Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
The night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. was sick (literally, with a sore throat)[i] and he was tired. Threats had been made on his life. He was in Memphis, Tennessee supporting striking sanitation workers who were facing violence from police and a legal injunction from the mayor forbidding them to protest.
He stood in the pulpit that stormy April night and said the words we heard this morning:
I don’t know what will happen now. But I’m not concerned … I’ve been to the mountaintop. 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.”[ii]
King’s Promised Land had less to do with nominal racial harmony and more to do with dismantling the very structures of racial and economic injustice upon which this nation was built. He learned from those who came before him, leaders like Ella Baker and Mahatma Gandhi.
He knew about organizing and teaching in ways that empowered people to combat fear and hatred, complacency and ignorance. He knew about amassing power: “Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect change, and we need power,” he said to striking workers in 1968.[iii]
By the end of his life, King was calling for a global, non-violent human rights revolution, a mass movement built on the foundation of love and the understanding of every human being as worthy.
It would take work. “Human progress,” he said a month before he died, “never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.”[iv]
~
We find ourselves now in this most auspicious year, 2018. One hundred and fifty-five years after the Emancipation Proclamation declared that black men and women were free after two hundred years of chattel slavery. Fifty-five years after Dr. King proclaimed his dream. Fifty-one years after he launched a Poor People’s Campaign for economic equality and called for an end to the war in Vietnam. Fifty years after he stood in that church in Memphis and declared that he had seen the promised land. And fifty years after the next day when he was shot on a hotel balcony.
Things have changed since 1863, since 1963, since 1968, for sure. We may be closer, but we are far from the land King saw from his mountain top. Our challenge now is to continue the work of understanding the racial and economic realities of today’s society, to keep fighting for what we know is right, to act as co-workers with the Good, and to not lose hope in the Promised Land.
~
“The hour is late. The clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now before it is too late.”[v]
Martin Luther King spoke those words in 1963, two months before the “I have a dream” speech in Washington.
“The clock of destiny is ticking out,” he said.
“The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation
of the Negro or any other minority group is the price of its own destruction.”
This is a different vision than a promised land of black and white children holding hands and being judged by the content of their character.
This is the nightmare instead of the dream. This is the reality of continued and constant oppression and exploitation: it leads to mutual destruction. This is the reality of white supremacy: it will hold on to power with a death grip until all is destroyed.
When Malcolm X was asked about a potential debate with King – something that never happened – his first reaction was to smile and say that King would surely lose.
Why? “Because I’m not interested in dreams,” X said, “but in the nightmare.”[vi]
The truth is, I think, that King saw the nightmare just as well as Malcolm X. He saw the slums and ghettos and backstabbing racism of the North. He saw the violent and belligerent and in-your-face racism of the South. He witnessed firsthand the systemic and insidious extensions of slavery in the exclusion of African Americans from the ballot box and the racialized economic degradation that pervaded both North and South. He saw the expansion of American militarism to foreign lands, most expressly in the Vietnam war, against which he spoke out vehemently in the last years of his life. He saw the “triple evils” of “racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” as “interrelated, all-inclusive, and stand[ing] as barriers to our living in the Beloved Community.”[vii]
Had he lived, he would have seen drug epidemics and gun violence pervade poor communities of color. He would have seen mass incarceration put “under correctional control – in prison or in jail, on probation or parole – more African Americans than were enslaved in 1850.”[viii]
Had he lived, he would have seen a nation of immigrants in an identity crisis, passing laws and executive orders that not only limit freedom but intentionally degrade immigrants – many of them poor people of color – seeking a better life for themselves and their children.
Had he lived, he would have raged against the recently-passed health care bill. The Promised Land cannot be found in a nation where adults and children lack access to health care,
not in a land where people must choose between medicine and food.[ix]
Had King lived, he would have seen nearly 3,000 children die from guns in the United States each year, 42 percent of them Black children and teens, though they make up only 14 percent of all children and teens.[x]
Today we will welcome activists and legislators, including Senator Blumenthal, to discuss gun violence in our community, our state, and our nation. I remember well five years ago, after Newtown, a town hall meeting in North Hartford, at which senators Murphy and Blumenthal heard the anguish of the black community in the voice of the Rev. Henry Brown, who, in no uncertain terms, called them to task. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Newtown, he said.
I’m tired of funerals, he said. Stop talking. Do something.[xi]
The truth is, a child of color in this country is five times more likely to die a gun-related death than a white child.[xii]
What would Dr. King say to a nation that prioritizes the profits earned by gun manufacturers over the safety of its own children?
Had King lived, he would have seen nearly 7,000 more American troops die in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, trillions of dollars spent on warfare, and over 200,000 civilian casualties,
many of them children.[xiii]
He would have seen black and brown people disproportionately killed by police, and too many of the killers acquitted of all charges.
He would have seen the voting rights he fought so hard for summerly stripped
when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.[xiv]
He didn’t see any this, and still, at the end of his life, five years after the March on Washington, King was tired. His friends tell us that he was increasingly anxious, depressed.[xv] My guess is that he struggled to maintain his hopeful stance, to believe in the dream he had once defined so eloquently.
Because America – black and white – condemned him for his stance on Vietnam and his plans for the multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign. The Board of Trustees of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was concerned about losing their funding; the press raked him over the coals; threats were made on his life.
But he was nowhere near giving up. In March of ’68 he proclaimed: “America, I don’t plan to let you rest until that day comes into being when all God’s children will be respected, and every man will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. America, I don’t plan to allow you to rest until from every city hall in this country, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream … America, I don’t plan to let you rest until you live it out that “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”[xvi]
“America, I don’t plan to let you rest…”
King was weary, but he declared that he maintained his hope: “I haven’t lost hope,” he said two weeks before he died. “The days ahead are difficult, but I have not lost hope. This is the only thing that keeps me going…I do not yield to the politics of despair. I will continue to work and hope that through that working, we will be able to transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.”[xvii]
King’s hope was not idealistic or optimistic. Though he had studied Transcendentalism and personal philosophy and all manner of liberal theologies, his deep, abiding faith was born of slave spirituals and the Black church. His was a “Precious Lord, take my hand” kind of faith.
A “through the storm” kind of faith.
“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,” he said to the striking sanitation workers in Memphis. “We’ve got to see it through…either we go up together or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”
“Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness,” he said. “Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge,
to make America what it ought to be.”[xviii]
You see, King never gave up on America. Oh, he wouldn’t let her rest, but unlike Malcolm X,
who was only interested in the nightmare that was – and, too often, still is – the American experience for black and brown people, King believed that America could be what it “ought to be” for all people.
He believed that we could become the nation that was promised in the lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He believed, like Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, that the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And he held out for his people hope in a promised land of economic and racial equity.
He saw it, I think, that promised land. The people working with him – those who knew both the truth of the nightmare and the beauty of the dream – they saw it. The striking garbage workers in Memphis saw it. The thousands of people of all races who traveled to Washington D.C. for the Poor People’s March on Washington in the months after King died saw it.
Do you see it?
Because the promised land still beckons. There is work to be done, and it is being done.
The dream is still alive.
There is a New Poor People’s Campaign being organized as we speak. Its leaders are William Barber, founder of Moral Mondays in North Carolina, and Liz Theoharis, co-director of the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary. And its members cross all sorts of divides –
race, gender, class, religion.
Together they demand a deeper justice, a moral reckoning. This campaign takes on four interconnected evils of our society: systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation.
“We are going to change this country and make it what it has not yet been for all of us,” Liz Theoharis said at a recent rally.[xix]
Today they are in New York City. In three weeks, they’ll be in Washington D.C. at All Souls Unitarian Church. I know Liz from my work at Union, and my heart has soared listening to Barber speak. Theirs is a tireless faith, and I know they see the promised land.
And let’s not forget that there is radical work going on right here in Connecticut, too.
At the end of November, a number of us attended the CONECT regional assembly in Bridgeport, where Pastor Anthony Bennet brought the concerns of the assembly
to Bridgeport Chief of Police Armando Perez.
Some of us were taken aback with how Pastor Bennet laid into Chief Perez. Some of us felt he may have been too harsh, too demanding, too shaming to be effective in our request for the police department to start using body cameras.
Truth be told, I felt that way.
We weren’t alone. I recently learned that many of the white suburban members of CONECT felt uncomfortable with Pastor Bennet’s approach. The fact is, we don’t often see a black man speak truth to power the way he did that night. I think we have to face that.
January 9th, this past Tuesday, was the day that CONECT requested a follow up meeting with the chief. Not only was it a cordial meeting (no hard feelings), but the department presented samples of the body and dashboard cameras they are using in a 90-day pilot to determine which ones they will purchase there in Bridgeport.[xx]
They are moving on this. It took work; it took confrontation; it took public demands and organized, demonstrated power. It made some suburban white folks uncomfortable.
And they are moving.
~
I don’t know exactly what King saw from his mountaintop.
I don’t know exactly what his promised land looked like.
I know what it doesn’t look like.
And I know we are called to follow where he pointed, called to pull on that arc of the universe and bend it toward justice. I know we are called to stay in the storm because, friends,
it hasn’t passed over yet!
We are called to have courage and to make our way through the night with our siblings who are fighting the good fight. It is the only way that any of us – any of us! – will ever be truly free.
“Martin King was right,” James Cone, the founder of Black Theology and a man I am privileged to call my teacher writes in his epic book Martin and Malcolm and America, “Martin King was right. ‘The hour is late’ and ‘the clock of destiny is ticking out.’ We must declare where we stand on the great issues of our time.” Racism, poverty, sexism, class exploitation, imperialism,
and we can add environmental degradation.
Cone continues:
“We must break the cycle of violence in America and around the world. Human beings are meant for life and not death. They are meant for freedom and not slavery. They were created for each other and not against each other. We must, therefore, break down the barriers that separate people from one another. For Malcolm and Martin, for America and the world, and for all who have given their lives in the struggle for justice, let us direct our fight toward one goal – the beloved community of human kind.”[xxi]
Friends,
Let us not “yield to the politics of despair.”
“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”
“Let us rise up [today] with a greater readiness.”
“Let us stand with a greater determination.”
“And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be.”
[i]http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_ive_been_to_the_mountaintop_3_april_1968/index.html
[ii] Martin Luther King, Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” (Delivered at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple, Memphis Tennessee, 3 April, 1968). “Martin Luther King Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle,” http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/ive_been_to_the_mountaintop/
[iii] Martin Luther King , Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Clayborne Carson, Ed. (New York:Warner Books, 1998), 253.
[iv] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” (Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington D.C. 31 March, 1968) A Knock at Midnight, Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran, Eds. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 210.
[v] Martin Luther King, Jr. “Speech at the Great March on Detroit” June 23, 1963. http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_speech_at_the_great_march_on_detroit/index.html
[vi] James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. (New York: Maryknoll, 1991).
[vii] “The Triple Evils” The King Philosophy The King Center. http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy
[viii] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, (New York: The New Press, 2010), 175.
[ix] Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Household Food Security in the United States in 2011,” September 2012. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45020/30967_err141.pdf?v=41165
[x] Children’s Defense Fund “2015 Protect Children Not Guns Factsheet” http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/data/2015-protectchildrennotgunsfactsheet.pdf
[xi] “Roundtable discussion on gun violence,” onpolitix, WTNH TV, last updated January 11, 2013. http://connecticut.onpolitix.com/news/219854/round-table-discussion-on-gun-violence
[xii] Black males ages 15–19 are more than five times as likely as White males and more than twice as likely as Hispanic males to be killed by a firearm. Children’s Defense Fund, “State of America’s Children, 2011,” xi. http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-of-americas-2011.pdf
[xiii] Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. “Costs of War.” http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military; http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic; http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians
[xiv] “The Real Voter Fraud” STAND ACLU Winter 2018, p11-15.
[xv] David G. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, (New York: Harper Collins, 1986), 622.
[xvi] King, “Beyond Vietnam”; idem, address given 22 March 1968 during a pre-Washington Campaign, Albany, Georgia; idem, “Which Ways Its Soul Shall Go?”
[xvii] Martin Luther King, Jr. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968.
[xviii] King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
[xix] Celeste Kennel-Shank, “William Barber and Liz Theoharis take the Poor People’s Campaign on the road.” Christian Century, October 18, 2017. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/news/william-barber-and-liz-theoharis-take-poor-peoples-campaign-on-the-road
[xx] http://m.ctpost.com/local/article/Bridgeport-Police-to-launch-body-dash-cams-by-12478735.php
[xxi] Cone, 318.