In his later sermons, the Reverend Martin Luther King compared himself to Moses. Moses led his people out of slavery. He saw the Promised Land. But he never got there himself. Moses died on a mountain top in Jordan. Deuteronomy 34:1-10. This was the fate that Dr. King foreshadowed for himself.
In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis, Tennessee supporting a garbage workers’ strike.
Thirteen Hundred sanitation workers had struck because black workers had been sent home while white workers remained on the job.
King gave a speech supporting the sanitation workers, and 15,000 came to the Mason Temple to hear what he had to say.
He returned again to Memphis to lead a march but things went wrong; there was looting and fights with police.
King returned again, to have another march, without the looting and without violence.
On the evening of April 3rd , King gave a speech saying, “I don’t know what will happen now.” He said: “I’ve been to the mountain top.” More, “I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Toward evening, that next day, April 4th, he stepped out on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.
A rifleman shot a .30-06 caliber bullet that broke Dr. King’s jaw, cut through his neck and spinal cord, and the slug lay spent in his shoulder blade. King died. He was not going to reach the Promised Land. He would die on that mountain top in Jordan instead.
His message, however, survived and it was that we must carry on and march to the Promised Land. We must resume and continue the march that he began. We must begin the world over again. And that is our tribute to King and to ourselves – to continue and finish what he began..
But where to begin anew?
Robert Kennedy said in Indianopolis to a crowd that had not yet heard that King had been killed that we must “tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.”
King would have agreed with that sentiment. Taming the savage! Making gentle!
We live in a time, however, when we risk greatly losing what King gained. It is because too few presume there’s no urgency. Christ said that he would spit forth from his mouth those who were tepid. Revelations 3:16. There are many who are luke warm today. King said of such folk, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” So we cannot remain silent. But many are. We cannot fail to act. But many are indifferent in the face of gross violations of civil rights and liberties.
Aristotle said nothing improves your aim like having a target. King spoke against “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.” Those are our targets – fighting those three, so inextricably tied together.
By way of background, you should know at least that King was born on January 15, 1929. He followed Jesus as a minister and followed Ghandi on how he might lead others in a ministry of tolerance and political action for fairness and equal rights without violence.
King led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. He also led the March on Washington in 1963 where he spoke of his dream for a nation – an articulation of a dream, brought home with such political force, that it prompted sweeping civil rights and voting reform legislation.
When King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his struggles against segregation through Ghandian civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance; he took the award as a commission to extend his efforts from civil rights to advocating peace.
The seeds of racism were planted when our nation was founded. Our founding fathers agreed to tolerate slavery to make this nation. That corrupt and toxic bargain has compromised this nation’s promise from the start to this very day – begging the question, what we really meant when we said in our declaration of independence that we believed in unalienable rights.
We know today that the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott, deciding that a man was property, was wrong.
But haven’t you wondered how politicians make similar made decisions today, in their political accommodations, that compromise essential truths?
Justice Taney made such a decision in Dred Scott out of respect for the seminal compromise that this nation made to tolerate slavery.
The Taney Court traded soulful humanity for slavery in service to political convenience.
As it was done then, so is it done today.
No, not that decision on slavery but others just as odious in their own way.
When the Civil War ended, it was believed that slaves were made free by the 13th Amendment, and all men acknowledged as equal by the 14th Amendment.
But it wasn’t to be so.
Words we found were weak tools when it came to overcoming the differences between and among races that so many wrongly found intolerable.
My wife Holly and I visited the St. Louis cemetery in Louisiana several years back, and we went to the grave site of Homer Plessy whose courageous conduct prompted an infamous Supreme Court case.
In Louisiana in 1890, there was a law that blacks and whites rode separately in different railway cars. The way that the conductors distinguished color was by comparing one’s skin color to that of a brown paper bag and, if you were as dark or darker, you rode in the “black” car.
The failure to “know your place” in the correct car was a crime.
The passenger and the conductor both were held accountable for this crime.
Blacks in Louisiana thought that the Civil War and the amendments to our constitutional really meant something.
Homer agreed to test this railway car offense at to race.
Homer Plessy was light-skinned, seven-eights Caucasion, and only one-eights black, so he could have passed the screening as white but he made it known that he was black.
This mattered when, on June 7, 1892, he boarded a car for white patrons only on the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans en route to Covington, Louisiana.
When the conductor asked Homer to leave the white car, he refused. He was arrested. He challenged his arrest and prosecution as violative of the the 13th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th prohibiting slavery and the 14th assuring him of equal rights. But to no avail.
Homer was convicted and sentenced to a fine of $25.00. The US Supreme Court found that “separate” did not mean “inferior.” Justice Brown wrote for 7 of the 8 justices that it was false to assume “that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so,” he said, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Simply amazing you might rightly think.
Justice John Marshall Harlan objected in his dissent to the majority opinion, saying that this decision by the majority would be vilified in days to come as much as the Dred Scott decision ever was. Harlan did not believe “separate” was “equal” and the conduct was plainly not even close to “equal” when it came to all manner of facilities including toilets, cafes, and public schools.
Plessy v. Ferguson had the effect of empowering the South to do worse things, under the guise of separate and equal, to segregate the races, not just on rail cars but in housing, education, hotels, restaurants, beaches, interracial marriages, and by taking away the vote from blacks by requiring they pay poll taxes that they couldn’t afford, requiring that they owned land to vote when they were mostly rental tenants, and that they pass literacy tests that were hardly fair and most certainly unnecessary.
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 said that “separate” was not “equal” and it was rightly hailed for its content but the decision ran aground in its implementation.
The Brown decision said that this offending segregation had to be remedied with “all deliberate speed” but no one first suspected that “deliberate” was “glacial” or that it might mean no movement at all – or massive resistance in the South.
This was what King was up against when he set out to make a difference.
We talk about faith – and we know King to be a man of faith but he also spoke of ecumenism - a broader acceptance than just what he believed. Now how refreshing is that breadth of tolerance?
He said: “A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical …”
King exhorted “every nation” to “develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing, unconditional love for all men.”
He could not help but comment on those who disagreed with him, with “his oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept” that was “so readily dismissed by the Nietzches of the world as a weak and cowardly force” and how, he said, it “has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind.”
We see in our body politic a different notion of Christian today than what King held dear, we see a faux political Christian – who has no use for the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. So how could such a person call himself or herself a Christian?
Jesus spoke of kindness and charity toward the poor. But we have Republican presidential candidates who think food stamps to feed the poor and hungry are a political punch line.
Jesus spoke of mercy but we have elected officials who favor tough love – go get a job you bum, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Don’t expect charity. That’s for suckers – like, well, Jesus, who said love your neighbor.
Jesus spoke of peacemakers as the children of God but we have Christians who would war throughout the world as if that was what Jesus would want – when he said exactly the opposite – to make peace.
Jesus said blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness. Reverend Don Prange is certain that the word “righteousness” may be properly understood as “justice.”
Unbelievably, we have faux Christians who say that “social justice” has no place in the pulpit. Does anybody ever read the scripture they purport encompasses what they believe?
The Sermon on the Mount has been excised from the belief and practice of the Faux Christians who use faith as a political device.
They show intolerance for those who do not believe as they do. They can’t be said to “resist not evil” and they most certainly don’t “turn the other cheek.”
Our challenge today, without regard to religious believe, is a nation that increasingly we find lacks soulful compassion.
King spoke of a faith among the religious for humankind over property. Faith must go beyond religious belief to encompass Senecan Stoicism and Kantian humanists and every other kind of belief system.
Faith cannot itself be a basis for intolerance – though it plainly is for many.
Einstein rightly worried that “A man who is convinced of the truth of his religion is indeed never tolerant.”
But King, by word and example, was tolerant.
King understood that, if we can’t co-exist with our differences, we may not be able to exist at all.
King also found a method to implement what he believed.
He visited Ghandi’s birthplace in India in 1959 and said,
“Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Ghandi embodied in his certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”
King did not believe that each of us was an isolated ego. He believed we were part of what the Reverend Jesse Jackson thought of as a multicolored quilt of differences, sewn together into one vast unified fabric. No doubt Jackson was inspired by King’s own remarks. King said, “all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny.”
How do we, to borrow Robert Kennedy’s formulation, “tame the savageness of man?” It was what King did – modeled on Jesus and Ghandi – non-violence in protest for fairness and equality.
That’s how he fought the persistent racism on buses, in eateries, hotels, jobs, indeed at every turn, and how he fought to remove obstacles to the franchise so that blacks would have recourse to how they were badly governed when they arrived in the polling booth and threw a lever.
What King discovered and sought to remedy was a system that valued property over persons and, in the bargain, short-changed workers in pay and benefits, denied them credit, housing, education and many other opportunities – all because of race – in a form of violence as invidious as physical violence, economic violence.
In his meditations in the course of political action, King had to consider the question of war – the Vietnam war then.
King had been praised for his non-violence in Montgomery, also on the Freedom Rides, in Albany, Birmingham and Selma. He was dumb-founded therefore when the public and even his strongest supporters challenged his opposition to the war. They told him that civil rights and peace didn’t mix.
But King said he had to live up to his ministry. He said, “the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.”
He saw capitalism, and the military industrial complex, entangled in the racism at home and the war abroad. He saw profit-taking at the cost of human life. King asked how we could possibly burn human beings with napalm? How could we create orphans here at home with the loss of servicemen abroad?
Father Berrigan took draft cards and burned them with napalm – and he was prosecuted and imprisoned for that. Berrigan asked how destroying paper records with napalm could possibly compare with killing Vietnamese men, women and children.
King connected racism with capitalism and militarism by the fact that the war was sending the poor and minorities, “their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions to the rest of the population.”
As Omar Khayyam said: “the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”
We have moved on but it’s not what many expected when King lived.
There has been a perverse march to the rear – a taking back of rights, a compromising, diminishing and elimination of the gains that King made and this assault is no longer just against blacks and minorities.
Today we see the triple evil as dangerous a threat as ever to the unfulfilled American promise of fairness and equality.
We fight wars of conquest, born by the poorest among us, by minorities disproportionally.
Our businesses have only one measure of success – the bottom line – and not the welfare of society.
Civil rights and liberties are under siege.
So-called Christian candidates make light of feeding the poor, of housing , of job training, of helping the unemployed, and it looks like things are going to get worse – before they ever get better.
To choose one particularly egregious example, this nation is watching voting rights taken away again.
There have been initiatives across the country to disenfranchise minorities.
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU has concluded millions of Americans will lose the right to vote – or only get the vote if someone will help them do so.
We’re talking about reducing our voting population by 5 million votes.
The states that have cut back on voting rights supply 185 electoral votes of the 270 needed to elect a president. That’s two-thirds of what a candidate must win to become president.
6 of the 12 battle ground states have either cut back voting rights or are considering doing so.
These limitations on voting rights attack persons of color, the poor, the elderly, and students.
We haven’t seen anything like this in this country in a century – we are going back to 1912.
Paul Weyrich, an evangelical leader once said, “As a matter of fact our leverage in elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
The strategy is clear, to have a reduced electorate like that had in the off-year congressional election in 2010 (when Republicans shifted leadership in the Congress), rather than voting like the more inclusive presidential election in 2008.
This is a calculated effort to disrupt voting rights by –
· New photo ID laws – requiring a state issued ID – that may require other proof including a birth certificate that is not easy to obtain and may be unaffordable. No, not everyone does drive, can drive or ever did drive – so they haven’t had ID that satisfies the new rules.
· There are new limitations on voter registration drives to make it harder to register.
· There are efforts to eliminate Election Day registration.
· Other states are curtailing the early voting period – cutting it shorter.
The pretense for these “election reforms” is that this will prevent fraud.
Of course, there hasn’t been any widespread or even isolated fraud that could possibly justify these sweeping reforms, disenfranchising so many; rather, this is about limiting the vote, suppressing it, you know like those old Jim Crow laws.
You may think, when you hear this discussion, I have an ID. And you do.
But more people than you think not only don’t drive but they rely on cash-checking stores that don’t require the kind of ID the state is mandating in this post 9-11 world -- when it’s harder than ever to get ID.
The New Dominion is becoming the old South once more.
At the current legislative session in Richmond, only days ago, Virginia joined the rank of States passing laws to curtail voting rights, requiring photo IDs to vote, and a 5 day waiting period after you register to vote.
Yeats wrote it’s an Irish curse to dream things that the world has never seen.
But by such dreams, one struggles to make them a reality, and thus does civilization advance.
King had a special dream and began a march to the Promised Land telling one and all his dream of fairness and equality.
It is our duty to complete that march – and to make real that dream.
Robert Kennedy said to those in South Africa, still fighting apartheid, but making progress, how they were making a difference for the better – and why they would succeed.
Kennedy told them: “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage … that human history is thus shaped. Every time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million difference centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Each of us must act to bring down the walls of oppression and resistance right here at home.
Give me a place to stand, Archimedes said, and I can move the world.
So we can today if we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us, on the shoulders of Martin Luther King, and we reaffirm his belief in tolerance, equality, freedom and non-violence.
We cannot fail – nor afford to fail – and by this resolve to follow King’s course, and to perform the political acts required, we pay tribute to Martin Luther King who only saw the Promised Land.
We owe it to King and ourselves to resume our march so we may arrive at the Promised Land.
Thank You.
