The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?
On April 4, 1968 I was in my dorm room at Smith College when I heard someone yelling, “Dr. King has been killed.” I rushed out and there on the television in the lounge was the news bulletin. “Dr. King has been killed.” I went back to my room alone and beat my fists on the top of my dresser until they were bloody.
On my campus and on campuses around the country where students were inspired by Dr. King to do voter registration and protest the Vietnam war, the grief was over-whelming. The person who was standing up for justice and inspiring us to do the same had just been killed. I remember it as though it were yesterday.
This is a solemn day, this 40th anniversary of the day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, was assassinated. In my adult life I have heard so many stupid speeches about Dr. King that blather on about how he “gave his life for freedom.” He didn’t give his life; it was taken. He was shot by an assassin because he had dared to speak the truth to power about race, about poverty and about war.
Yet, these days, the conservative co-optation of Dr. King is in full flower. Five years ago I was on a Nightline special about whether we should attack Iraq, a country that had not attacked us, and Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention quoted Dr. King in his argument in support of pre-emptive war. Rev. Rod Parsley, who believes we are in a cosmic and earthly war with Islam, who liberally laces his sermons and speeches with images of war and violence, in one sermon asked God for another Dr. King. “Give us somebody like Martin—what poor whites called Dr. King.” Why? Well, Rev. Parsley wants another Dr. King so that he will thunder against “the thirty-forty liberal pastors who filed against our ministry with the Internal Revenue Service.”
That is not Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1968, after the successes of civil rights and voting rights legislation, Dr. King was beginning to take on poverty and the war in Viet Nam. Two months before he was shot, while I was a student at Smith, Dr. King was sitting in the cafeteria of Chicago Theological Seminary on the south side of Chicago, talking with Dr. Calvin Morris. Dr. Morris, Dr. King, Rev. Jackson and many others had started Operation Breadbasket in our seminary cafeteria because when Dr. King first came to Chicago, the pulpits and even some of the doors of African American churches were closed to him. With the support of CTS President Howard Schomer and many of our faculty and students, they began to work for economic justice and an end to the Viet Nam war as well as civil rights.
In that winter of 1968, Dr. King was trying to build an interracial movement to end the war in Viet Nam and to bring about greater economic equality. Poverty and war, these challenges were daunting even after the civil and legal successes of 1964 and 1965.
Sunday, March 31, 1968, Dr. King spoke at the National Cathedral. He called on Americans to look toward one another for a way forward. “We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Dr. King said. “And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”
In Dr. King’s theological vision, there is not only blessing, but also judgment on this nation. “Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.” And has America measured up? No. “America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.” Yes, we have done great things with our “scientific and technological power,” but when we stand before the God of history, that God will ask us, did you do justice?
“It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, ‘That was not enough! I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, yet do it unto me.’ That’s the question facing America today.”
A month later, Dr. King was dead, shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Dr. King’s message was so challenging to established power in the United States, power based on racial privilege, on militarism and on economic stratification, that he was killed for speaking out. It is no wonder that established power today wishes to domesticate Dr. King’s prophetic vision and co-opt it order to justify conflict.
But today of all days, today as we remember that 40 years ago Dr. King was killed for speaking out against unjust power, let us not be fooled. Dr. King was killed because he challenged racism, militarism and economic inequality. And if you are not doing the same, you have no right to claim this legacy.
It is a judgment on us all.
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