MLK Day is Not a Time for Comfort

I vividly remember the exact moment.

I was in seminary, having fled my native South to New York City. I was embarrassed at being a Baptist, at being a white Southerner, and not entirely sure if I was a believer. But the “God question” wouldn’t go away.

A mighty wrestling match was underway in my soul, trying to come to terms with my adolescent “youth revival” preacher days. Neither the Civil Rights Movement nor the anti–Vietnam War movement had disturbed my piously furrowed brow.

It occurred one Saturday during high school, at the beginning of a 12-hour shift pumping gas, washing cars, and changing oil. I was moving product displays and stacks of new tires outside as we prepared to open shortly before dawn, when I overheard the radio announcer mention Martin Luther King Jr.

“That Martin Luther King, he ain’t no Christian,” the station owner growled toward the radio. “Everywhere he go there’s trouble.”

It would be years before it occurred to me that the same was likely said about Jesus.

Entering seminary, I became a voracious reader of Civil Rights Movement history—the gritty details and the various figures—creating a timeline and a map in my mind.

Moment of Clarity

Then came the vivid moment.

I had purchased one of those oversized photo books featuring Dr. King and other civil rights moments and luminaries. Flipping through it, I turned to a photograph showing King and his wife, Coretta, seated at a piano, their infant daughter, Yolanda, perched on Martin’s lap as he and Coretta sang from an open hymnal.

The cover title was unmistakable. It was the Broadman Hymnal—the hymnal I grew up with. 

Published by the Southern Baptist Convention, the same body whose executive committee voted down a resolution of sympathy to members of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church one day after the 1963 terrorist bombing that killed four young children.

At one time, I could quote from memory the page numbers of dozens of hymns in that book. As I came to discover, many Black churches that hosted Civil Rights Movement mass meetings—churches threatened by cross-burning Klan torches—also sang from the Broadman Hymnal. 

That moment—that photograph—stands among my life’s greatest epiphanies. I came to realize the language of faith can carry many different, even competing meanings, just as any chemical compound, minus even one element, becomes something else altogether.

I had long since come to despise the refrain from the popular hymn “What a Fellowship”:

Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarm.
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.

By this point, the sound of that song felt in my ears like someone raking their fingernails across a chalkboard.

That changed when I watched the first episode of the Public Broadcasting Service series Eyes on the Prize. I learned that the first song sung at the first mass meeting—called to consider continuing the 1955 one-day Montgomery bus boycott—was “What a Fellowship.” The meeting took place at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

The meaning of that music was suddenly transformed in my mind.

Of course. When you can’t depend on the police, the courts, the government or the business community—not even the white churches, including the liberal ones—leaning on Jesus was an audacious, even revolutionary, act.

Faith has a way of being clarified in the midst of turmoil and threat.

Remembering the Dream

The annual commemoration of Dr. King’s birthday provides a perennial occasion to remember the dream that still beckons both church and civil society—and not just in the United States.

I’ve listened to children in Baghdad sing “We Shall Overcome” in Arabic and read similar accounts of it being sung during the collapse of the Berlin Wall in Germany. It was sung by demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and during protest marches in South Africa’s Soweto township.

A comic book–style telling of the Montgomery bus boycott, first published in 1958, was translated into Arabic in 2008 and circulated widely during the Arab Spring democracy movement in North Africa.

Yet Dr. King was not assassinated because he was a dreamer or a promoter of “race relations Sundays.” The Montgomery Improvement Association strategically focused on integration.

Even so, its first demand of the bus company did not include full integration. Black riders would still sit in the back and white riders in the front. 

The change was that no Black person would be required to give up a seat to a white person. It was an incremental goal—one that would soon lead to more substantial demands.

Over time, the movement would recognize that integrated seating at lunch counters, water fountains and bus terminals was not enough. It became clear that transforming economic systems, equitable pay and housing policy required changes in voter registration within the Black community as well.

Remember the 1963 March on Washington was named the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

Molding Prophets for Profit

Since legislation making Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday, political leaders, in concert with commercial interests, have gradually domesticated and smoothed over the threat he represented. (“The most dangerous Negro in the country,” according to the FBI’s assessment.) During my years in Atlanta, several Black civil rights groups seriously discussed—but ultimately chose not to protest—the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday parade because of its corporate sponsorship and military presence.

We forget by the time King was assassinated, his favorable public opinion rating had plummeted to 33%. We forget in his last major speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” he openly condemned the U.S. war in Vietnam and charged our nation was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

After prophets die, we mold their memory to suit our purposes. We ladle praise upon them and place them on pedestals as a way to distance ourselves from them. There is some truth in the old canard: A conservative is someone who admires a dead radical—because the radical can no longer climb down from the pedestal to challenge us.

Admiring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is not the same as being captured by it. It is common to respect the man while relinquishing the mission, to revere the dreamer while reneging on the dream—until it becomes something else entirely. As with the Christian community, admiring Jesus often substitutes for following him.

The greatest mistake we make is using King’s birthday observance as an occasion to heap accolades on his memory. Diane Nash, one of the many unheralded leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, puts it well:

“If people think that it was Martin Luther King’s movement, then today they—young people—are more likely to say, ‘Gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us.’ If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would ask themselves is, ‘What can I do?’”