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During the 60's, I was a Rolling Stone's fan and memorized the lyrics to "Sympathy for the Devil". Particularly potent is the
song's introduction...
"Just help yourself, just call me Lucifer, because I'm in need of some restraint. Give me all your well earned politics or I'll
lay your soul in waste. Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name, but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game."
Why did history's greatest spiritual figures, who once took the throne at political banquets, become its most grieved victims. Because
political systems perceive their most dangerous threat to be individual transcendence, which is at the heart of the visionary's teachings.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy as America's foremost Civil Rights leader began in the 60's. Although his stature is so great
his birthday is now a national holiday, how well do we remember his truth? Is it still relevant to the "well earned politics" of 2017?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but
by the content of their character."
Dr. Martin Luther King's most inspired speech was delivered at a massive peace rally August 23, 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
Washington D.C.
"Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our
struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic
heights of meeting physical force with soul force."
King took listeners to a mountaintop view of America using lyrics from a Spiritual.
"Free at Last! Free at Last - Thank God make it last".
Spirituals used to be called "Jubilees", which meant the day of deliverance was coming. They carried a dual message of biblical
reference and coded maps to freedom. King used them in his sermons, marches and in this speech to capture that first burst of hope from the past.
In 1955, at age 26, King's career as orator preacher began at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1954, the U.S.
Supreme Court's decision, Brown v. Board of Ed, declared congregational doctrines of "separate but equal" unconstitutional. When Mrs. Raymond A. Parks refused to give
up her bus seat for a white man, King's advocacy of non-violent protest was launched from his position as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. During a night of
anguish, King realized that his political role would end the serenity of life and heard a voice saying,
"Stand up for truth - and lo, I will be with you even until the end of the world."
From that moment on, King displayed the heroic courage and magnetic persona for which he is remembered.
At the heart of the Montgomery bus boycott was the use of Black economic power. As Blacks made up two thirds of the riding public, bus
companies could not survive without their patronage.
"The Negro has enough buying power in Birmingham to make the difference between profit or loss in a business."
In later years, as King's prominence grew, so did his vision of oppression.
"Equality for Negroes is related to the greater problem of economic uplift for Negroes and poor white men. They share a common problem
and have a common interest in working together for economic and social uplift. They can and must work together."
In 1956, King became President of The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) formed by 60 Black ministers. While other Black leaders
wanted to rely on legal action, King held that mass protest was more effective.
"We must move on to mass action."
"Give us the ballot! The executive branch of the government is too silent and apathetic."
Dr. King was a man of his times responding to a great cause. Had people not banded together in the 1950's and 60's - Black, White,
Christian, Jewish - segregation laws might still be on the books. On the surface that has changed but despite Obama’s presidency in America racial oppression still endures
and grass roots organizations like “Black Lives Matter” have taken the vanguard.
By 1957 King was recognized as the No. 1 Black leader, but throughout his life, he suffered injury and threats, bomb attacks, tax trials,
arrests, jail terms and one near fatal knife attack. He was harassed and libeled by the FBI and experienced in-fights from jealously within Black leadership. Once, after he was
brutally arrested for entering a courthouse, he said,
"I have no malice toward anyone - not even the white policemen who almost broke my arm, who choked and kicked me. Let there be no
malice among you."
King tried to live up to the Christian ideal when he turned the other cheek.
"The law of retaliation is the law of the multiplication of evil."
"When I took up the cross I recognized its meaning. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately die on."
During his career King traveled extensively in Europe, the Caribbean, Africa and India, where he met Gandhi's disciplines and studied
nonviolent techniques. He admired Gandhi's... "great capacity for self-criticism, total avoidance of material possessions and absolute self discipline in private and
personal life."
"The oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed...privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong
resistance. Freedom comes only through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against a system of evil."
"Freedom is necessary for one's selfhood - one's intrinsic worth."
"Without the pressure of the press, there would have been untold massacre in the South. The world seldom believes the horror stories
of history until they are documented via mass media."
Between 1955-68, King became involved in many civil rights struggles; all repeating the pattern of mass protest, then legal progress followed
by a violent backlash of arrests and murders. The 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C. prompted the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1960; the 1961 Freedom Rides resulted in the
Interstate Commerce Commission's ban on bus segregation; the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama movement to desegregate public facilities, where King wrote his "Letter from
Birmingham Jail", resulted in the Supreme Court ruling segregation ordinances unconstitutional and King witnessing the signing of 1964 Civil Rights Act by President Johnson.
The 1965 Selma, Alabama campaign to register voters resulted in Johnson signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Less successful were the 1965
Chicago Project "Freedom Sunday" drive to end discrimination in housing, schools and employment; the 1967 inception of the "Poor People's Campaign"; and
finally the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee.
King was an admitted male chauvinist who believed his wife, Coretta, should not participate in his work. King had many affairs and alluded to
feelings of guilt.
"Each of us has two selves... Every now and then you'll be unfaithful to those that you should be faithful to... It's a
mixture in human nature."
In 1963, the FBI, under Hoover, started a campaign of death threats and wire-tapping that deeply troubled King. When President Kennedy was
killed, King said,
"This is what is going to happen to me. This is such a sick society."
When Malcolm X returned from Mecca in 1964, he said the "blue eyed soul brothers" he met were spiritually evolved. He broke with his
traditional Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad. No longer the firebrand, King hoped that Malcolm would forsake "hate whitey rhetoric". Believing Malcolm was killed by
his Black rivals; King offered to act as a mediator.
"It is even more unfortunate that this great tragedy occurred at a time when Malcolm X was reevaluating his own philosophical
presuppositions and moving toward a greater understanding of the non-violent movement and toward more tolerance of white people."
Although King received world-wide recognition during his lifetime, including being named TIME's "Man of the Year" in 1963
and the recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he often expressed self- doubt.
"There are those moments when I feel a sense of inadequacy as a symbol."
As the civil rights revolution expanded to the North and the Vietnam War escalated, King broadened his goals to include world peace.
"Violence is as wrong in Hanoi as it is in Harlem."
"I cannot sit idly by and see war continually escalated without speaking out against it."
"These are evil times. The USA is the greatest actual purveyor of violence in the world today."
Many believe King was killed because he spoke out against the Vietnam war. A lot of anger was turned in his direction when he said American
boys had no business there.
King's last speech at the Memphis Masonic Temple, April 4, 1968 is perhaps his most moving. It foretells his death the next day via an
assassin's bullet on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel.
"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really 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 so I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
Martin Luther King, Jr. January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968
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