FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO

FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO

            I was a senior in college at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) forty-nine years ago .   How can it have been so long?  Where did the time go?  Who knows where the time goes, as Sandy Denny once wrote in song.  By this time in 1968, I had crossed over a bit from my captivity to race, and I was working in the garbage workers strike.  I was part of a group of students who went to worship services at white churches and interrupted their worship services to urge them to support the garbage strike.  I’ve often wondered what I would have done if folks came in and did that at Oakhurst when I was pastor there!

            I was also involved with some of the first black students at Southwestern, some of whom were involved with the Invaders, a group of young black adults in Memphis, who were pushing for change and who felt that Martin Luther King, Jr., was not realistic about the intransigence of white power, and thus he was increasingly irrelevant.   I was in the beginning of my formation on these issues, and I felt caught intellectually.  I had admired Dr. King for his witness against the Vietnam War a year earlier, but he seemed increasingly ineffective against the white power structure.  I had a chance to go hear Dr. King’s last sermon on April 3, 1968, at Mason Temple, but to my everlasting regret, I declined because I did not think that it was worth it.

            About 6:30 PM the next night, one of my black colleagues found me as I came out of the library and told me that Dr. King had been killed.  My friend was seeking to raise money to buy guns for self-protection, but fortunately, I had no money on me.  If I had any money, I would likely have given it to him, because I, like so many others at that moment, had lost belief in the efficacy of nonviolence.  I remember the violence that broke out in Memphis and in so many other places, and I remember the tanks and half-tracks that the Army and National Guard rode through the streets of Memphis over the next few nights.

            Over the years, I’ve thought about those events a lot.  Though Dr. King was not the Civil Rights Movement, his assassination seemed to take the air out of it.  Looking back, Dr. King turns out to have been an incredibly courageous and radical-in-the-making, and though I do not believe that James Earl Ray was the only one involved in his assassination (if he was involved at all), Dr. King’s developing radicalism is undoubtedly what got him killed.  We have also sought to sanitize him and make him an American saint over the years, but we should always remember that while he remained committed to nonviolence, by the end of his life, he had come to believe that the American vision built on racism, materialism and militarism had bankrupted our individual and collective souls.  He had come to believe that we needed another American revolution.  It was that belief that made him dangerous and got him killed.  In his fine book on Dr. King and Malcolm X (“Martin and Malcolm and America”), James Cone had a fine insight on this kind of movement.  Dr. Cone indicated that Dr. King had begun with love as his guiding principle and had moved toward justice as the guiding principle.  In a similar movement, Malcolm X had begun with justice and moved towards love.

            We are in a mess in this country, and much of the reasons for this are the powers that Dr. King and Malcolm X exposed in their ministries for love and justice.  As we remember their lives and deaths and their witness, and especially Dr. King’s on this day, let us re-commit ourselves to the love and justice that drove them.  May it drive us also.   I like what my friend and colleague, the Reverend Magdalena Garcia, posted on her Facebook page today:  “Articles about what happened to MLK's shooter? Frankly, I'm not interested. I want to know what happened to the message!”  May we find and live the message.