I was glad to see so many of you at the Martin Luther King Jr. Interfaith Shabbat Service two days ago at Congregation Rodef Sholom next door! As Unitarian Universalists, we have a particular fondness for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is probably a rare UU church that is not celebrating King's birthday today. Many of our members were very active in the civil rights work that King led in the 1950's and 1960's. Perhaps some of you here were active in those times. We lost two of our members to violence in that era. UU martyrs: James Reeb and Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a minister and a laywoman, killed in two separate incidents in Alabama.[1] The death of Reeb energized Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
There is perhaps a deeper motivation for this fondness. Former journalist, the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt related the story of her interview with Coretta Scott King in our UU World magazine a few years ago.[2]
During an hour of wide-ranging conversation, I mentioned to her that I was in seminary to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. What frankly surprised me was the look she gave me, one of respect and delight.
"Oh, I went to Unitarian churches for years, even before I met Martin," she told me, … "And Martin and I went to Unitarian churches when we were in Boston." … "We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian."McNatt goes on to explore what it would have taken for King to be a Unitarian civil rights leader. I simply feel proud and not surprised at the Kings' connection with us.
I think King's words and work resonate so well with us because he was on a parallel path. True, his language and much of his teaching draws heavily on Hebrew and Christian texts and ideas. He draws especially on the Hebrew prophets who spoke out against injustice in their times. He draws on Amos, "we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream".[3] Or on Isaiah, "that one day every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."[4]
But if we were to examine his writing and speeches, we would find that some of his deepest thinking is familiar to us. There is an undercurrent of universalist inclusion in all his language. King's phrase, "We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" evokes a sense of the interconnectedness of all life -- our seventh principle. King was fond of quoting Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, "The arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice."
But we do well not merely to praise King but to learn from him. This morning I want to explore King’s legacy as a tactician in achieving change in our world. We acknowledge his great success in Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma and his central role in passing the Civil Rights act in 1964.
King’s other great contribution, in my opinion, was to bring home to America the ideas of nonviolent social change developed by Mahatma Gandhi and used successfully in India and other countries. King first put the ideas of nonviolent social change to the test in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. As most of us know, the bus boycott began when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. Leaders of the black church community, along with King, a new minister in town, decided to ask the black community to boycott the busses for a day or so, and the boycott mushroomed into a 381-day confrontation.[5]
What I was not conscious of was the degree of planning and organizing that went into the boycott. King describes the planning and the decision-making that this project required in his book "Stride Toward Freedom". They had to plan alternate transportation using what cars the blacks owned. They had to communicate with the press. They had to hire lawyers to defend legal attacks by the local authorities. And certainly they had to do significant fundraising.
But the most important organizing task was the endless support and training of the black community in the methods of nonviolent resistance that had been used successfully by Mahatma Gandhi. King very much understood the theology, the moral underpinning of this nonviolent social change. He had studied Gandhi’s work and his life, and even traveled to India to meet those close to Gandhi. King said after visiting India, "I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."[6]
Let me say a bit about non-violent social change as taught by Gandhi. Rejecting the term 'passive resistance', Gandhi developed a theological idea of nonviolent resistance based on what he called Satyagraha, or 'soul force'. This is the force of truth or of love, exerted in the act of non-violent engagement with the oppressor. It is a courageous act, for it invites suffering on oneself. Gandhi made the distinction this way: "Satyagraha is a weapon of the strong; it admits of no violence under any circumstance whatsoever; and it ever insists upon truth."[7]
King understood this. He summed this up in his peace prize speech: "Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation."So considerable work went into helping black participants understand and practice nonviolent resistance. In preparing for confrontations on integrated busses in Montgomery, King tells us:
"we ran teaching sessions to school the people in nonviolent techniques. We lined up chairs in front of the altar to resemble a bus, with a driver's seat out front. From the audience we selected a dozen or so 'actors' and assigned each one a role in a hypothetical situation. One man was driver and the others were white or Negro passengers. Both groups contained some hostile and some courteous characters. As the audience watched, we played out a scene of insult or violence. … Often a Negro forgot his nonviolent role and struck back with vigor; whenever this happened we worked to rechannel his words and deeds in a nonviolent direction"[8]Even so, King encountered some who wanted to strategize violence, especially as homes were bombed and blacks were beaten up during the boycott. King described one man from his own church who approached him and said solemnly, "we need to kill off 8 or 10 white people. It’s the only language they understand. If we fail to do this they will think we are afraid. We must show them we are not afraid any longer."[9]
King was able to convince most to continue the experiment of nonviolent resistance in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma. King was less successful in later years, as others in the black community began advocating and using violence, arguing that violence would achieve their goals faster than nonviolence. Malcolm X put it this way:
"If [the white man's] language is with a shotgun, get a shotgun … If he only understands the language of a rope, get a rope. But don't waste time talking the wrong language to a man if you want to really communicate with him."[10]As King came to understand the 'soul force' power of nonviolent action, he also came to understand that our national tendency toward war, the military and overseas violence had a hidden cost. He saw the terrible linkage between racism and poverty and war, he began to speak in opposition to the Vietnam war as a time when such speech took true courage. In 1967, he tells us:
"A few years ago …it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. … Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."[11]We have a tendency in this country to reach for forceful and even violent ways to achieve our national ends. Thus, our current wars were originally pitched to us as short-term easy victories against third-world nations. We were told that terrorism could only be dispatched if we were willing to use torture, rendition and indefinite imprisonment. We are told that the only way to reduce crime is to 'get tough on crime' with lots of prisons and long sentences. We are told that the only way to deal with addiction is through a 'war on drugs'.
Even President Obama is not immune to attack as a 'wimp'. According to an article by Helene Cooper in last week's NY Times, "here is a president who just ramped up the war in Afghanistan, sending an additional 30,000 troops, … stepped up drone strikes by unmanned Predators in Pakistan and provided intelligence and firepower for two airstrikes against Al Queda in Yemen that killed more than 60 militants." And yet this week's Foreign Policy magazine has on its cover a visual comparing Obama with Jimmy Carter.[12]
When we consider President Obama's Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech, we see an apology for war, and an attempt to claim that the current wars are, to use the technical term, 'just wars'. Most disturbingly, at the end of the speech, Obama says, "oppression will always be with us", that "there will be war". My wondering and my fear is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By preparing for war and international oppression, we seem to create the conditions that encourage it. We defend the entrenched powers in places like Guatemala and Saudi Arabia; we enforce artificial national divisions in places like Rwanda; we prop up corrupt leaders through our selective complacency in places like Burma or Zimbabwe. It's well known that our aid years ago in Afghanistan supported the rise of the Taliban, but we continue to aid the Taliban through military payoffs to support our supply chains, according to journalist Aram Rosten.[13]
Is war our only tool? I wonder if we as a nation could commit to doing more in support of nonviolent social change, both in our own land and in other countries. Could we offer material and organizational support to those being oppressed? Could we reserve threats of force for those situations in which nonviolent resistance is attacked violently by foreign governments? This could require a fundamental rethinking of how we do statecraft. I do not know what this might look like, but I do have a suspicion that it would be more successful and less costly than our current national defense and homeland security system.
To accomplish this change we have to work at a deeper level than policy and platforms. We have to change the fundamental ideas of our national theology, what Robert Bellah calls our 'civil religion'. We need to admit that we are not endowed by God as a God's chosen nation, that we are not separate from others. We need to see the deep reality that we are all interconnected, so that as King tells us, 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere'. We need to recognize, as King did, that violence masks fear, while nonviolence requires true courage.
What can we do at the level of this one congregation? I think we would do well to educate ourselves on the method of 'soul force' that Gandhi developed. I think we would do well to seek situations in which the application of such creative methods for social change may be explored. I think we also should hold fast to the yearning for peace.
Let me end with an excerpt from two of King's speeches, "A Christmas Sermon on Peace", and "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence", both from 1967:
"It really boils down to this, that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality."[14]So that then,
"We must move past indecision to action.… If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world.… Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."[15]
Notes:
1 "So Nobly Started", UU World, http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/2356.shtml
2 "To Pray Without Apology", UU World, http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/2527.shtml
3 Amos 5:24 described in Eric J. Sundquist, King's Dream, 2009, p. 122.
4 Isaiah 40:1-5, described in Sundquist, p. 131.
5 M. L. King, Jr., Playboy Interview, in James M. Washington, ed. A Testament of Hope, p. 343.
6 M. L. King, Jr., "My Trip to the Land of Gandhi", ibid, p. 25.
7 The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 19, p. 350, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
8 M. L. King, Jr., Stride toward Freedom, in Washington, p. 458.
9 ibid, p. 449.
10 Sundquist, p. 122.
11 M. L. King Jr. "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" 4 April 1967, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
12 NY Times, The Label Factor: Is Obama a Wimp or a Warrior? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10cooper.html
13 " How Americans Help Fund The Taliban", NPR Fresh Air, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=122563121
14 M. L. King, Jr., M. L. King, Jr., "A Christmas Sermon on Peace" in Washington, p. 254.
15 M. L. King Jr. "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" 4 April 1967, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
