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?
My response to QUESTION 1: After the shock of grief and wave of sadness, I said to myself, “The curtain has come down on the stage he managed, but the play has not ended.” On the staff of a national church-organization deeply supportive of “the Movement,” I knew King as a strategist as well as as a word-master and was personally conversant with his best-known lieutenants.
(We were paying the salary of one of them. King asked us to send him the checks so he could be the paymaster, and we complied. He was a tight manager of his stage-crew.)
My response to QUESTION 2: As for the impact this martyrdom had on me, it deepened my conviction that – as I had said in the New York Times – America needs to become more realistic about violence. The simple moralism than violence is evil had comforted white racism’s self-satisfaction at condemning all black threats and outbreaks of violence. (Just imagine how King George III felt about the Boston Tea Party, an instance of organized violence breaking out from a church basement. Those evil Colonial insurgents!)
Let’s stay with the stage analogy. Act 1: A ghetto riot and police counter-violence. Act 2: King leads a well-publicized non-violent protest – well publicized so that the television cameras would be ready to catch the police counter-violence (dogs, fire hoses, shouting Bull O’Connors). Act 3: White America is shamed into support for “the Movement.” Act 4: King’s martyrdom – not the end of racism in America, but the death of any further dignity for Jim Crow.
My response to QUESTION 3: We live in a world more violent because hard-and-soft technology has made violence more accessible. King continues as a model of manipulating violence to good ends while being oneself non-violent. The simple-minded extremes of militarism and pacifism (King rejected both) increasingly misfit the complex realities of this global world. But underlying all considerations of means and models is the spiritual issue of whether we are to live by fear or faith. King’s power came from his heart-and-mind consonance with the Bible’s trust and hope in God – as in the words of his last speech, “I’ve been to the mountain, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.”
I must not close without mention of an under-remarked subtle double stratagem of King. It was as if he said, in one breath, “Poor me, I’m a victim; watch out, here I come!” Some clips show both: striding boldly while wiping a smashed tomato off his face. He’s still striding boldly year by year, and as a martyr he’s a permanent victim.
Jeremiah Wright is accused of “Jeremiads” in the denouncing spirit of some of Jeremiah’s speeches in the Bible book of that name. King was capable of such – for example, his (Riverside Church, NYC) Jeremiad against our war in Vietnam. But his preferred mode was from the other Bible book from the Prophet Jeremiah, namely, Lamentations.
King had a resonant, beautiful, lachrymose (tearful, mournful) voice. When he really wanted us all to weep for him and his racism-oppressed people and America's shameful history and present reality on race, he reinforced this pitiful tone with the Bible’s “kinah” meter and the sad rhythms of black spirituals. Of America’s great orators, he was the best tear-jerker.
Some others I knew in “the Movement” were as least as worthy as King of being the personal symbol of anti-racism in American history. But only King combined the gifts of word-master and stage-manager.
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