"THE BACKBONE OF THE BOYCOTT"

 “THE BACKBONE OF THE BOYCOTT”

On May 17, 1954, SCOTUS delivered a hard blow to the deep racist vein in American history, deciding in a unanimous decision that “separate but equal” was no longer constitutional.  Less than a week later, white mayor William “Tacky” Gayle of Montgomery, Alabama received a letter from the Women’s Political Council, a letter written and signed by Joann Robinson, who was president of the Council.  The letter demanded that the city stop the bus drivers from humiliating and harassing the Black passengers on the buses.  If no remedy was forthcoming, the letter indicated that a bus boycott would soon follow.  Mayor Gayle dismissed the demand, knowing that the Black people of Montgomery would not stand up to white power in such a way, SCOTUS or no SCOTUS.

Though the boycott would take a while to materialize, the mayor had badly miscalculated the level of determination of Joann Robinson and other Black women and men.  Robinson had been the youngest of 12 children born in rural Georgia, and she had gone on to be valedictorian of her high school class, get a college degree and a master’s degree.  After a teaching stint in Texas, she took a position on the faculty of Alabama State University in Montgomery.  She herself had been humiliated on a Montgomery city bus in 1949 because she refused to move to the Black section of the bus.  She vowed never to ride a segregated bus again, and she kept her vow.

She was a member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr., would later become pastor.  She also joined the Women’s Political Council (WPC) founded as an activist Black women’s group by Mary Fair Burks.  She helped to turn it into a powerful political force, and she became its president in 1954.  In early 1955, she felt that the time for the bus boycott had come, when teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the white section of the bus in March, 1955.   She and the women of the WPC went into action to get ready, getting fliers ready for distribution to the Black community.  Black male leaders like ED Nixon, however, did not think that Colvin was the right case, so Robinson held the fliers back.  On October 21, Mary Louise Smith was harassed on the bus for refusing to give up her seat in the white section.  Robinson was ready to go again, but again, the Black male leaders refused to endorse a boycott.

Robinson was now frustrated with both the Black male leadership and the intransigent white supremacy.  Then, the right person presented herself.  Spurred on by her work at Highlander Folk School the previous summer and by the blatant lynching of Emmett Till in late summer, on December 1, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the white section of the bus.  As the song by John Legend and Common put it, “Rosa sat down, and we stood up.”  One of those standing up was Joann Robinson.

This time she would not wait on the men.  She went to work the night of Rosa Parks’ arrest.  She consulted with attorney Fred Gray about taking action, and he urged her to do it.  She drafted a short statement for the WPC and a longer statement for wider public distribution.  She gathered women colleagues and students at Alabama State at about midnight to begin the arduous process of running off the flyers on the mimeograph machine. (Those of you in my age bracket will remember those things – necessary but messy!)  Here she was, sneaking into the building, using state facilities to reproduce fliers calling for the first step in a revolt against the white supremacist structures, supported and upheld by that very state system.  She took a deep breath – let the copying begin in the all night process.  They copied 35,000 fliers that night, and the WPC made sure that they were distributed on Friday to churches, schools, stores, beauty parlors, barbershops, and pool halls. They called for a Black boycott of the Montgomery city buses beginning that Monday, December 5.

Some of the Black ministers were distressed that the fliers showed up at their churches without their input or consent, but the word had been spoken, and there was no going back.  Would the boycott happen?  Would it last?  No Black people rode the buses on Monday, and the white community was shocked.  Robinson was at the center of organizing car pools, meals, money in order to sustain the boycott, which ended up lasting over a year, until SCOTUS ruled that segregation on public transportation was unconstitutional. That decision came in response to a suit filed by Fred Gray on behalf of Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, and Aurelia Browder in Browder v. Gayle.  No males stepped forward to join in the suit.

The Montgomery bus boycott was one of 4 actions in the 1950’s that led to the Civil Rights Movement.  At its backbone and its heart was a woman named Joann Robinson.  She would eventually lose her job over her leadership, and she had to leave the state of Alabama, moving to California, where she continued to teach and to work for justice.  She died in LA (that’s Los Angeles, not Lower Alabama) in 1992.  

If you don’t know her story, go learn about her – I’ve barely scratched the surface here.  And, let us find our paths in her story and in her witness.      

"OL' MAN RIVER"

 “OL’ MAN RIVER”

In a Facebook post on January 23, Philly Herlein Rains reposted a report celebrating the birthday of William Caesar Warfield, who was born in West Helena, Arkansas, in 1920.  I had forgotten that he was a Black “native son,” although I had been well aware of the most famous Black “Native Son,” Richard Wright, being from Elaine and West Helena.    

William Warfield was born to Baptist minister Robert Warfield and Bertha McCamery Warfield in West Helena in 1920.  Reverend Warfield had a “day” job as a sharecropper, a hard knock life.  Combined with the rampant white supremacy, the neo-slavery of the 20th century, and the murderous lynching of over 235 Black Americans in Elaine and in Helena in 1919, the Warfield family soon joined the Great Migration from the South, stopping first in Missouri, then landing in Rochester, New York.  Though William Warfield did not stay long in his birth state, he described himself “as an Arkansas boy from tip to toe.” He was plagued by white supremacy all his life, but his heritage was multiracial: Black, Native American, white.

In 1938 when he was a senior in high school, he won first place in the National Music Educators’ singing competition with his powerful bass-baritone voice. He won a scholarship to famed Eastman School of Music.  He was drafted into the army in 1942, but before his departure, he gave his graduation recital at Eastman School to an overflow crowd. Because he was fluent in German, French, and Italian, he was assigned to an intelligence gathering unit.  Fighting through the racism at Fort Richie, he became a valuable asset, and he was discharged in 1946.

He then began his singing career in a road show called “Call Me Mister.”  The cast included Carl Reiner, Buddy Hackett, and Bob Fosse. During this time, he appeared in other shows and operas, while receiving acting and singing training. He also sang in clubs, and on one such occasion in a Toronto, a financier named Walter Carr heard him and decided to sponsor him.  Warfield’s Town Hall debut in New York City was on March 19, 1950.  He wowed that audience and was signed for an extended tour of Australia.  He also made his first movie,  a remake of “Show Boat,” and he landed his signature song “Ol’ Man River,” originally sung by the incomparable Paul Robeson.  Though the song was written with Robeson in mind,  Warfield came to own it, singing it more times than any other artist, including singing it in several languages.   No small irony that it is a song about the Mississippi River near his birthplace, a river from which his family had to flee in order to find their lives and to develop Warfield’s singing voice.

In 1952, he toured Europe to sing the lead in “Porgy and Bess.”  The “Bess” role was sung by Leontyne Price, a stunning soprano from Laurel, Mississippi.  The fire in the parts spread to them personally – they were married that same year.  The marriage did not last long, and they were separated in 1958.  They remained lifelong friends, however.  In 1957, Price began her incredible career at the Metropolitan Opera, but Warfield could never break that ceiling because his racial classification was Black Male.  

He appeared in movies and television and made many recordings.  He worked with composer Aaron Copland on many occasions, and in 1984, he won a Grammy for his role as Narrator in Copeland’s “A Lincoln Portrait.” You can hear an audio recording of it at https://soundcloud.com/oaiquartz/copland-lincoln-portrait - it’s about 8 minutes into it, though the ‘Billy The Kid” suite that precedes it is good also. 

His career was varied and long and included teaching at Northwestern.  He was invited back to Helena/West Helena to sing at the Warfield Community Concert, named not for him but for a white man SD Warfield, who had left much of his estate to establish an annual concert series that was to be free to the community.  One can only wonder what his thoughts were, as he climbed the stage in the area from which his family had fled in 1922.  

In 1977 he established the William Warfield Scholarship Fund, providing funding for African-American high school and pre-college students interested in vocal classical music, and it is now in its 46th year of providing such scholarships.  Warfield died in Chicago in 2002 after brain injuries suffered from a fall, and his body is buried in Rochester, joining a sea of witnesses, including Susan B. Anthony and  Frederick Douglass, in Mt. Hope Cemetery there.  He described his career in these words:

“I wanted it all. I wanted “Show Boat” and “Porgy,” as well as Brahms and Fauré. I wanted the spirituals along with the boogie-woogie, and grand opera, too. I wanted the Hollywood film and I wanted the bistro gig, the international tour and the White House command performance. I wanted to teach music, to bring to a new generation the lessons of my life in art. I wanted to play a role in world culture–not just “Negro culture” not just “Western European culture.” I shared the dream of every artist, regardless of his or her origins, to find my patch in that great tapestry of art. If West Helena, Arkansas, wasn’t big enough for my sharecropper daddy, the East Coast cocktail lounge circuit wasn’t big enough for my career. I wanted all the wonders of music, a taste of everything that the muses had to offer.”

"THE ARC OF HISTORY IS LONG"

“THE ARC OF HISTORY IS LONG”

Septima Poinsette Clark was born on May 3, 1898, six months before the violent white coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, overthrown the democratically elected Black city government and established a reign of terror, which Clark and many others would have to combat in order to try to bend that arc of history towards justice.  She was born in Charleston, SC – her father had been enslaved, and her mom was from Haiti.  She came to believe in the power of education and in organizing against oppression, and for her efforts, she was often called the “Queen Mother” or the “Grandmother” of the Civil Rights Movement.

She began school at age 6 in a home school for Black kids, and later she went to a new Black school in Charleston for 6-8th graders, taught by all white teachers.  She graduated from high school in 1916, but there was no money for college, even though she was an excellent student.  She took the state exam to become a gteacher at age 18 and passed.  No Black teachers were allowed in Charleston, so she took a job teaching on John’s Island.  There she would begin a teaching career that lasted for the rest of her life, settling in Columbia, SC, where she got her college degree from Benedict College and a Master’s degree from Hampton University.  During this time, she spent summers at Atlanta University, studying with W.E.B. Dubois.

She also got actively involved with the NAACP, but in 1956 the state of South Carolina passed a law that banned city or state employees from being members of or having involvement with civil rights groups.  She was upfront in her refusal to to leave the NAACP, and she was fired from her job in the Charleston City Schools, effectively losing her 40 year pension.  A Black teachers’ sorority held a fundraiser for her, but no member would have their picture taken with her for fear that they would lose their own jobs.

This terrible set of events became a turning point for Clark.  She had been introduced to the Highlander Folk School in Knoxville, and had attended some workshops there.  In 1955, she helped to develop some “Citizenship Schools” in which participants were taught literacy as well as organizing techniques.  Because of her teaching experience and organizing ability, Clark became a leader in this development.  As Myles Horton, the founder of Highlander, put it, “we needed people to do real education with people who had been oppressed and mistreated.  Septima was a true leader for that.”  Highlander already was in trouble with the Tennessee state authorities because of their just8ce activities.  For the moment, however, Clark became the director of their Citizenship Schools, and she brought in her niece Bernice Robinson to develop the program.  In a compressed week’s workshop, they found that they could turn sharecroppers and other “uneducated” Black people into potential voters.

     In the summer of 1955, she became a mentor for a woman from Montgomery, who was interested in learning of more ways to resist the racial injustice of Alabama and to seek ways to change that injustice.  Rosa Parks was looking for ways to stand up when she came to Highlander that summer.  Septima Clark helped her to find her fire, and just a few months later, Parks would not stand up – she would remain seated and ignite a Civil Rights Revolution.

Highlander was closed by the state of Tennessee in 1961, after bogus hearings led by Bruce Bennett, attorney general of Arkansas.  (See Horton’s autobiography “The Long Haul” for that story).  Clark was hired at SCLC to found and expand the “Citizenship School” concept.  It took off all over the South, and it became a model for developing ways of resistance.  Like Ella Baker before her, however, Clark ran into the strong sexism of the Black male leaders of SCLC.  In spite of this. Clark was the first woman to gain a position on the SCLC Board.

She retired in 1970 from SCLC, and she was able to get her pension reinstated which had been denied to her in 1956.  She also served two terms on the Charleston County School Board.  She died in 1987, and at her funeral, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery gave her eulogy,  saying that her courageous and pioneering work made way for rights for Black people and for women.  One of her famous quotes described her ability to make a way out of no way:  “I have a great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.” 

    She shook up the white South and got us moving – those same oppressive forces are rising again, so let us find our place in that chaos and do some bending towards justice.

 

"O, MEMPHIS"

 “O, MEMPHIS”

I was born in the Methodist Hospital in Memphis.  Even that many years ago, Memphis was the capital of three territories:  eastern Arkansas where I lived, north Mississippi where all my forebears are from, and western Tennessee where Caroline’s dad grew up.  Though I lived in Arkansas, Memphis was the city to which all the small town people in the three territories related, including me and my family.  My mother’s brother, Bud Armour, lived in Memphis before he and his family moved to Chicago – part of the Great Migration in a different way. My mother’s other closest relative, Bernice Armour, lived in Memphis, and we often went up to see “BB,” as she was called. As a kid, Memphis had a magical, urban quality to it – I loved going there.

I went to college in Memphis at what was then Southwestern at Memphis, now Rhodes College.  I had just ended working my shift in the college library in the spring of 1968, when I heard that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot and killed not far away at the Lorraine Motel, where he was headquartered to organize a second march in support of the sanitation workers there.

When I heard that Tyre Nichols had been beaten and killed by police officers in Memphis, I was not greatly surprised, but I felt a tug at my heart for my relationship to Memphis.  I was reminded of Jesus’ words in Matthew 23 on the outskirts of Jerusalem, as he got ready to enter that city: “ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

I’m not Jesus, and Memphis is not Jerusalem, but I had some of this same sense for Memphis when I heard about the police murder of Tyre Nichols.  I’m not sure why that feeling of affection had not left me, but it was there.  I haven’t been back to Memphis much since my mother died in Arkansas in 2004.  Memphis has a horrible history of white supremacist murders of Black people.  It led the white, Southern defense of neo-slavery in 1866 with the “Memphis Massacre,” in which white people killed at least 46 Black people and burned homes and churches and businesses to the ground.  On The Curve, in 1892, white people murdered Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart - all because they dared to open a Black grocery store in a Black neighborhood.  

    One of Tom Moss’s friends, Ida B. Wells, wrote the truth about his lynching, and her newspaper offices were burned in response.  A price was put on her head, and she became an exile, not returning South again for 30 years.  She came then to investigate one of the worst mass murders of African-Americans in American history – it happened in my home county of Phillips County in the Elaine Massacre. She rarely returned to Memphis after she left in 1892.  

    One of the great American prophets, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed there in 1968.  Many others have been lynched or run out of Memphis.  Still, it hurt my heart that my “home” city of Memphis was the site of such police brutality on a Black man.  And, yes, I know that it is a horrible and yet standard practice in Memphis and around the country for Black men to be targeted in this way.  

    I’m reading a fascinating book now about the white resistance to powers that would seek to curtail the white ability to dominate and brutalize people classified as “non-white.”  In this book, “Freedom’s Dominion” by Jefferson Cowie, the obstacle to white domination is federal power.  As the subtitle says, it is “a saga of white resistance to federal power,” and Cowie has so far done an impressive job of tying the slaughter and removal of Indigenous People with the slaughter and enslavement of African-American people.  The killing of Tyre Nichols reminds us that this powerful white supremacy is not only internalized by those classified as “white,” but also by those classified as “Black.”  In fact, white supremacy works best when those classified as “colored,” come to believe that it is true.  It is why Ron DiSantis opposes the teaching of Black History in Florida – to do so would be to shed light on the fact that the white supremacist narrative is not true at all.

    “O Memphis” – a lament about the continuing power of white supremacy. It is  a clarion call for us to continue to work so that a different narrative can take hold, a narrative that proclaims that the system of race is a lie, that white supremacy is a lie, even as its power continues to grow.  A narrative that proclaims that we are siblings after all, that humanity is not a hierarchy of races but rather a family of those who are made in God’s image, each of us and all of us.

"EVERYBODY'S HEARD OF DAVID STROUPE!"

 “EVERYBODY’S HEARD OF DAVID STROUPE!”

This Tuesday will be our son David’s 43rd birthday – yes, can that be possible?  He was born (4 days late) in a snowstorm in Virginia, and he has said that he has been trying to get warm ever since then.  His current clime of teaching at Michigan State is not exactly the place to get warm.  We give thanks for his being in our lives and in the lives of many others.  

He got his doctorate in science education at the University of Washington in 2013 and then got his tenured position at Michigan State.  He was always interested in education, but his time of teaching in public schools in Houston in poorer neighborhoods cemented his desire to do deeper work in education.  While teaching science in these schools, he was dismayed and infuriated that there was no lab equipment in these middle schools for the students to use in order to learn science .  His mantra is that all children in this country deserve a decent public education, and he set himself out to reform public education in America.  

He has done much work in this regard, editing and writing several books, with his second one with Harvard University Press due out in May.  We give thanks for his leadership and fire on improving public education in the United States.  We operate only on the peripheries of this world, so I am grateful for a story from Dr. Greta Reed about David’s prowess and reputation.

Greta has her doctorate in philosophy and taught in the University of Tulsa before hearing a new call from God to consider pastoral ministry.  She came to Columbia Seminary to get her ministerial education, and while she was at CTS, she worshipped at Oakhurst and got involved in the life of the church.  She got to know David there when he was in his teen years.  She later got ordained as a pastor on the staff of Second Presbyterian in Ft. Lauderdale, and Caroline and I preached on the “bent-over woman” on Luke 13 for her ordination.  She has now retired and lives in Tallahassee.

A few years ago we got a call from Greta, saying that she had heard a good story about David, which she wanted to share with us.  The retirement home where she lives often has guest speakers and others who present programs.  At one of these programs, a graduate student in education at Florida State University came to make a presentation on the developments in education.  Greta indicated that the student made a fine presentation, and afterwards, Greta went up to her to thank her for her work and to ask her a question.

Greta told the student that she had enjoyed her program, and then asked her:  “ I realize that this is a big world, but sometimes it is a lot smaller than we think.  I’m wondering if you know one of the guys in education, whom I watched growing up in one the churches that I attended.  Would you happen to know David Stroupe?  Do you know who he is?”  The grad student answered right away: “Everybody knows who David Stroupe is!  I’ve read so many of his great articles and books.  Do you know him?  He’s up in the high stratosphere of education!”  Greta indicated that she had known him as a youth in the church. The student replied: “He is one of the leaders in changing teacher education and helping us all to strengthen public education.”

We so appreciate Greta calling us to share that story – yay for David and for all those who work to deepen and strengthen public education.  David has taught us so much over these 43 years, and we give thanks for his gifts to us.  As a boy, he was not a great sleeper, and in his infant years, we would lose sleep ourselves trying to get his mind and body to slow down in order for him to relax enough to get to sleep.  On those occasions when one of us would be rocking him to sleep, we often thought: “Well, at least if he goes to graduate school, this ability to live on little sleep will bring benefits to him – but, right now, David, go to sleep!”

We are grateful for David and all his gifts, especially in education, which is so vital to us all.  Michigan State is paying out all kinds of money for its errors - $500 million for its failure to stop Larry Nasser and that horrible abuse, almost $100 million for its football coach.  Because of that, MSU has crunched faculty in all departments.  David and Erin will be moving to Salt Lake City this summer to begin teaching there and developing new approaches in education at the University of Utah.  We give so many thanks for him and his leadership, and of course for his bringing Erin and daughters Emma and Zoe to us.

"1963"

 “1963”

Sixty years ago in the early fall of 1963, I started my senior year at Central High School in Helena, Arkansas.  Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington in late August had already opened the window into my soul a bit.  My growing awareness of a whole new world was beginning to open my imagination, and because of this, I felt pain at the white response to King’s speech.  That response happened on September 15, 1963, when four little Black girls (Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley) were killed in their Sunday school room, when white men bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.  For a powerful rendition of this horror, listen to Rhiannon Giddens cover of “Birmingham Sunday,” written by Richard Farińa, brother-in-law at the time of Joan Baez.

Caroline and I preached at Oakhurst Baptist Church this month on MLK Sunday, using King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” as the theme, intertwined with our Seven Steps for guiding those classified as “white” in engaging our addiction to race.  That Birmingham campaign had taken place in the spring of 1963, and in working on the sermon, we went back and reviewed some of the events of 1963. It was quite a year in American history and especially in civil rights history.  This year marks the 60th anniversary of those events.  I want to note some of them here, so that we all can remember them and re-commit ourselves to working for justice and equity in our time.

That year began with the inauguration of George Wallace as governor of Alabama.  Wallace had been a “moderate” on race in the South, but he pivoted to take up the mantle of overt racism with these words in his inaugural speechin Montgomery:  “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and throw a gauntlet before the feet of tyranny… and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”

Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) would seek to answer Wallace’s tyranny with the Birmingham campaign in April and May of 1963, in which basic rights for Black people were sought.  There were marches and sit-ins and nonviolent protests.  Eight white liberal pastors addressed a letter to King and SCLC in the Birmingham News, asking them to stop the campaign, in order to give the white moderates a chance to produce those rights.  King’s reply to them in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” has become a classic in American history and indeed in world history of human rights movements.  I’ll look at it more closely later this year, but if you have not read it lately, especially if you are classified “white,” go read it as a letter of 2023 addressed to your congregation.  

In the spring of that year, the all-white Mississippi State men’s basketball team, which had won the Southeastern Conference basketball title, snuck out of Starkville, Mississippi, to fly to East Lansing, Michigan, to play Loyola of Chicago, a team with many Black players.  The legislature of Mississippi had passed resolutions forbidding the team to play any team with Black players. More on this later too.

On June 11 of that year, Governor Wallace again made the news, when he stood in the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama, seeking to prevent James Hood and Vivian Malone from entering their state university as students who were classified as Black.  Wallace made a big splash nationally, but as often happened, he stepped aside and allowed federal marshals to accompany Mr. Hood and Ms. Malone to register and to attend classes at the University of Alabama.  Wallace’s point was made, however, and his national profile rose.  One day later in Jackson, Mississippi, a cowardly white man named Byron De La Beckwith, shot Medgar Evers in the back as Mr. Evers walked up his driveway at his home.  Beckwith was tried twice in the 1960’s for the murder of Medgar Evers, but he was not convicted.  He was finally convicted in 1994 and sentenced to prison.

MLK made his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28 before 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, a speech that called to me in ways that I had not expected.  Again, the cowardly white folk responded by bombing a church in Birmingham, killing those four little girls, whose main offense was seeking to follow Jesus.

And, for me was the crowning event of 1963:  on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.  Although I was a Richard Nixon supporter in the presidential election of 1960, I was still shocked that an American president could be assassinated like that.  It was a life-changing moment for many of us who were teen-agers at that time.

So, wow, 1963 – what a year!  I’ll be revisiting some of these events as their 60th anniversary comes up this year.  There were clearly many other important events that year, and I invite you to think about the impact of this year on your life, if you were alive at that time. Let me know your thoughts and reflections. 

"MLK"

 “MLK”

Many years ago I had a discussion with my longtime friend Ed Loring about influences on our lives.  I asked him what historical figure had been most important in his development, and he replied “Dorothy Day.”  He asked me, and I replied “Martin Luther King, Jr.” I went on to note that my opinion of Dr. King had vacillated all over the graph of my life.  When I first came to consciousness of MLK in my early teens, I saw him as a communist who was a grave threat to American life, or perhaps a charlatan who was just trying to get money from unsuspecting supporters.

Yet, something about Dr. King was nagging at my soul.  As I have written previously, I decided to listen to Dr. King’s speech at the March on Washington in August, 1963 (60 years ago!).  I listened to it by myself, because I did not want any of my friends to know that I might be interested in hearing him.  I wasn’t sure that I did, but I wanted to hear from him for myself.  I was stunned by all the people who attended that gathering, and I was impressed by his eloquence and his vision.  I wasn’t convinced yet, but Dr. King opened a window in my consciousness that day.  He seemed to be promoting the American dream by seeking to expand it to include those who had been excluded.  Far from demeaning the ideas of America, he upheld them, and he even suggested that the vision of America was far stronger than many of us thought that it was.

As I began to gain a bit of liberation from my captivity to white supremacy, I watched Dr. King more closely, and I was impressed with his vision and willingness to take action and to go to jail for his beliefs.  I began to shift dramatically in my approach and began to work in justice movements in college.  King’s emphasis on nonviolence began to ring hollow to me and my friends, who saw white supremacy as so entrenched and so violent that only the threat of violence could change it.  I worked in the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis in 1968 in my senior year in college, and by that time, I had gone to the other extreme with Dr. King’s views.  Where once I had considered him to be a communist subversive, now I considered him to be irrelevant.  I wrote a column online for The Atlantic on this journey, and if you want to know more about it, here’s the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/doubting-mlk-during-a-strike-in-memphis/550118/

As we celebrate his remarkable legacy once more this weekend, it is hard to recall anyone who made such a difference in American life.  As the great organizer Bob Moses put it, Dr. King was part of an ocean of people who made such a difference in the civil rights movement.  Dr. King was a huge wave on that ocean, mainly because he had such a strong vision of the American idea of equality and because he had the courage and willingness to work so that idea would apply to everyone.  

Despite all the resistance that those of us classified as “white” gave to him, Dr. King never gave up on the idea that we are all siblings, that human life is a circle of humanity rather than a hierarchy of races.  He demanded that all of us expand and deepen our imaginations so that we could build this idea of equality, this idea that all of us are created as children of God.  We tend to sanitize him now, but in his day, he was seen as one of the most dangerous people in the country, because his vision was so clear, and his courage was so deep.  

In what I take to be his greatest published sermon, he gave his own obituary in his powerful “The Drum Major Instinct,” preached at his beloved Ebenezer Church on February 4, 1968, two months before he was assassinated.  Here’s part of what he said:

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. (Yes) And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. 

 I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question.  I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.  And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.  I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.  

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.  Say that I was a drum major for peace.  I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.  I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.”