THE RADICAL KING A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor January 16, 2005 Radical-"of the root...essential, fundamental...primary, affecting the foundation, going to the root." In philology, chemistry, mathematics, botany, music, and in general usage, to be radical is to be at or to go to the root. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a radical man. He was a man who came in his early adult years to understand that only be going to the root of things can we live a good life, holding on to what is worthy, changing what is unworthy. Dr. King was a radical man, but he was also in many respects, as his sister described him, "an average and ordinary man." One friend said of him that he "just loved to party, he loved to enjoy life." What more pedestrian thing could be said of him that that he had a good sense of fun. A day or so before he was murdered, he and Andrew Young got into a pillow fight. Solemn and dignified in public, in private he let loose of his inhibitions and enjoyed himself. He loved food and drink, confessing once to a newsman that "eating is my big sin." His hearty appetite led to weight problems for him and then dietary difficulties. His hectic schedule kept him from regular exercise, normal sleeping time, and a sensible diet. He got heavy. He worried a lot, and like many of us, he ate for comfort. He was plagued by loneliness. Coretta wrote that "jail-going wasn't easy because he never liked to be alone." Once he "just broke down and cried and then he felt so ashamed of himself." Travel contributed to his solitude. He could easily feel abandoned, deserted, forgotten, lonely. He was not infrequently depressed. In his Nobel acceptance speech in 1964, he referred to those who "can no longer bear with such a heavy burden. They will face the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life." He was speaking of himself, as he was two years later in these words: "We often develop inferiority complexes, and we stumble through life with a feeling of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, and a sense of impending failure." In the last year of his life he was almost always filled with a deep melancholy. He talked often of giving up the work of civil rights, of going to Africa or Switzerland to live, of taking up teaching, anything but continuing in work about which he too often felt depressed or that he had failed in. Guilt filled him because he felt more praised than he deserved. He was a man of large sexual needs, "a compulsive sexual athlete," in biographer David Garrow's phrase. The woe he brought to himself in this way was enormous. That woe is reflected, as Garrow details in his book, in sermon after sermon after sermon. The pain he caused his family was profound, though rarely have they spoken of it. The sense of betraying the cause lived with him constantly, but the compulsions of his body gave him no rest. His marriage was not easy, primarily because of the conflict so many of us understand between his work and his home. Almost always when a choice had to be made, he chose the work, the cause, the calling for which he and so many others felt he was uniquely qualified. Money was a problem because as a champion of the poor he thought he had no right to have a lot of money or even own property. Coretta, more practical, wanted him to keep some of the money that came his way for himself and the family. It was a constant tension. They also wrangled over King's view that a woman belonged in the home, with the children. Coretta once observed that "I've never been on the scene when we marched. I'm usually at home, because my husband says, 'You have to take care of the children.'" His views were traditional, patriarchal, in opposition to her more modern and feminist ideas. It was a difficult marriage, to the point where many of those close to Martin and Coretta felt that had he survived, the marriage would not have. He did not possess an unusually commanding or good-looking body. Shorter than me by a couple of inches or more, as he grew older he grew fatter and softer. In so many ways, Martin Luther King. Jr. really was "an average and ordinary man." But we know that he was much more than that, that for all his average-ness and ordinariness, he was really quite extraordinary. Only a most remarkable individual could have inspired the powerful and hateful Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, to describe him as "the most dangerous Negro in this nation." He was dangerous, he was extraordinary, because he had the courage to become a radical man, a man who went to the roots of human life and human society and human thought and lived by what he discovered there. The first thing he discovered on his journey was the importance of faith. Dr. King was a very learned man. His doctoral dissertation was a comparison of the German Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich and the American Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman. He was comfortable in academic circles, and his speeches and sermons are laced with references to a wide range of the world's thinkers. But it was not theology or philosophy that formed the core of his faith. It was rather an ethical truth at the heart of every religion. Here is how King expressed that truth: "I still believe that love is the most durable power in the world. Over the centuries men have sought to discover the highest good...What is the summum bonum of life? I think I have discovered the highest good. It is love." He came to this understanding in a remarkable religious experience a few weeks into the Montgomery bus boycott. He sat alone late at night at his kitchen table. He was weary. He was afraid. He especially feared for his wife and daughter. There was violence in the air. The phone call was particularly disturbing. "Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren't out of this town in three days, we're going to blow your brains out and blow up your house." The 27 year old King, two months a father, a reluctant leader of the boycott, did not know if he could take one more minute of his frightening and anxious life. He began to pray out loud, "...Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak." Then, King reported later, "It seemed I could hear an inner voice saying to me, 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even unto the end of the world.' I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone." King grew out of that experience into a faith that love would always abide in the world and that his task was to spread that love in as many ways as he could: love in the form of righteousness, love in the form of justice, love in the form of truth. His faith enabled him to proclaim that "blood may flow in the streets of Montgomery before we receive our freedom, but it must be our blood that flows and not that of the white man. We must not harm a single hair on the head of our white brothers." King's faith in the power of love gave him a largeness of spirit that led him to declare on winning the Montgomery bus boycott that "I would be terribly disappointed if any of you go back to the busses bragging, 'We, the Negroes, won a victory over white people.' I hope nobody will go back with undue arrogance. If you do, our struggle will be lost all over the South. Go back with humility and meekness." King had a faith that "hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyses life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it." Such a faith in love lived to the fullest extent is unusual because life is so full of hatred and bitterness and anger, so full of self-righteousness and self- justification. It is so much easier not to love, but so much more calamitous. King's faith in love was a radical faith drawn from the heart of the universe. A radical faith in love means a commitment to non-violence, a commitment King lived fully. Himself the target of violence several times-stabbed, beaten, bombed, and eventually shot to death-he did not respond with either hatred or a call to arms. King said of violence that it "brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace." He applied that conviction to the civil rights struggle. He applied it to the devastation wrought upon the native populations of this land. He applied it to a cultural ethos that celebrates gunplay and violent solutions in books, films, and television, He applied it to the war in Vietnam and to all wars: "Violence is immoral, but not only that-violence is impractical." Violence is an assault on love, a betrayal of the faith that human beings can get along, that we do not need to hurt each other in order to live well. That is a radical faith, a faith that goes to the root of human personality and human society and the natural order. Competitiveness is part of life, but cooperation-a form of love-is far more important for survival and good living. Think what a difference it has made to South Africa that Nelson Mandela shared Dr. King's faith in the power of love. A situation that could have been filled with bloodshed and slaughter has mostly been free of such horrifying violence. This is because Mandela loved his jailers and befriended even those who had oppressed him. He had the same radical faith in love that King had. Dr. King's faith is a faith we can all share. We can share it because it is not a faith that requires any theological affirmations. Whatever our theology, we can believe in and practice love. King's mentor, Mohandas Gandhi, was a Hindu. King's close friend and supporter, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was a Jew. His adviser, Stanley Levinson, was not formally religious. The Unitarian Universalist Homer Jack was an ardent follower. This is a faith foundational to all religious, a faith in what makes life work, what makes society work, what enables us to be happy and productive people. Martin Luther King was a radical man. He believed in love. Secondly, King was a radical man because he refused to fudge the truth about racial justice in our land, either historically or in the present moment. It is not a pleasant truth. The racial problem in America is as old as our nation. By the year 1619, when slaves began to be imported into the English colonies of North America, there were already one million Africans living in slavery in the western hemisphere. For one hundred years before that, people of black skin, both native and imported, had been treated as less than human, as beasts of burden, as property, as flesh not spirit, as animal not human. The slavery established here was a major resource in a huge money-making enterprise, agriculture, in time primarily cotton. Slavery was not grounded as previous slavery had been in battlefield loss or economic disaster, and only rarely was there a way to get out of slavery. American slavery was rooted in racial hatred. The radical Dr. King insisted on this fact being made clear. He pointed out that the very charter of our government, the Constitution, endorsed both slavery and the slave trade. It counted Negroes as well as Indians as three/fifths of a person for determining representation in the U.S. Congress, though neither of these groups received even a three/fifths vote for these representatives. It took the bloodiest war in our nation's history to give legal freedom to black slaves. Within a short time, Jim Crow laws were passed that prevented black people from obtaining good jobs, good housing, a good education, and participating in the democratic process. The Plessy v Ferguson decision by the Supreme Court in 1896 put the imprimatur of the federal government on discrimination against black people. Dr. King was a radical man who insisted on going back to the roots of the problem, who proclaimed that 340 years of oppression and denial was a long enough time to wait for justice. He insisted on justice now. He was a radical man, so in pursuit of justice he went to the roots of the American ideal, to the documents of our history that speak of our commitment as a people to liberty and to justice for all. Dr. King began his most famous speech with these words: "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity..." He went on to remind his listeners and the world that "when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all...would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Later in that speech he said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all...are created equal." He also said, "Now is the time..." That too is a radical notion, for most of us are more likely to believe that there is plenty of time to get the work of justice done. King knew that only with the attitude of doing it now can the long and hard work of justice ever get done. He was not stupid. He knew obstacles stood in the way. What he meant by saying that now is the time is that strong and unrelenting steps must be taken towards the goal of racial justice today. What he was talking about is the attitude with which we approach the issue of race. Too many people had for too long ignored or never learned the history of slavery and racial injustice in this land. What King called for was for the whole of American society to let that history fill not just our minds but our hearts. When that happens, when we all know and are horrified by the images of enslavement, daily humiliations, impoverishment, exclusion from the political process, inadequate education, and the myriad other oppressions and denials, then we will all say with Dr. King, now is the time! That is a radical notion, going to the heart of what keeps an unjust system going, too many people willfully blind to what has gone on and is now going on, too few good-hearted people determined to end the injustices. Dr. King was radical because he confronted the history and the present reality of slavery and segregation and racism. He was radical because he used the founding documents of our nation to call that wretched history to judgment. He was radical because in announcing that judgment, he always held out his hand to white people in fellowship and hope. "Our destinies are tied together," he said. In his lifetime, that was a radical notion. King was a radical man as well because he challenged the materialism of our society. When he died in 1968, he was preparing to lead a Poor People's Campaign to Washington, D.C. The plan was to camp out until the country took notice and began to take action to ease the terrible burdens imposed on black and red and brown and yellow and white children and women and men by the materialistic society of America. The well known March on Washington in 1963 was a march for jobs and freedom, though many forget the first part of that dual goal. King said that "the dispossessed of this nation-the poor, white and black-live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to lift the load of poverty." In 1965, King called poverty the second great evil of the human race. He urged an all-out war on poverty, and went north himself in that year to begin exposing and challenging some of the worst conditions. "Let us march on segregated housing, until every ghetto of social and economic depression dissolves and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe and sanitary housing...Let us march on poverty, until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat, until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in search of jobs that do not exist." I cannot help but feel that Dr. King would be mortified by the present circumstances of American life. Millions have no jobs or they have jobs that pay so little they must work at two or three of them to provide minimally for their families. Support for families, especially for single parents, has decreased in the past forty years. Meaningful health insurance simply does not exist for more than 75 million Americans. He told us in 1967 in a speech at Riverside Church in New York City that ours is a "thing-oriented" more than a "person-oriented" society. In our land, "machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people." A recent article in the Business Section of the New York Times made it clear that this has not changed. It described the mammoth salaries, bonuses, golden parachutes, and exit payments received by high-level CEO's in American businesses. Even so conservative a paper as the Times felt the unseemliness of such arrangements. Dr. King would have named it greed and called it evil. King understood that it was not this or that individual that had to be changed, but the whole structure of society, and that is a radical idea. "True compassion," he said, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs re-structuring....(It) will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth." King saw the way American capitalists used other nations for their own profit while doing virtually nothing for the social betterment of those countries. We can buy cheaper clothes and cheaper food and cheaper products of many kinds because we export their making to other lands where the cost of labor is vastly reduced. What King understood is the injustice of huge discrepancies between the rich and the poor, all of which have grown much worse in this land since his death. He understood that economics is simply one more place where community must come to matter more than individual success. That is a profoundly radical assertion in a land that worships individualism and the free market. Dr. King was a radical man in challenging one of the fundamental bases of our society, the pursuit of happiness through material gain, the love of things. King's call for "a revolution of values" was a radical call. It involved a deep faith in love as the strongest force in the universe. It required a painful knowledge of the history of racial injustice and a commitment to the ideals of our nation in eradicating that injustice. It demanded that we redirect our priorities from things to people, from individuals to community. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a radical man, an ordinary man who went to the roots and in the process became extraordinary. May the inspiration of his life fill our lives with a strong faith in the power of love, a firm commitment to the work of racial justice, and a new devotion not to accumulation but to the cause of humanity. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Lerone Bennett, Jr., WHAT MANNER OF MAN:A BIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., Pocket Books, 1968. 2. Michael Eric Dyson, I MAY NOT GET THERE WITH YOU: THE TRUE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., The Free Press, 2000. 3. David J. Garrow, BEARING THE CROSS: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE, Vintage Books, 1986. 4. Vincent Harding, MARTIN LUTHER KING: THE INCONVENIENT HERO, Orbis Books, 1996. 5. THE WISDOM OF MARTIN LUTHER KING IN HIS OWN WORDS, Lancer Books, 1968. 6. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (edited by Clayborne Carson), Intellectual Properties Management, Inc., 1998. 7. Martin Luther King, Jr., STRENGTH TO LOVE, Pocket Books, 1968. 8. ............................, STRIDE TOWARD FREEDOM: THE MONTGOMERY STORY, Ballantine Books, 1958. 9. ............................., WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY?, Beacon Press, 1968. 10. John A. Williams, THE KING GOD DIDN'T SAVE: REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., Pocket Books, 1971. Copyright 2005, Kenneth W. Phifer All Rights Reserved 1