The Full Vision and Way of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This spring marks the 40th anniversary of the Birmingham Campaign, a
major chapter in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As a fitting opening to this year’s
commemorations, Dr. Vincent Harding was invited to be the keynote speaker at
the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Unity Breakfast in January, 2003. Dr. Harding was the first director of the
King Center in Atlanta and was the major historical authority for the acclaimed
film series, Eyes on the Prize. He
knew Dr. King personally and was in Birmingham in 1963 with him. Selections from his speech follow below:
“Good morning,
friends. I first came to
Birmingham—it’s seems very strange to me now—forty years ago this spring. Nineteen hundred and sixty-three. And having come that long ago the first
time, and having been in the midst of the struggle for transformation, and
having seen and heard and felt the cost of the transformation, I am deeply
impressed with what is here now, and what I imagine is in your hearts for what
needs yet to come.
“I think you
have to keep working at this. It’s
crucial work that you are doing. Not
simply for the image of the Birmingham, not simply for nostalgic-colored
reasons, but because we need to recognize the significance of what a great
Jewish rabbi said just ten days before Martin King was assassinated. Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel in speaking to a
group of his co-religionists and introducing Dr. King to them, spoke these
words, which I think are the words that
must hold us to keep our hands on the plow in this work we are doing. Heschel said, ‘Martin Luther King, Jr., is a
voice, a vision and a way. I call upon
every Jew to hearken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow in his
way.’ Then he ended that segment with
these powerful words: ‘The whole future of America will depend on the impact
and the influence of Dr. King.’
“And so I am
simply coming to encourage you to try to hear his full voice as clearly
as we can, to see all of his vision, to really understand his way. We need to open up to the fullness of the
Dream before we can really put it into practice. That is the first great challenge for us here in Birmingham., as
well as the challenge for America. Who
was this man, and what did he really dream and believe, and how much of it have
we comprehended?
“As I have
seen it over the years since the holiday began, we have tended to forget some
absolutely crucial aspects of King’s message and King’s meaning. And I think that every King day can offer an opportunity to us, not just to repeat
the same old words, not just to have the same race relations dream, not just do
the same march on Washington Dream box—all of those are very important. But why every King Day say the same thing,
do the same thing, as if there were nothing more to Martin King than that
rather narrow confine in which we keep him.
“I think each
day like this offers us an opportunity to open up our understanding of King, to
hear his voice in a fresh way, see his broadest vision and to recognize the
awesome expansiveness of his way.
Remember, this was a King, who after he left Birmingham, within a year
and a half or so, won the Nobel Peace Prize, not only for what he did in
Birmingham, not only for his dream of a new racial unity in America, but this
was a King who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his vision of a world at
peace, in which women and men treat each other as children of God. This is the King who we so often neglect to
say was a follower of Jesus, the Jesus who taught us to say, ‘Our Father.’ Not our exclusive Christian Father. Not our American Father, but Our
Father, including God’s Iraqi and Vietnamese children. Our Father.
“This was a
King who recognized that his vision of unity had to extend to the world. Towards the end of his life, he started
using a metaphor that was fascinating.
He said that we are residents of a world house, and we have to live and
act as if we are all a part of the same house, the same community, the same
family. And he was trying to put that
into practice, because he recognized that human unity was tied to dealing with
the problems that tear humans apart, that human unity required dealing with the
problems of world poverty, of world economic exploitation, of opposition to
imperialism, colonialism and war. And
keep saying that word, ‘war,’ and keep tying to Martin Luther King a
determination to fight for a world that goes beyond war. At the very end of his life, in the last
February of his life, he preached at Ebenezer.
He said, ‘When you remember me, make sure that you remember that I tried
to stand up against war as a way of solving human problems.’ I don’t hear that very much on King
Day. We very much need to hear that
today. We cannot narrow him to a keeper
of better race relations.
“That’s very, very important.
But listen to what he had to say in 1966, after he had moved into one of
the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago.
Listen to what he said, ‘I
choose’ (this is a Ph.D. in Philosophical Theology now), ‘I choose to identify
with the underprivileged. I choose to
identify with the poor. I choose to
give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of
opportunity. If it means dying for
them, then I am going that way.’
“Now this is
King, hear him. See how expansive this
vision was, and understand, please, that each day that we come together around
his life, remember that King, even in that solidarity with the poor, refused to
confine it to the USA, because he was still praying, ‘Our Father.’ And in the midst of a rising of a war in
Vietnam that was the responsibility primarily of his own country, King said
that this solidarity that he had with the poor, as a result of his religious
faith and his human compassion, could not be confined to the USA. ‘This solidarity with the poor,’ he said,
‘had to be with more than the poor of America.’ He increasingly chose to speak on behalf of the poor of
Vietnam. That was what so much of that
speech of 1967 was about. He came and
said, ‘I am speaking for the poor of Vietnam.
My country is killing them, but I am going to stand up and speak on
their behalf.’ That is a King we must
not forget. We are going to need him
even more in the days ahead.
“Eventually,
of course, he became the major public voice against the war, because of the
damage it was doing to the poor in America at home and to the poor Vietnamese
under the fire of America. Ultimately, he
had to stand against the war, he said, because he loved America and was
concerned about the soul of his own country.
So, he said to us, he said to President Johnson and he said to the
Congress, ‘A nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on
military defense than on programs to serve its neediest people is approaching
spiritual death.’
Like you, he
knew the dangers to the nation represented by racism, but he never forgot that
his vision took in more than racism.
In the last years of his
life, please remember that he warned us against three related dangers to our
souls, as a country and as individuals.
He kept tying them together, not separating them. He said these three things especially, we
have to remember are dangerous to our being.
One is racism, and that was very, very clear to him, and he kept working
against a racist way of life, but he never stopped there in his last
years. He went on to say that, two, is
materialism. The demand, the desire to
have more things, what we would call consumerism today. King said that will eat away at the entrails
of our being, if we let it stay in our lives.
And then thirdly, so difficult for us to deal with, especially in 2003,
he said that we have to deal with the deadliness of militarism in our society,
the belief that there are military solutions for the deep needs and problems of
the human community.
“That is a
challenge you see that thousands of people have taken up this weekend all over
our country, all over the world, and some of those thousands right in front of
our doors this morning, reminding us of the Martin King who said, Beware of the
dangers of racism, materialism and militarism, the tendency to believe that
armed power can handle the things that need to be done.
“We all need
to hear again and again and again his declaration one year exactly before he
died, he said, ‘Silence on an issue like this war can be betrayal.’ So, he spoke up and said, ‘Never again will
I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and
destroying thousands and thousands of little children in Vietnam. The time has
come for a real prophecy, and I am willing to go that road.’
He was willing
to do that, even though the President of the United States was on his head,
even though Congress and the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the
great keepers of the wisdom of the society said, ‘You have nothing to do with
this, King. Your charge is civil
rights.’ In other words, ‘Stay in your
place.’ And King knew that his place
as a child of the living, loving Creator God was with all who are suffering, in
trouble and in need, so he stayed in his place, continuing to call upon the
voices that needed to speak out for the Vietnamese people.
“That’s why these thousands this
weekend have gathered together. That’s
why one of my friends had a button on that said, ‘I love the children of Iraq
and the children of America.’ I could
hear Martin King saying that very, very easily. That was his calling.
That was why his last campaign is something we need to talk about much,
much more than we do, on these King days.
His last campaign he called ‘The Poor People’s Campaign.’ His last campaign was spent trying to gather
poor people of every color and ethnicity, from all over this country, to go to
Washington with him and to face the government of the United States and to stay
there until the government was willing to listen to the word that we must turn
away from the war against Vietnam and turn toward a real war against poverty in
America and elsewhere. That was his
last campaign. That is what he died in
the midst of. We don’t honor him by
forgetting that. We don’t honor him by
ignoring that. We don’t honor him by
saying just continuing to say, ‘I have a dream that one day my little
children…’ No, that’s wonderful, but
that’s not enough. King said, ‘I have
got to keep on going, I have got to keep on standing, I have got to keep on
climbing.’ And if we are really to
honor him, we’ve got to keep on going, we’ve got to keep on standing, we’ve got
to keep on climbing to the levels that he was taking us.
“When we remember King, we need to
remember ‘The Poor People’s Campaign,’ and let its goals stay in our
memory. Then we might have some new
thoughts for today, some thoughts, for example, about an unlimited war on
terrorism and unconstitutional war against Iraq. We could think some new thoughts, some new courageous
thoughts.
“Now I know—I know—that just when some
of us thought we were getting the racial dream together, here comes a challenge
to do something more. But, you see,
that was King, always being challenged to do something more. He led that marvelous pilgrimage from Selma
to Montgomery, through it, got Lyndon Johnson to do what he said was impossible
a few months before, which was to get a Voting Rights Bill passed. And King was just at the height of his power
and fame at that point in 1965, and then in Montgomery, when they got there,
King said, ‘This is wonderful. We’ve
done a beautiful job, but we must keep going.
Always, we must keep going.’ And
that’s when he tried to lay out his concern for the urban poverty that was so
deep in our nation, and still is very deep, too deep in the richest nation in
the world.’ King said, ‘We’ve got to
take this on.’
“I am closing by asking you to open up
your understanding of King. Open up the
celebration of King. Practice unity,
yes, but practice unity that goes across national borders. Practice unity that goes across religious
borders. Practice unity that goes
across economic borders. Let unity be
unity, and not just segregated unity, to occasional black and white gatherings
together. Remember King.
“Remember King, as we were reminded a
little while ago, that could take a Ph.D. in Philosophical Theology right to
the side of garbage workers, to stand with them, and to die in their
midst. Unity—if we want to talk about
unity—carry it there. Let the
Birmingham Pledge concerning respect for individuals open itself up to ask, do
we respect the individuals who will die under our bombs in Iraq? Open it up.
Open it up. Let there be unity
that is truly godly unity. Let it be
the unity that took a middle-class African-American Baptist preacher to stand
with the Buddhist peasants of Vietnam.
Let that unity be in our hearts and in our minds.
“Let the unity be the unity between
the young people, whom we sometimes are afraid of, and us who need to hold them
in our arms. Let the unity be between
us and the folks in prison who we don’t even think about a lot of the time. Let
the unity be unity, Birmingham.
“And when you are worried about
whether we can really get into this kind of thing, remember two things. One, that Declaration of Independence was
developed by some people who had all kinds of problems and faults, but they were
willing to take a chance to try to start a new world. We need to recognize that we are probably capable of doing much
more newness than we have probably thought.
Let it start it with you, Birmingham.
You started some other wonderful things. Let this new unity be a part of what you are doing.
“And remember the second thing is that
Rabbi Heschel was right. The whole
future of America depends upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.
“Now, here is a word of encouragement
for those of us who see how tough this can really be. I came across a word from Nelson Mandela, which is really a word
for us. Sometime between his election
and his retirement, he said, ‘I have walked the long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter. I have made missteps along the way, but I
have discovered the secret, that after climbing a great hill, one only finds
that there many more hills to climb. I
have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds
me, to look back on the distance I have come.
But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes
responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet
ended.’
“Martin used to like to say, from the
spiritual, ‘Walk together, children.
Walk together, children. Don’t
get weary. Walk together. And I say to you with and for my brother,
‘Birmingham, walk the full way of unity.
Let it include all the people whom we consider outcasts, whom we
consider less than us, whom our President says are enemies to us. Walk in unity, Birmingham, because that is
really King’s way. And, the whole
future of America depends on how seriously we take the need to walk together in
King’s way, from this way, from this day, from this place forward, upward,
toweringly sometimes, but keep on going.
Because we are not alone. I am
quite sure that our brother is constantly hanging around, trying to see how we
are doing in this unity walk.
“I am grateful for you. I am glad for all you have done and all you
are trying to be, and I say, you can do more, you can be more. Let the unity be rich and full and
remembering the King who put his arms around the world, and said, ‘Our
Father. My family. And I’m going to treat you like family.’
“Be strong. Don’t give up.
Birmingham, you’ve done a great deal.
You’ve got a great deal more to do.
And you can do it.”
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