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The New York Times
Opinion
The Last Wish of
Martin Luther King
By TAYLOR BRANCH,
Op-Ed Contributor nytimes.com on the Web, April 6, 2008
FORTY years ago on March 31, at the
National Cathedral, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what would be
his last Sunday sermon, on his way back to Memphis. That same night in
1968, President Johnson shocked the world by announcing that he would not seek
re-election.
I was a senior in college. My mother was visiting four nights later when
all conversation suddenly hushed in a busy restaurant. A waiter whispered
that Dr. King had been shot.
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.
Dr. King had been in Memphis marching in support of sanitation workers.
Two of them, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed in a mechanical
malfunction; city rules forbade black employees to seek shelter from rain
anywhere but in the back of their compressor trucks, with the garbage. But
looting had broken out from Dr. King’s march, for the first time.
When he showed up in Washington that Sunday morning, he was scarcely the toast
of the United States. Headlines in Memphis called him, “Chicken à la King,” with
accusations that he had run from his own fight. The St. Louis
Globe-Democrat called Dr. King “one of the most menacing men in America today,”
and published a wild-eyed minstrel cartoon of him aiming a huge pistol from a
cloud of gun smoke, with the caption, “I’m Not Firing It — I’m Only Pulling the
Trigger.”
So Dr. King stood in the pulpit a marked man, scorned and rebuked, beset with
inner conflicts. Yet as always, he lifted hope from the bottom of his
soul. He urged the congregation to be alive and awake to great revolutions
in progress. “I say to you that our goal is freedom,” he cried, “and I
believe we’re going to get there because — however much she strays from it — the
goal of America is freedom!”
We face daunting precedent in history. Our nation has slept for decades
under the spell of myths grounded in race. I grew up being taught that the
Civil War was about federalism, not slavery. My textbooks even used a
religious term, the “redeemers,” to describe politicians who restored white
supremacy with Ku Klux Klan terrorism late in the 19th century. Modern Hollywood
was founded on the emotional power of that myth as portrayed in “The Birth of a
Nation.” Progressive forces advocated racial hierarchy with a bogus
science of eugenics.
More than once, the dominant culture has turned history upside down to make
itself feel comfortable. And when a civil rights movement rose from the
fringe of maids and sharecroppers, making it no longer respectable to defend
racial segregation, wounded voices adapted again to curse government as the
agent of general calamity. We have painted Dr. King’s era as a time of
aimless, unbridled license, with hippies running amok.
The watchword of political discourse has degenerated from “movement” to “spin.”
In Dr. King’s era, the word “movement” grew from a personal inspiration into
leaps of faith, then from shared discovery and sacrifice into upward struggle,
spawning kindred movements until great hosts from Selma to the Berlin Wall
literally could feel the movement of history.
Now we have “spin” instead, suggesting that there is no real direction at stake
from political debate, nor any consequence except for the players in a game.
Such language embraces cynicism by reducing politics to entertainment.
Democratic balance has slept for 40 years, and we face a world like Rip Van
Winkle run backward. We wake up blinking at Tiger Woods, Condoleezza Rice
and Barack Obama, while our government demands arbitrary rule by secrecy,
conquest and dungeons. King George III seems reborn.
Please resist any partisan connotation. Our problem is far too big for
that. Indeed, I think the most pressing challenge for admirers of Dr. King
is to recognize our own complicity in the stifling myths about civil rights
history. Battered, long-suffering allies of Dr. King discarded him as a
tired moderate long before the reactionary campaign to make the word “liberal” a
kiss of death for candidates across the country. Similarly, forces called
radical and militant turned against liberal governments for taking so long to
respond to racial injustice, then for the Vietnam War. Only a convergence
of the political left and right could cause such lasting erosion for the promise
of free government itself.
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.
Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but
also the white South. Surely this is true. You never heard of the Sun Belt when
the South was segregated. The movement spread prosperity in a region previously
unfit even for professional sports teams. My mayor in Atlanta during the civil
rights era, Ivan Allen Jr., said that as soon as the civil rights bill was
signed in 1964, we built a baseball stadium on land we didn’t own, with money we
didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t found, and quickly lured the Milwaukee Braves.
Miami organized a football team called the Dolphins.
The movement also de-stigmatized white Southern politics, creating two-party
competition. It opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from
homosexuals before the modern notion of “gay” was in use. Not for 2,000 years of
rabbinic Judaism had there been much thought of female rabbis, but the first
ordination took place soon after the movement shed its fresh light on the
meaning of equal souls. Now we think nothing of female rabbis and cantors and,
yes, female Episcopal priests and bishops, with their colleagues of every
background. Parents now take for granted opportunities their children inherit
from the Montgomery bus boycott.
It is both right and politic for all people, including millions who are benign
or indifferent toward the civil rights movement, or churlish and resentful, to
see that they, too, and their heirs, stand with us on the shoulders of Rosa
Parks, Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power
grows against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the cold war and South
African apartheid ended to the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” defying all
preparations for Armageddon. The civil rights movement remains a model for new
democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace. In Iraq today, we are stuck on
the Vietnam model instead. There is no more salient or neglected field of study
than the relationship between power and violence.
We recoil from nonviolence at our peril. Dr. King rightly saw it at the heart of
democracy. Our nation is a great cathedral of votes — votes not only for
Congress and for president, but also votes on Supreme Court decisions and on
countless juries. Votes govern the boards of great corporations and tiny
charities alike. Visibly and invisibly, everything runs on votes. And every vote
is nothing but a piece of nonviolence.
SO what should we do, now that 40 years have passed? How do we restore our
political culture from spin to movement, from muddle to purpose? We must take
leaps, ask questions, study nonviolence, reclaim our history.
What Dr. King prescribed in his last Sunday sermon begins with the story of
Lazarus and Dives, from the 16th chapter of Luke. Told entirely from the mouth
of Jesus, it is a story starring Abraham the patriarch of Judaism, set in the
afterlife. There’s nothing else like it in the Bible.
Dr. King loved this parable as the text for a fabled 1949 sermon by Vernon
Johns, his predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.
Lazarus was a lame beggar who once pleaded unnoticed outside the sumptuous gates
of a rich man called Dives. They both died, and Dives looked from torment to see
Lazarus the beggar secure in the bosom of Abraham. The remainder of the parable
is an argument between Abraham and Dives, calling back and forth from heaven to
hell.
Dives first asked Abraham to “send Lazarus” with water to cool his burning lips.
But Abraham said there was a “great chasm” fixed between them, which could never
be crossed. In his sermon, Dr. Johns drew a connection between the chasm and
segregation.
But according to Dr. Johns, Dives wasn’t in hell because he was rich. He wasn’t
anywhere near as rich as Abraham, one of the wealthiest men in antiquity, who
was there in heaven. Nor was Dives in hell because he had failed to send alms to
Lazarus. He was there because he never recognized Lazarus as a fellow human
being. Even faced with everlasting verdict, he spoke only with Abraham and
looked past the beggar, treating him still as a servant in the third person —
“send Lazarus.”
Dr. King’s sermons drew more layers of meaning from this parable. He said we
must accept the suffering rich man as no ordinary, nasty sinner. When refused
water for himself, he worried immediately about his five brothers. Dives asked
Abraham again to send Lazarus, this time as a messenger to warn the brothers
about their sin. Tell them to be nice to beggars outside the wall. Do something,
please, so they don’t wind up here like me.
Dr. King said Dives was a liberal. Despite his own fate, he wanted to help
others. Abraham rebuffed this request, too, telling Dives that his brothers
already had ample warning in Torah law and the books of the Hebrew prophets.
Still Dives persisted, saying no, Abraham, you don’t understand — if the
brothers saw someone actually rise from the dead and warn them, then they would
understand.
Jesus quotes Abraham saying no. If the brothers do not accept the core teaching
of the Torah and the prophets, they won’t believe even a messenger risen from
the dead. Dr. King said this parable from Jesus burns up differences between
Judaism and Christianity. 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.
Dr. King then went back to Memphis to stand with the downtrodden workers, with
the families of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. You may have seen the placards
from the sanitation strike, which read “I Am a Man,” meaning not a piece of
garbage to be crushed and ignored. For Dr. King, to answer was a patriotic and
prophetic calling. 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.
Taylor Branch is the author, most recently, of “At Canaan’s
Edge,” the third volume in his history of the modern civil rights era. This
article was adapted from a speech he gave on Monday at the National Cathedral.
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