is the title of an important piece by his prize-winning biographer Taylor Branch in today's NY Times. And just as this is not the normal time for me to post, so this diary will be somewhat different than what I normally write.
It should be obvious that King has had a profound influence on me, as seen by two of my recent diaries, Thursday's I've been to the mountaintop and Friday's A time comes when silence is betrayal. Perhaps his influence has increased as I have aged, and as non-violence has been an increasing part of my own outlook. And it is with that in mind that I want people to read the piece by Taylor Branch. If you do no more than that, there is no need to read below the fold of this diary. I will be satisfied.
Branch begins with March 31, 1968, when King preached his last official sermon, in National Cathedral in Washington DC, not far from where I write this across the Potomac in Arlington VA. His efforts on behalf of the Memphis sanitation workers was already being mocked. Branch was a senior in college having dinner with his mother in a busy restaurant when the waiter whispered that King had been shot.
I want to offer the next few paragraphs unedited to set the context in which I wish to write some of my own thoughts. First, here is Branch:
Civil rights, Vietnam, Dr. King, Memphis — these are historic landmarks. Even so, this year is a watershed. Because Dr. King lived only 39 years, from now on, he will be gone longer than he lived among us. Two generations have come of age since Memphis.
This does not mean that our understanding is accurate or complete. A certain amount of gloss and mythology is inevitable for great figures, whether they be George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Honest Abe splitting a rail or Dr. King preaching a dream of equal citizenship in 1963. Far beyond that, however, we have encased Dr. King and his era in pervasive myth, false to our heritage and dangerous to our future. We have distorted our entire political culture to avoid the lessons of Martin Luther King’s era.
He warned us himself. When he came to the pulpit that Sunday 40 years ago, Dr. King adapted one of his standard sermons, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." From the allegory of Rip Van Winkle, he told of a man who fell asleep before 1776 and awoke 20 years later in a world filled with strange customs and clothes, a whole new vocabulary, and a mystifying preoccupation with the commoner George Washington rather than King George III.
Dr. King pleaded for his audience not to sleep through the world’s continuing cries for freedom. When the ancient Hebrews achieved miraculous liberation from Egypt, many yearned to go back. Pharaoh’s familiar lash seemed better than the covenant delivered by Moses, and so the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. It took 40 years to recover their bearings. Dr. King has been gone 40 years now, but we still sleep under Pharaoh. It is time to wake up.
It is time to wake up. As I read those words I came to a full stop. The issues of economic inequity and injustice are still with us. We are yet again engaged in war that is destroying the good name of the nation, despoiling the soul of the nation, and wastefully expending resources of men and material and money desperately needed not for the destruction of war but for the healing and uplifting of the least among us, both here at home and around the world.
Let me quote again from above: Dr. King pleaded for his audience not to sleep through the world’s continuing cries for freedom. The freedom of which King spoke is not achieved by military overthrowing a dictator only to replace him with economic tyrants or the imprisonment of fear of violence from gangs and militias. We might think of the Four Freedoms that FDR offered in his famous expression on January 6, 1941, almost a year before we became engaged in the Second World War. It is worth quoting the larger context in which Roosevelt placed those freedoms:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions -- without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
Roosevelt could see that "the crash of a bomb" that dictators used was not not the path to true freedom, offering instead a vision of "cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society" and "the supremacy of human rights everywhere." We cannot claim we are working towards these goals when we deny rights to anyone - purported or even convicted terrorist - in the name of some greater good. In that moment we have found our equivalent of the bomb of the dictator that Roosevelt criticized.
And in that light I want to look especially at what Roosevelt says about the fourth freedom, the freedom from fear: which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world. A nation which seeks to always be the most powerful nation capable of crushing of any nation is not seeking a world that knows freedom from fear, and will to its great dismay find that its insistence upon such superiority of arms which inevitably are used either in threat or in actuality will engender a hatred and opposition from those whom we humiliate by its application. We will not see the cooperation of free societies to which Roosevelt would have had us aspire.
As we have looked back o 40 years ago, some have commented that far too often we think of the King of Montgomery in 1955, a speech in 1963, and then he is killed. We ignore so much else, including the radical challenge he presented us. Branch remarks that we are all, liberal and conservative, complicit in glossing over the full details of the civil rights period. It was not all pretty. I know that when I show high school students the film from the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965 some are sickened, most are shocked. Or perhaps it will be the fire hoses and police dogs of Bull Connors in Birmingham a few years before.
Today we rarely see such large scale abuses of people protesting their dispossession. We still see brutality, whether of Rodney King on video, or reading about Amadou Diallo. We somehow don't seem to notice that our society, for all of its advances, retains as much brutality and inequity. We arrest more people, and then when they are brutalized, physically or psychologically in supermax prisons sometimes run by for profit companies,we don't see it, or we watch on Cable TV as we comfort ourselves at how bad these people must have been to wind up like that. But do we stop to think what conditions exist that we have now reached the situation where 1% of our population is incarcerated?
There are two more paragraphs from Branch that I feel I must quote:
Many of Dr. King’s closest comrades rejected his commitment to nonviolence. The civil rights movement created waves of history so long as it remained nonviolent, then stopped. Arguably, the most powerful tool for democratic reform was the first to become passé. It vanished among intellectuals, on campuses and in the streets. To this day, almost no one asks why.
We must reclaim the full range of blessings from his movement. For Dr. King, race was in most things, but defined nothing alone. His appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. "We will win our freedom," he said many times, "because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands." To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy — even as racial healers and reconcilers — is to diminish them under the spell of myth.
King was rooted with one foot in the Bible and one in the Constitution. The two do not have to be in conflict. Both speak passionately of justice. But what is justice?
Each year I begin my instruction by asking my students to define the word. Inevitably what comes to mind is criminal justice, and the first definition offered will be some form of punishing those who break the law. But if then challenged - does that mean it would have been appropriate to lock away for life people like Harriet Tubman or Levi Coffin who helped blacks escape slavery in the South was just - my students being the process of learning to think more deeply, beyond the surface meaning.
... to redeem the soul of America... We have heard eloquently the voices of those not included but who still dreamed of the promise of America. Think of Langston Hughes and of Barbara Jordan. And yet, we are still not a fully just society.
My students are the beneficiaries of those who have gone before, as I often remind them. But they also know how much further the road still winds, and that if they are unwilling to go further, with all the concomitant risks they will encounter, whatever progress has been gained in the struggles that I have seen in my own 6+ decades can easily be lost.
Branch points out the King was fond of the image of Dives and Lazarus, using as a model the preaching of his predecessor at Dexter Avenue, Vernon Johns, although King went further. Johns said that the sin of Dives is that he failed to see Lazarus as a fellow human. But King went further. He said the we must accept the suffering of the rich man, because he atleast sought to warn his brothers. According to King, that made Dives a liberal - he cared about what happened to others.
There are two more sentences from Branch that I must now quote. At the end of his discussion about King's preaching this parable, he offers the following:
The lesson beneath any theology is that we must act toward all creation in the spirit of equal souls and equal votes. The alternative is hell, which Dr. King sometimes defined as the pain we inflict on ourselves by refusing God’s grace.
In the Orthodox Church liturgical tradition of which I was a part for 14 years, one frequently encounters such universal expressions as those I have just quoted. Pascha is late this year, and Orthodox Christians are still in Great Lent, on the Sundays of which one hears instead of the normal Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom the Liturgy of St. Basil. The Theotokian - the hymn to the Mother of God - from that liturgy begins with the words "All of creation rejoices in you oh full of grace." The redemption through Jesus is not only of sinful humankind, but of all creation. The theology is that in assuming form from the created universe God has bound all of that created universe fully with him, through crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. Similarly, there are prayer that address not only the members of the church, but conclude with the words that show a broader intent for the prayer: "and all mankind."
Many religious traditions recognize something similar. For all their particularity, most great spiritual traditions accept how inextricably bound we are to one another we are, and how dependent upon and responsible we are - for one another, for the world in which we live. to me the refusing of God's grace described in that last quote is the separation of ourselves from others. Ultimately Hell is to be trapped in ourselves, without the redeeming power of love, which can only occur when we open ourselves up.
And that is perhaps the point of nonviolence: to open ourselves up, to be vulnerable, so that we can truly experience love, and other people, and to have ourselves be known and experienced.
It is, depending upon how you look at it, now very late, or else very early. Perhaps the words I have offered have some meaning to you. Perhaps you think this is little more than meaningless blathering by someone who is not completely coherent and certainly not especially cogent in his thinking. I acknowledge my thinking is flawed, incomplete. Part of the reason for exposing it like this is precisely to be vulnerable, to allow others to offer back, whether criticism or support, whether challenge or affirmation, or whatever mix of all these and more they deem appropriate.
Nonviolence requires vulnerability. It requires a forswearing of retaliation, and more. It does not mean one will not experience anger, perhaps even righteous anger. It does mean that one cannot be consumed by one's anger, or one's hurt, or one's sorrow. Nor can one be blinded and inebriated by one's joy to the point of obliviousness to the pain of others. Think for a moment of a very sharp blade. It can kill, but it can also give life when in the hands of skilled surgeon, or it can scrape things away - whiskers from one's face, the inedible from that which we need to survive. The gifts we have, personal and material, are like that sharp blade: whatever gifts we have can be used positively or destructively. If one is vulnerable, one should be humble enough to realize that using a sharp instrument should be done with care, never in anger, and only when the gains from its use outweigh the damage that might be done.
As a musician I have often thought about those whose lives seemed short. Most know of Mozart, but forget that Schubert and Purcell were both much younger when they passed, and Arriaga was not yet 20. Do we mourn what they might have given us had they lived longer, or do we celebrate and appreciate the riches we enjoy from them? I prefer the latter. Similarly with Dr. King. I am now more than 2 decades older than he was 40 years ago. I remain amazed at the legacy he left behind, as incomplete as it may have seemed to him. He gave us a gift the night before he died, of reminding us that our journey is never solitary, that we move towards the promised land together.
We have much to do, still have as the poet Robert Frost told us miles to go before we sleep. And the final two sentences of the piece by Taylor Branch returns to the idea of Lazarus and Dives. Branch writes of King:
He challenges everyone to find a Lazarus somewhere, from our teeming prisons to the bleeding earth. That quest in common becomes the spark of social movements, and is therefore the engine of hope.
Hope. Without it why go on? But with it we can aspire, we can motivate one another, we can together go yet one further step, and then another, and then another.
We cannot give up. Despite his setbacks, despite knowing he might die in the process, King never did.
And for us? I offer what I always offer, the same hope:
Peace.