This is my fourth and likely final post on At Canaan's Edge, Taylor Branch's book on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. The first post is here. The second post is here. The third post is here.
In April, I went through John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree.
In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
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I was speaking to a group on Zoom about my own book this week, and I veered off to share a little bit about my experience of reading about the civil rights movement, and MLK, in At Canaan's Edge.
To my surprise, a wave of emotion washed over me as I brought to mind the figure of this solitary man. He was one among many, yes, as I wrote last week. The civil rights movement was full of brave, courageous people who faced down threats and fears that would make any of us shake in our boots.
But he was also thrust to the fore of this movement. He was called, and he did respond to the call, but then his life was taken from him, long before he was killed.
I have written in the previous two weeks how the movement lost momentum after Selma and the 1965 Civil Rights Act. I wrote last week about how Taylor Branch's book covers the rise of the black power movement, and King's resistance to this.
It is this isolation of King, from his own movement, that I find most compelling, and most painful. And it is his determination to remain committed to non-violent civil disobedience, rather than armed resistance, that I find so fascinating and arresting. What convinced him to keep preaching this message, when so many around him had given up?
As someone who is intimately familiar with the architecture and details of the Christian faith and its stories, King's saga increasingly reminded me of Christ's way. It's not just his martyrdom. It that King radically lived out the most challenging teachings of Christ, especially the ones that relate to the idea of power, true power. He sought to model the low way of Christ that leads to the high places: a victory that comes not through dominating one's opponent but through a bold meekness which seeks the good of all; of a power found in loving one's enemies; of meeting hate and violence, not in kind, but with forgiveness; of a willingness to suffer to advance the cause of the oppressed.
"To our most bitter opponents we say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering," King said in his sermon, Loving Your Enemies.
It is part of a larger passage that is breathtaking in its moral ambition, its largeness of purpose and spirit, and its pure bravery. It is also, as King usually was, clear-eyed about reality.
"For more than three centuries American Negroes have been battered by the iron rod of oppression, frustrated by day and bewildered by night by unbearable injustice, and burdened with the ugly weight of discrimination," King wrote. "Forces to live with these shameful conditions, we are tempted to become bitter and to retaliate with a corresponding hate. But if this happens, the new order we seek will be little more than a duplicate of the old order. We must in strength and humility meet hate with love."
He continued:
"Of course, this is not practical. Life is a matter of getting even, of hitting back, of dog eat dog. Am I saying that Jesus commands us to love those who hurt and oppress us? Do I sound like most preachers—idealistic and impractical? Maybe in some distant Utopia, you say, that idea will work, but not in the hard, cold world in which we live."
"My friends, we have followed the so-called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos. Time is cluttered with the wreckage of communities that surrendered to hatred and violence. For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way. This does not mean that we abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community."
This ethic is the way of Christ as I understand it. It is what I have tried to pursue in my own context. I do not know how much of this faith I was taught by my parent's church growing up, and how much of Jesus' teaching came to me through my own fairly intense study and reading of the Scriptures. I am grateful for what I was given, and saddened by the ways in which many American Christians live out this way of Christ in their interpersonal relationships, but fail to see the implications for politics and public life.
***
There are different versions of King's Loving Your Enemies sermon. The King Institute at Stanford has a transcript of a sermon King preached in 1957 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. That was King's home church, where he was called to the pastorate in 1954. The version I quote from above is taken from Strength to Love, a collection of King's sermons. All of those sermons, King said, were written "during or after" the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in 1955 and lasted until the end of 1956.
I labor on this point of timing because I want to spend the remaining portion of this reflection focused on King's state of mind a decade later after the bus boycott, after he wrote the Loving Your Enemies sermon. When Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, it ignited the civil rights movement in America, and it elevated King into a national figure at age 26 or so. He was a leading pastor and orator in the city in which Parks made her stand. He wrote this sermon on loving your enemies while he was still in his late 20's.
Roughly a decade later, King had lived through and endured more upheaval than most of us can conceive of. He had seen more human hatred and brutality up close than most of us will ever see in our whole lives. He had achieved great victories but was increasingly worn down by the never ceasing series of crisis after crisis around the country. He was only one man in the face of an ever adapting status quo that, to this day, seeks to put new garments on old ghosts.
And by 1967 and 1968, he was increasingly abandoned by many who had previously followed him. The Black Panthers and the black power movement were the more interesting, provocative, and seemingly relevant vehicles for the struggle. A new generation of activists were coming up behind King, and declared him irrelevant. "The young people here have reached a political consciousness that those ministers do not understand or control. As for non-violence, that died in Newark and Detroit," one young activist said (Branch, 740). The references to Newark and Detroit are to major urban riots that took place in those two cities in the summer of 1967. Newark's violence claimed the lives of 23 people, and in Detroit 43 people were killed.
And you can see in Branch's narrative that King's conviction about the effectiveness of non-violence is wavering. His mental stability, also, was fraying. In March 1968 he preached a sermon called "Unfulfilled Dreams." Branch writes that King, in that sermon, "identified with crushed hopes." And during this period, "King's gloomy distraction pushed friends to the brink of alarm" (707). He made a quick trip to Acapulco, seeking some relief and replenishment.
But King was so worn down and disturbed that he could not even sleep once he arrived at his hotel room. "He stared alone from a high balcony until nearly dawn and evaded Abernathy's questions about what was wrong — pointing enigmatically to a rock in Acapulco harbor, then singing 'Rock of Ages.' His conduct alarmed Abernathy" (708).
I think my emotions, when I brought up King on that Zoom call, came from seeing him suffer so much and yet endure in his insistence that non-violence was the way. "King ... upheld nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues weary of sacrifice. To the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people" (771).
And here is where it is important to reflect on the fact that, for King, non-violence was more than a political or pragmatic slogan. It was "an act of public theology," as Gregory Thompson put it in his 2015 dissertation on King.
Thompson quotes King, in 1958, saying that "from the beginning a basic philosophy guided the movement."
"This guiding principle has since been referred to variously as nonviolent resistance, noncooperation, and passive resistance. But in the first days of the protest none of these expressions was mentioned: the phrase most often heard was ‘Christian love.’ It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.”
Again, that was said in 1958. A year later King would make a five-week pilgrimage to India, to deepen his understanding of Mahatma Ghandi's philosophy of non-violent resistance. King's own philosophy had been shaped by Ghandi's writings and actions before the Montgomery bus boycott, and his trip to India expanded his commitment to it.
Here is how King explained the impact of Christ and Ghandi on him, in his sermon, Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.
"As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence, is one of the most potent weapons available to an oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.
... At the beginning of the [Montgomery Bus Boycott] protest, the people called on me to serve as their spokesman. In accepting this responsibility, my mind, consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. This principle became the guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation and Gandhi furnished the method."
***
"Riots erupted in 110 American cities" (767) after King was murdered on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, on April 4, 1968.
King had no will. His net worth upon his death was less than $6,000.
He gave his all, and ultimately his life, to seek economic justice, freedom from oppression, and the defeat of hatred and discrimination with love.
The days grew darker still after he was killed. He died with almost nothing of material value to his name.
But his memory and inspiration endures as a guiding light for our civic and political debates, and for our spiritual quest to overcome the hatred and violence in our own hearts. He is a modern founding father of the United States.
The challenge for those who benefit from the status quo is to avoid making King into a "plaster saint," (769) as his adviser Stanley Levison put it, and to grapple with the demands his life and message make upon each one of us. He was a radical, not a soothsayer. His face, his image, his words: they are a call to reject easy sentimentality or cheap unity.
King's visage should haunt us. What am I doing, today, to live the sacrificial way of love?