In the wake of the controversy over the funeral of Coretta Scott King, I was reviewing the recent keynote address of
Reverend James Lawson, receiving the Distinguished Alumnus award in Nashville, in January of 2006, years after he was kicked out of Vanderbilt Divinity School for organizing the
Nashville lunch counter sit-ins. (His home was also bombed during this campaign.)
King once called Lawson "the leading nonviolence theorist in the world," and it is Lawson who can be largely credited with being one of the prime movers in the American Civil Rights movement. It was Lawson -- ministering in Memphis in 1968 -- who brought Martin Luther King to Memphis to help organize and speak on behalf of sanitation workers during their strike. This campaign ended with King's assassination on April 4, 1968.
Hear Lawson's words from his own mouth, nearly 40 years later.
And see what others might have found "inappropriate" had this speech reached a national audience.
(Excerpt after the flip.)
The struggle, in my judgment, has only begun. We've only come a distance. The 21st century is going to see the waxing of the nation's consciousness about itself, or we'll see the waning of this nation's experiment with self-governance.
King himself insisted in 1957 in a kind of a meditation and prayer, "God help me to remember that I am a symbol of a movement because of a people who selected me to stand there."
So, in our cult of being famous, or celebrities, and so forth -- we yank Martin King away from the fact (that.. an actual fact) that a group of people in Montgomery, AL after the bus boycott began -- gathered and said, "we must structure ourselves" and they asked King to become the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.
We disconnect the man from the people and from the movement, that both empowered him, and selected him.
Secondly, I want to lift up the fact that we have sanitized Martin Luther King -- and the movement. I don't know if any of us can get into that era and to understanding. Perhaps Martin Luther King was the most hated man this nation has ever birthed, or allowed to rise to the kind of voice that King's voice reflected, both in the United States and around the world.
He was despised and rejected.
I wish I had time, someday, to go through newspapers in Montgomery, AL or newspapers in Tallahassee, FL or in Jackson, MS or Little Rock, AR and see how King was characterized. You will find almost no small or large portrait which indicates that he came from three generations of preachers in the Baptist tradition; that he deliberately prepared himself -- academically -- because of the call of God to his life for ordained ministry, for teaching.
You will almost not know that in the years of his struggle in the movement that he was a man with children, and a wife, and father, and mother, and sister -- with friends and neighbors of all sorts. Or that for all of his professional life, he pastored a congregation of people.
You will not come to know that, for example, in various campaigns that I recall, that in various meetings of the struggle -- Martin would announce in the midst of a staff or a board episode, "I promised so and so ... that I would meet with them in a pre-marital session this evening in Atlanta. I have to leave to go see them." This despised and hated man -- and we sanitize him today at our own risk, and at the risk of our nation.
A poet -- Carl Wendell Hines -- wrote this, and wrote this very well:
"Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
Build monuments to his glory
Sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
Such convenient heroes: They cannot rise
To challenge the images
We would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
It is easier to build monuments
Than to make a better world.
So, now that he is safely dead
We with eased consciences
Will teach our children
That he was a great man ... knowing
That the cause for which he lived
Is still a cause
And the dream for which he died is still a dream,
A dead man's dream."