In America, we frame oversize pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and we miniaturize him at the same time.
We want him to be only a national hero, only a racial icon. A man who gave one great speech, helped black people sit at the front of the bus, led a march or two, got shot. On to the next question on the high school history quiz.
I’m in London, doing a series of talks on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and I am astounded by the diversity of the audiences -- Arabs and Africans, American expats and Indians, college students and senior citizens. A young British Muslim approached me after my talk at the British Library and said that reading King’s speeches and writings as a young woman changed her life. Her work for interfaith cooperation is inspired by him.
Today, on the anniversary of King’s martyrdom, I am speaking on King's legacy at Westminster Abbey, where King is one of a handful of Americans honored with a statue.
I will speak of King in London as a global interfaith hero – rooted in his Christian faith and the American promise even while he revolutionized them, constantly learning from other traditions and reaching out to the world.
In 1950, when King was a young student in a Christian seminary, he went to see a lecture on Mahatma Gandhi in Philadelphia. Learning about Gandhi’s Hindu-based satyagraha (soul force) movement to free India stirred something in King. He had always believed in the Christian ethic of nonviolence, but thought it was relevant only for personal relationships. He was amazed that Gandhi had made that ethic the basis of a successful social reform movement.
Five years later, when King was named the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, he copied Gandhi’s approach in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The people who marched with him called their movement “Christian love”, but King knew that it was a Hindu named Mahatma Gandhi who had, as he put it, “furnished the method.”
In 1959, as the civil rights movement was gaining ground, King went to India to study Gandhi’s legacy firsthand. He marveled at the religious diversity of the subcontinent, how Gandhi had brought people of all faiths and classes together to work nonviolently for freedom.
When he returned to Montgomery, King got up in the pulpit of his church and spoke these words: “O God, our gracious heavenly father. We thank thee for the fact that you have defined men and women in all nations, in all cultures. We call you this name. Some call thee Allah, some call you Elohim. Some call you Jehovah, some call you Brahma. Some call you the Unmoved Mover.”
King’s ultimate vision was not just about race or nation, but new relationships – between people from different backgrounds, between America and the world, between humanity and God. That is why people from every country and faith derive inspiration from his legacy, a legacy best summed up in one of King’s final books, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community: “The great new problem of mankind (is that) we have inherited ... a great ‘ world house‘ in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu ... Because we can never again live apart, we must somehow learn to live with each other in peace.”
King does not belong only to people who look like him, or pray like him or speak like him.
King belongs to people who live up to his legacy of pluralism.
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