January 15, 2012
“Any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and women
and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that can scar the soul,
is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is sobering to think that today would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 83th birthday. What might his eloquent and prophetic voice have had to say about the events of the last forty-four years? Unfortunately, we will never know. King’s death at the age of 39 was certainly one of the tragic but defining events of my young life. I am sure that it played no small part in my decision to consider the ministry as a meaningful career.
For King showed me and a generation of other young people that it was possible for a single person to make a difference and to lead constructive social change, and that religion and the church could still be relevant. He, like his hero Gandhi and others before him, proved that the universal human values which are found in all religious traditions could be a powerful motivating force on the road to a more just and peaceful and loving world. He showed us the importance of living a life of service to others and not just to oneself.
In thinking about what I could say about King this year that would be fresh and new, it occurred to me that one of the most overlooked legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. was his critique of the interconnection between militarism, racism, and poverty, and especially his growing commitment to economic justice not just for African Americans, but for all Americans. I suspect that this is not by accident.
Indeed, like his increasingly vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, King’s work on behalf of economic justice may have been as much a cause of his unpopularity, and ultimately of his death, as his work on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.
It is sometimes forgotten in all the mythology surrounding King that the last evening before his assassination in Memphis,Tennesseein 1968 was spent not at a civil rights rally but at a gathering in support of striking sanitation workers—read “garbage men.” There, King gave one of his most memorable and prophetic speeches—remembered mostly for the “been to the mountaintop” premonition of his imminent death.
Somewhat surprisingly, given its fame, that passage is found only in the final paragraph of his speech. King knew that his new focus on the link between the ongoing war inVietnam, the evils of racism for both blacks and whites, and an oppressive economic system was dangerous. He had received threats on his life—nothing new. He had already survived one assassination attempt when he was stabbed by a mentally ill African American woman in the 1950’s, and he most likely felt that it was only a matter of time before there would be another. (In fact, much of his final speech focuses on all the changes he would have missed had he sneezed following that first assassination attempt, as the tip of the knife had settled perilously close to his aortic artery, and the doctor told him he would have died if he had sneezed.)
One could speculate that King advocating on behalf of African American rights was far less threatening to the powers-that-be than King advocating on behalf of economic justice for blacks and whites alike. As he himself noted, “Many white Americans of good will have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.” King wrote,
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
King’s insights about the relation of economics to injustice seem prescient today. Early in the year in which he died, King wrote,
Most of the people who are poor in this country are working every day and that is not said enough. They are working here in Washington and in all our cities. Working in our hotels, they clean up our rooms. . . . They work in our hospitals, they work in our homes. . . . . Most of them are working every day, working sometimes sixty hours a week, working full-time jobs and getting part-time incomes. These are problems that are very real.
Because he was convinced that the only solution to the economic inequalities that existed, and still exist in our society, was what he called “a radical reconstruction of society itself,” King was often accused of being a communist. (We hear echoes of this criticism when our current presidential incumbent seeks to address problems of distributive justice and is accused of being a “socialist,” an only slightly less-pejorative term.) King spoke directly to these accusations as follows:
I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers—from a dialectic point of view, combining a partial yes and a partial no. In so far as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous “no”; but in so far as he pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness in the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian churches, I responded with a definite “yes.”
Nonetheless, as our morning’s reading [by Jonathon K. Cooper Wiele] suggested, to “celebrate all” of King we must embrace the extent to which his critique of capitalism had grown into a strong advocacy for a fundamental economic realignment in the western world. In his famous speech “Beyond Vietnam,” given in April of 1967, fully six years before that war would finally come to an end, King said,
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast between poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the west investing large sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. . . . A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling things is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home . . . physically handicapped and emotionally deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
The more I have thought about this aspect of King, the more it has seemed to me that he would be very much tune with the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The disparities of wealth to which King was pointing in the 1960’s have not abated, but, one could argue, have actually grown far worse in the years since. And the kind of non-violent, mass protest in which the Occupiers have been engaged would, of course, be right up his alley.
So I was not particularly surprised when our friend Tom Stites forwarded me a link this week to an article entitled “Black Churches to Energize Occupy.” “The mission,” writes reporter Scott Galindez, “which is being called “Occupy the Dream,” will start on Monday, January 16 . . . in commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. On that day . . . pastors who are part of the Occupy the Dream movement will connect with the well-knownOccupy Wall Streetgroup to hold protests at Federal Reserve banks in 10 cities around the nation.”
“The strategy,” writes Galindez, “will be to raise the consciousness level of African-Americans, starting in church pulpits, by spreading the message of income equality, economic justice and empowerment.” As the article makes clear, Occupy the Dream is organized around the vision of Dr. King, “who sought to wage war on poverty, unemployment, and economic injustice.”
As Sgt. Shamar Thomas and David DeGraw of Occupy Wall Street recently wrote in welcoming the founders of Occupy the Dream to the larger movement, “The Occupy Wall Street movement draws its strength from people of all different walks of life, with opinions across the political spectrum, coming together to find common ground and unite against the global financial interests that have bought control of our government. Dr. King’s vision of economic justice is an edifying example of what we intend to achieve.”
The great challenge of our time is whether the current political stalemate can be overcome and progress finally made toward building a more just and equitable nation and world. In this important work, the life and thought of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. still have an important role to play in speaking to the moral conscience of this brave new world in which we live, and of reminding all of us, as he once said, that “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
King would, I think, be gratified by the many positive changes that have taken place inAmericasince his death. He would be disappointed, but not surprised, by the depth and tenacity of the problems to which he so eloquently and prophetically pointed our attention more than forty years ago. Like all the biblical prophets before him, King spoke truth to power and gave voice to the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden, regardless of the color of their skin. He was ultimately a realist who knew that great changes never come quickly or easily and that our work in the world is never fully done.
In his final speech inMemphis, King invoked the image of Moses from Deuteronomy 33, standing on the top ofMt.Pisquah, able to see the promised land, but not allowed to enter in. It was a truly premonitory image, evoking both the death of Moses in that same passage and his own death less than twenty-four hours later:
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And 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. And I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
May we always maintain a hopeful vision of the promised land of our dreams, not only for ourselves, but for all people, everywhere. As King implored, “Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.” So may it be. Amen.
– The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Readings: from “The King We Ignore,” by Jonathan K. Cooper Wiele; from “A Testament of Hope,” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
