From Mike to Martyr: Becoming Martin Luther King Jr. by Rev. Steve Wilson

Transcription

1 From Mike to Martyr: Becoming Martin Luther King Jr. by Rev. Steve Wilson Before he was a postage stamp and had boulevards named after him, before he was awarded more than fifty honorary degrees and became accepted as the most important African American in US history, before in 1964, he became the youngest person ever to receive a Nobel Peace Prize and got a statue of his image hoisted up and onto the façade of Westminster Abbey, Martin Luther King Jr. was an almond-eyed kid named Michael. Yup Michael. He would only be renamed Martin Luther after his dad took a trip to Germany and changed both their names in honor of the German reformer. His being re-named at the ripe age of 5 was designed to instill a sense of responsibility and destiny. No spoiler alert necessary: it worked. However, before anyone could predict the impressive, courageous, tragic life the kid named Mike would grow up to live, he was the oldest son of a talented church organist and fiery preacher s kid. A chubby middle child born into a privileged African American neighborhood of Atlanta. His mom frequently brought her son around to various local churches to sing. They even sang at the city s premiere of the classic film Gone with the Wind. However, little is generally said about his mom s influence on him. His dad seems to steal most of the print on parental influence. The King biographer Michael Frady described Martin Luther Sr. as a commandingly chesty man. Martin s Dad was bolder and more physically imposing than Martin would ever be. MLK Sr. literally threatened to hit one of his own parishioners with a chair at a challenging church meeting. King Sr. was demanding and angry enough to frequently beat his namesake son too! A neighbor of the King s, overhearing one of the beatings that took place next door, recalled Martin Sr. said that he was going to make something of his son, even if it killed him. In hindsight we can see, in a way, it worked. The MLK we know reportedly took these beatings from dad with a stoic resignation. When being hit, our young hero would tear up some, but always silently, always sternly, and never let himself audibly cry. Let s feel that little boy for a second. It would be a sternness and selfcontrol in the face of challenge that never left him. The message that Martin learned early on, was that he should never, ever give a white man any fodder to dismiss him. To not take him seriously. Both dad and son saw themselves carrying on the noble standard set by the famed Washington Carver. Both saw it as their job to live as a contradiction to the stereotypes placed upon them, and never ever be seen to resemble the caricature handed his people. He spent a lifetime never publicly breaking that stern character. The MLK we celebrate this weekend grew up with the mind-bending, anger-cultivating context that instructed him that he was important. He was, within the African American, or at the time, the Negro community, a kid of privilege. The grandson of sharecroppers whose son turned into a successful preacher, Martin grew up attended to at home, at church, and in the relatively affluent black community that surrounded him.

2 And then, the minute he stepped out into the broader white world, he received a very different Sociologically, we know now that the recipe for creating dissent in a person is to fill them with pride, and then tell them they are worthless. If you want to build an activist from scratch, you provide that person with the dissonant experiences of dignity and indignity. King lived that contrast. Our hero, my hero was born at that cultural and psychological borderline. I think that made the difference. When he was a teenager, Martin worked at a local mattress store and at a local railway station. In these places, he witnessed the first-hand mistreatments and indignities of his people. As a teen, he committed in his heart to hate every white person. All those experiences seemed to have formed the stern, professional demeanor we think of when we see MLK. Those experiences seem to have led him to transcend his relatively stout short body and his average looks. His presence was far more statuesque and regal than others of his height and objective appearance. However, to fully understand the man we know and honor tomorrow with the same status now as a founding father, you must understand that while Martin was firm and unbendingly stoic on the public stage, behind the scenes and off stage, he could be moody and impulsive. The balance to his firm façade was that he could be both depressively brooding and selfishly indulgent. During his childhood, he twice jumped out of the window of his home in attempts to kill himself. From his teenage years on, he would smoke, drink, and I think indulge is a fair word, in the company of women. It was behavior that although hardly odd, reportedly had a binging and anxiety-purging quality to it. I don t know if his actions ever crossed the line to hash-tag me-too, behavior, but I don t know that it didn t either. By the time he became a teen, he had cultivated enough polish To earn the nickname Natty. King was the kind of guy who always drove a simple car, but wore silk pajamas. Silk pajamas, interestingly, that he always requested when he was arrested and had to spend the night in jail. Which as we know, given that it was part of his strategy, a frequent place to crash. Always smaller and less aggressive than his dad, like most teens coming into his own, he rebelled against some of his upbringing. In his mid-teens, he remembers denying the bodily resurrection of Christ, and calling the bombastic style of his dad s preaching, an embarrassment. Martin was always smart. When he was a kid listening to a preacher he whispered to his mother that he would have fancy big words like that someday too. It didn t take long. Even as a kid he was always a bit of a wordsmith. Smart enough to skip the 9 th grade and then a few years later skipped his senior high school year too. MLK was able to head off to college early because so many of the 18 to 22-year-old African- Americans that would normally have been Morehouse College students went off to fight in WWII. In response to this odd historical circumstance, the Morehouse administration offered anyone who could pass their entrance exam admission. King passed the entrance exam, and by age 15, Martin was a college student. By 15, MLK Jr. was a smart, cavalier, romantic young undergrad at the nation s premier black university.

3 At Morehouse he was a good, but hardly outstanding student who generally found a seat at the back of the classroom. Perhaps it was because he was so young. He was always smart, always had a great vocabulary, but was never that detail oriented. He and I share a commitment to justice, and a love of writing, and a certain carelessness for proper grammar, and accurate spelling. So, next time you read the newsletter, and wonder why there is a comma there or not there, remember, your humble minister is just trying to be more like Martin Luther King. Unlike me however, he quite liberally borrowed the academic ideas of others. Quite simply, he plagiarized work his entire academic career. His real intellectual gift was never really as much as an academic as it was as what we call a practical theologian. As a thinker, as a student, as an intellectual, He was never quite as diligent and specific, more interested in the practical implications of what he learned. Those who have studied his work and patterns must have discerned that he always synthesized information into his own framework exceedingly well. He really became a hybrid of a preacher reared in the emotive tradition of black Baptist church life, who then got a sophisticated education. You can hear in his speech that he thought and wrote to speak. And as a speaker, well to me, his gift is that he was an amazing orator, dignified and emotive. Flowery without being too pretentious, and emotional without sounding too sentimental. He is my favorite person to listen too. I almost can t hear him without crying. King, Jesus, my grandfather, and my dad are my heroes. And, more importantly he walked his talk. Walked his talk so much sometimes it is hard for me to listen. King always does his job of making me feel like I don t do enough. He is in my head like a Jewish mother. It was at Morehouse that he first got his first real exposure to big theological ideas. There he was first exposed to Thoreau s discourse on civil disobedience, and the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system. As a college student, Martin also talked his way into some women s hearts and clothes. He ran with a group of male friends who called themselves the wreckers for their proclivity to win and dispense with the hearts of women. A less admirable use of his gifts. But style aside, romantic and or lustful interests aside, King always wanted, expected, and was determined to make a difference. He was, after all, born and re-named to make a difference! He never forgot that, he made more of a difference than he or his dad could have ever expected. While as an undergrad teasing with visions of how he might do that, he considered careers in law and science, but made the practical decision that as a Southern black man, it was in the ministry that he could be most impactful. At 18 while finishing up his undergraduate degree, he went back home to enter the ministry. He called his decision to enter the ministry a heatless decision driven by what he called a strong desire to give himself over to an idea bigger than the practicalities of his own present life. That sounds like King, doesn t it? It really is. How very him to coolly and rationally make a selfless decision driven by a mix of deep conviction, and an ego that drove him to action. That s Martin Luther King to me. King described his choice to leave school and return to the church as the one path that offered the most reasonable way to fill what he phrased, "an inner urge to serve humanity."

4 Although obviously following in his father s footsteps, he made the very intentional personal choice to walk that path in a more rational way. His first step in that path was to literally go back to the church he grew up in and was groomed to take over. Standing in that pulpit for the first time, while still a teen, it is reported that he looked in one biographer s description, like a dwindled version of his dad in the pulpit. Until, he started speaking, and then he was brilliant. At the end of the first sermon he would ever preach in his home church, the congregation he grew up in, rose to its feet-- elated. They didn t know, they couldn t, and wouldn t have recognized that he largely ripped off the sermon, from the famous preacher Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick. Nonetheless, he was good! Confident that he had style, but maybe not the full the intellectual gravitas it took to match his talent as a statesman, he enrolled Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. At just 19, King entered his new small northern seminary with the disciplined self-righteousness polish he always carried. Always very concerned to represent his fellow negroes well, he scolded a fellow black student for having beer in his room. At Crozer he became a more conscientious student than he had ever been and began to read more broadly. In seminary, he explored the world religions, read Marx, and assessed how his own personal experiences and insights measured up against the teachings of leading liberal theologians of the age. He continued to be captivated with Thoreau, our Thoreaumost specifically his idea that one noble person could reform society. While at Crozer, MLK Jr. also first encountered Gandhi s efforts for non-violent resistance in India. Reflecting on that time, he said that if he ever had been pushed he would have believed that only armed revolt was likely to change segregation. King said that he learned from Gandhi how to paint with the broad brushes of good and evil. He learned well. Eventually he grew more comfortable in his small mixed-race Pennsylvania seminary, and began to reach out socially. He started drinking, playing pool, smoking cigarettes, and seemed to have returned to be the lothario that he always would be. At Crozer, he fell hard for a German girl who worked in the school kitchen. Hard enough that he aimed to marry her. However, given the obvious consequences of what an interracial relationship would mean to his future, he was, albeit only reluctantly, talked out of it. Heart-broken, he ended it and went through a period of depression. Amidst this romance, and depression at Crozer, he also became the student he had never quite had been. By graduation he was the valedictorian of his class. For this he was awarded a scholarship to pursue a doctorate at Boston University. At the time of his graduation from Crozer, his proud dad bought him a fancy new green car, and after a trip home, off he was to Beantown. It was a big draw for me to sit in some of the same seats he sat in at BU school of Theology. I entered BU in pursuit of a master s degree in Ethics, having, at that time, no intention of becoming a minister. I entered BU with weird visions of activism in my head, in part, inspired by King. I was thrilled to find out that MLK and I shared a teacher (Walter Muelder) who taught MLK Jr. in some of the first years of his long career, and me in some of his last. But this is not my story. In Boston, beginning to pursue his Ph.D., King met Coretta Scott who was studying to be a vocal soloist at the New England Conservatory of Music. They formally

5 courted, took in quite a bit of Boston s music scene, and on one of their summer breaks back down South from Boston, got married in her home s backyard in Alabama. He was 24. His dad was none too pleased that his son didn t marry one of the upper crust gals in Atlanta and in doing so, nearly assure his return home. Martin never did take over his father s pulpit as planned. They did eventually co-minister a church together when MLK was in the middle of his 13-year civil rights career, but I am getting ahead of myself. In Boston, King mingled with Unitarians and occasionally attended the Arlington St. church. Although King s encounters with Unitarianism would hardly be worth much of a mention in any real biography, they are for us, of interest. In fact, after his death, Coretta reported that had her husband thought that he could have had the same impact as a Unitarian pastor and activist as he expected to have as a Baptist, she said he briefly considered becoming a Unitarian. Thank God, he didn t! He did way too much for us to want to warp history for our own denominational pride. King in that same speech also mentioned that during his leadership of the bus boycott in Montgomery, three UU Pastors had provided him valuable counsel. In 1965, King also spoke at the memorial service of Unitarian Universalist Minister James Reeb who went South to support the effort to desegregate Selma and was beaten to death by white racists. A year later, King was invited to deliver the Ware Lecturer at our General Assembly in Florida in His speech was entitled, Don t Sleep Through the Revolution. To this day Beacon Press, the UU publishing house, has sole rights to publish his works. At BU, King continued to digest and synthesize the theological movements and theory of the day. He met fellow African American academic Dean Howard Thurman, who mentored him and deepened his understanding of Gandhi s efforts. Five years later, a married man now, King graduated and got a gig at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama. During his first year serving the Dexter Avenue congregation, our 26-year -old hero finished his dissertation and father his first child. There was never any moss on King s stone! We have of course reached the beginning of the acts he committed that have us pausing today to tell his story. And that story really begins with the phone call he got that asked him to lead the local city-wide bus boycott, a fight that had been brewing, but was sparked to life by one Rosa Parks. As we know, he said yes. On Dec 5 th, 1955, the Monday morning following Rosa Parks now famous Thursday refusal to move from her bus seat, King stood in the window of his home peering through the window and watched the nearly empty buses roll by. He was shocked the cry for a boycott was working. He would never be the same. We would never be the same. I am not going to document King s entire battle for civil rights I barely need to set the scene. It is perhaps some of the best and worst moments in America's history. You likely have some of the iconic images seared into your head. Churches overflowing with hopeful, scared people singing big hymns that led them out the church doors to perform the courageous yet simple acts of marching, and sitting and gathering where they were not allowed. Very frequently inspired by King s own words of

6 courage, African Americans walked out of those churches and their neighborhoods to cross bridges or enter town centers where Troopers and angry, entitled, and sometimes hooded people awaited. There was a violence back then we haven t really seen until well, the last couple years. We because of King, and for all the violence there seems an aliveness, a naiveté almost that we have lost. As sad and ironic as it is, whenever there was no dramatic violence that spilled blood out into American televisions and newspapers, that failed to get captured by the press. King and his friends needed to perform the emotionally difficult job of getting people into harm s way, and then into the press for the morality of the cause to be felt. Tragically, the more kids blown away with fire hoses, the more women beaten with sticks, and the more dogs turned on protesters, the more successful the campaigns were. Had it not been for his steady non-violent call, that era likely would have been even bloodier. It was all hard. And their efforts only succeeded about half the time. At the same time, he publicly stood so strong, he was privately terrified of dying. He felt that way for good reason. During those 13 years of his activism, his house was bombed and his life was frequently threatened. All the while, he was talking to presidents and mayors. At the same time, he was making stops to receive honorary degrees, he was being attacked. During his campaigns, he was beaten up, hit by a flying brick, and stabbed nearly to death. He was praised and mocked and threatened by his own government in the same day. He was arrested, had his hotel rooms bugged, and he was treated like royalty. Coretta received from the FBI audio tapes of Martin with other women. Just before he would receive the Nobel Peace prize, they were sent a suicide note as both encouragement and blackmail that he should give up his fight or his life. King wanted political reform to the apartheid system of the South, for sure, but he also wanted to flip the script. In the South, King saw an epic wrong of biblical scope, a Cain and Abel kind of wrong, the kind of wrong where two brothers were in broken relationship with each other. And, as much as anyone can change a culture, he, and of course thousands of others, in mostly relatively small cities named Selma and Birmingham, Montgomery and Albany, King reminded us that great moral sagas of right and wrong are still alive in the world. Racism was, of course for King systematic acts that denied access and opportunity to black people, but it was also, and perhaps more importantly, a violation of the way it should and could be. It really was this high-minded view of the fight that kept King unable to see a victory that did not transform the heart of white America. He understood that in the end, whites were victims too. Whatever change we might have gone through, none of us would ever be the same. I love him for stretching like that. When he was faced with the brutality he saw in St. Augustine, Florida, he came to doubt that non-violent resistance would be enough. However, publicly, he never wavered that it could be done any other way. In practical terms, he saw that violence between blacks and whites fight would be a loss for both, and that in the end we were going to need to live together. He stood in pulpits and said things like this.

7 We will meet the forces of hate with the power of love We must say to our white brothers all over the South, we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering Bomb our homes and we will still love you We will appeal to your heart and conscience and we will win you in the process. Too me, if you can t deep down in your bones, feels how powerful and good and meaningful, these words are, then you don t really get him. King, it was poetically said, was a moral set designer, who turned an important idea like voting rights into a battle for the soul of our nation. His vision pulled him beyond civil rights to Vietnam, from Vietnam to the causes of poor people everywhere. Before he was killed he began to speak more frequently and boldly about issues of poverty and class. He began to be very vocal that the US was on the wrong side of a world revolution. And then he went to step in and provide support for sanitation workers in Memphis. On the morning of April 4 th, 1968 when he stepped out on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he was shot. Shot by James Earl Jones, who a lot of ink suggests did not act alone. His first responders came from the police at the fire station across the street, where FBI surveillance crew was monitoring the actions of King. He was rushed to the hospital, and died after surgery failed. The antagonism between King and the FBI, the lack of an all-points bulletin to find the killer, and the police presence nearby led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination. In an act that harkens back to saving the hair from a martyr, Walter Abernathy, his best friend after returning from the hospital, took a stiff bit of paper from the inside of a starched shirt collar and scooped King s blood off the ground and into a jar. Jesse Jackson, nearly always by his side, dipped his hands right down into the pool of blood left from the bullet and spread it on his own white shirt. When the doctors performed the autopsy, they said that 39-year-old King had the heart of a 60-year-old. King's main legacy was sealed in tribute and in an act of appeasement to the violence that erupted days after his murder when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of And in 1982, a national holiday was established in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. To those who wished to remain in control, in control of other s lives he was subversive. To me he is a hero with whom I shared the earth with for just over a year. He took an ugly part of our country and made us believe in a great idea. King gave us hope, and much of the blueprint for whole. King reminds me of just how powerful a great idea can be. King was an imperfect man with a perfect vision. So, what does he mean to us today? You re not going to be King. I despite my most lofty dreams, will not be much like him, you will not be like him. But the question he asks me, and maybe all of us is this: What imprudent, selfless, ego driven, high minded thing are you gonna do with your precious time here. What are we going to do? What are you individually going to do. What are we collectively going to do? Amen #