Does Dr. King Matter Any More?

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, January 16, 2011

            On our way home from Mexico, where I had gone on sabbatical back in 1992, my family and I visited numerous historical sights throughout the American South (which is where my mother was from originally—South Carolina—in case you didn’t know). We made our way through southern Alabama; visited the national Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery; stopped for a bit at Dr. Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute; then, like Sherman, made our way into Georgia by way of U.S. Highway 280, passing through the city of Columbus. Of course, we made what looked like a “short” detour south to the Jimmy Carter National  Historical Site, and the Jimmy Carter boyhood home, in Plains. (It turned out to be a longer detour than we reckoned, what with those southern back roads and all); so we spent the night at a Best Western in Cordele (which also wasn’t as close to Plains as we reckoned; nothing is close to Plains, Georgia, in truth). The next morning, we headed north to the teeming metropolis of Atlanta—capital of the New South—where one of the first places we wanted to visit was the Martin Luther King National Historical Site—the house where Dr. King was born; the church where his father was minister; and the King Center, of course, which seeks to carry out his work, and which has an amazing museum of his life, with room after room of photographs, and recordings of his speeches, and artifacts from his life—all very moving, and certainly very thorough. Dr. King’s image—his voice—his words—his name on the walls-- are everywhere at the King Center, as you might imagine.

            So, I was kind of surprised, as I was browsing through the gift shop at the end of our visit, to overhear two young men-- high school students, I suppose, there on a field trip—conversing with one another as they looked out a large, plate glass window, toward the Center’s central courtyard, its reflecting pool, in the center of which the cool white marble tomb of the hero sits.

            “What’s that over there?” one boy asked the other. “There in the middle. What’s that in the water?”

            “Looks like some kind of grave or something,” the other one responded. “I wonder who’s buried there?”

            “I dunno,” the first one replied.

            Sometimes, to me, it seems as though, when we approach Martin Luther King Day, more than forty years now since his death, that the grave has been robbed. Or that we look out at his tomb, and turn to one another and ask, “I wonder who’s really buried there?” Sometimes, I wonder whose birthday it is that we are really celebrating. Because sometimes, to me, it seems that the man who gets remembered at all our Martin Luther King observances these days is not the same man that was shot, and died, and laid to rest in that tomb in the center of Atlanta. Or, that it’s not the whole man, the man as he truly lived, the full man in all the dynamism and power—and essential radicalness—of who he was.

            One of my favorite poems about Dr. King is by the poet Carl Wendell Hines:

Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
build monuments to his glory
sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
such convenient heroes: They
cannot rise
to challenge the images
we would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.

            Not exactly the “Hallmark cards” version of a Martin Luther King Day poem, is it? It’s something of a downer, really. So why is it one of my favorites?

            Because Hines’ poem reminds us that we’re not there yet.

            It reminds me that, while Dr. King may be worshipped (at least publicly) as a “hero” and as a “great American” by those in power today, that many of these very same men who sing his praises now had precious little good to say about him while he was alive. They may find a little time this week, amidst their gala balls and soirees and other gatherings of the elite, to lay a wreath at his tomb, but they would not have been as kind to the good reverend while he was alive. These denizens of power brought him no flowers back then, certainly. They may cry crocodile tears to the glories of our democracy and the Constitution. But these men cry too few real tears for the men, women, and children broken by the ravages of time and our national history.

            It’s intrigues me to wonder how Dr. King would have fared in this era of You Tube and Twitter  and Facebook. When, speaking about Vietnam, he told his congregation in Montgomery, just a few months before he died in 1968: “We are criminals in [this] war… We’ve committed more war crimes than any nation in the world… But God has a way of putting even nations in their place.”  One wonders what the reaction to such words would have been today? Would he have been Jeremiah Wrighted— aspersions cast upon his entire career; his very sanity, perhaps, called into question—for a few words deemed intemperate or over the top? Would the video have gone viral? Would his words have been plastered across right wing internet blogs? Would Fox “News” play the tape of those few words, over and over again, incessantly? Would that windbag O’Reilly denounce him as a “traitor”—as not a “real American”? Would Dr.King’s birth records be called into question? Would he end up in the cross-hairs of Sarah Palin’s map (purely figurative of course) of political leaders to be “taken out”? Would he end up on Glenn Beck’s “blackboard”?

             You bet he would.

            Glenn Beck tells parishioners across Americaa that they should get up and walk out anytime their ministers use the term “social justice”. Well, if that happens, there’s going be a lot of people getting up and walking out all across America. Because ministers seem to be the only ones talking about “social justice” any more. And there would have been lots and lots walking out whenever Dr. King preached. Because social justice was what he was all about.; it was always, for him, not a question of “what’s in it for me”—but rather, “what’s in it for us”—all of us; all men, women, and children; all the sons and daughters of God Almighty; especially, what’s in it for “the least of these”, our poor brothers and sisters the world over:

            “All I’m saying is simply this,” he said, “that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of humanity.”

            This is the basis upon which our view of the world must be founded, if Dr. King’s legacy to us is truly to be lived—indeed, if this dream which is Americaa truly is to be lived. It is all about justice. It is all about social justice. It is about finding the national will—the spiritual willpower, the political willpower—to put questions of justice back on top of our nation’s priorities— not bailing out Wall Street, and securing economic justice and opportunity for all people. That is not popular stuff to talk about these days. How few of our leaders talk about economic justice; talk about ending poverty; talk about spreading our vast national wealth around. As one writer has put it: “Of course, the political will [to do such things} is not there; instead, we have only the complicity of complacency.”

            “Spread the wealth”—the very words have become an epithet—beyond the pale of “civilized” “mainstream” political discourse. But what on earth is wealth for, if it is not to be shared—to be spread around and used to benefit the commonweal? Wealth isn’t created so that it can be hoarded, but so that it can be used.

            That is what Dr. King stood for. And if we neglect that call in remembering his birthday, it is as though the tomb lies empty, or there’s somebody else inside that we’re talking about here, and that we have created a pretender to the title of Prophet. As Dr. King said to the AFLL-CIO back in 1961: “Yes, before the victory is won, some will be misunderstood. Some will be called Reds and Communists, merely because they believe in economic justice and the brotherhood of man. But we shall overcome.”

            Glenn Beck and those like him have said that those who call for “social justice” are nothing other than “communists, socialists, and Marxists”. If Glenn Beck were an honest man, he’d have to include Dr. King in that list, too—rather than trying to bask in his glow, and brazenly cash in on his memory.

            Now, some have said that fine—fine—Dr. King’s radical words were all good and well, back then. But that was then; this is now. Times have changed. We live in a different world. Such radical ideas aren’t necessary any more. This is the Age of Obama, the post-racial world. America’s racial divide has been bridged.  Just as King was like Moses, and led us within sight of the Promised Land—so it will be up to later leaders (like Obama perhaps) to be the “Joshua generation” and make his dream real, and lead us into the Promised Land.

            Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the Promised Land. A not-so-funny thing, actually; a really tragic thing, in fact. And that is that, if we’re honest, we have to admit that we’re really no closer to utopia than we ever were. That while more overt racial discrimination has been eliminated (glory hallelujah—that’s a good thing); and that while an African American has risen to the top political post in the land (another glory hallelujah to that)—are we really a kinder, gentler, more just and compassionate society now, than when Dr. King lived and preached and worked for justice?

            I think we would be hard pressed to say that that is true. Perhaps you disagree with me, but I don’t think so.

            The Pew Foundation reported last year that almost half of African Americans born to middle income parents in 1968—the year Dr. King died—have ended up in the bottom 20%% of the nation’s income level today. That’s true for only 16% of whites born into middle class families at that time. Are our inner cities in better condition than they were forty years ago? Is there more hope in the ghetto? Are there fewer homeless people on the streets? I don’t think we can say that any of these things are true.

            So what happened on the way to the Promised Land? And how can we say that Dr. King is still relevant, that he still matters, if our hope in the dream he articulated has fallen by the wayside so many times, and if our hopes have been so disappointed?

            Dr. King himself never told us that it would not be easy. He only told us that it was possible. He said:

            “I think that with all of these challenges being met and with all of the work and determination going on, we will be able to go this additional distance and achieve the ideal, the goal of the new age, the age of social justice.”

            Only if we see our age as the “age of social justice”—and do what we need to do to make this vision real—do we truly honor Dr. King and live his Dream.

            Martin Luther King wanted to be remembered as a drum major for social justice. He was also a blessed messenger of peace, who believed in loving your enemies, and dialogue with those with whom you disagree, and always seeing things from the viewpoint of the other. But he also knew, too, that you didn’t bring justice to birth by countenancing injustice. He was a man of peace, but he was not a man of vacillation and appeasement. Like Jesus before him, he was not always an easy man for those in power to bear. While he was alive, he was no safe and easy, cuddly and warm national icon.

            He was a prophet—pulling his people and his nation forward into the next stage of their development. True prophets are seldom easy people to be around, and they are often pains in the back to defenders of the status quo.

            King was a man grown increasingly impatient with the status quo of his own day. We can only imagine what he would make of our own day, when there is barely the pretense of caring about social justice, even in this national administration derided by some as “ultra-liberal” and even radically progressive in its orientation.

            Dr. King was a real radical—a man who knew that the building of the beloved community required a complete transformation of the society in which he lived, and the values it lived by.

            “I am convinced,” he said, “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must radically begin to shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered… A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

            Harsh words from a man who spoke clearly words of truth to those in power.

            Martin Luther King Day, for me, is not a time for us to bask in the glow of self-satisfaction about how great we are as a nation, and how far we have come. It is, rather, a time to take an honest reckoning of how far we stray from the principles of liberty and justice for all which shine at the heart of our national dream, if not in the core of our actual history and practice. It is a time when we take stock, and ask ourselves what is to be done if we are to get back on that road toward justice. It is a reminder to us that, without the “revolution of values” of which Dr. King spoke, and for which he lived and died—without a revolution in the sphere of our consciousness as Americans--  the future of our nation—politically, economically, spiritually—is still built on the shifting sands of time. May God help us.

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