  We took his body and his life but not his spirit and his soul.  May we hear his voice and his witness, and may we find our way down that path, however haltingly and slowly, as my journey has been.