Spiritual Depth of Martin Luther King

Holidays have a way of taming and diluting the real importance of the legacies and events they are meant to commemorate. This tendency is particularly true of today’s holiday celebrating the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These efforts reflect some discomfort with the true level of sacrifice and commitment involved in fighting for freedom. Resisting this tendency requires some real thinking and soul-searching.

Sometimes, a very good author helps us regain some needed perspective on what matters. Fortunately, a few months ago, Jonathan Eig issued a new, deeply researched biography of King that helps us understand better not only what King did in his short life, but why he did it and what forces made him who he was. Admirably, Eig does not shy away from any of the ugly difficulties that kept King in danger throughout a 13-year ministry that began in 1955 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The son of Martin Luther King, Sr., who was then the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, outgrew his father’s legacy but also benefited enormously from his father’s self-made path from the son of Georgia sharecroppers to a prominent leader in the Black churches of the South.

Over the past two weeks, I have been leading a discussion of this remarkable book—King: A Life—in the Adult Forum of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, in Chicago. The participation has been lively, and people have taken turns reading passages that I thought were especially illuminating. There is not room in one blog post to cover all that territory, so I highly recommend reading the book, but I will make what I think are some salient points about the King legacy.

First, I think it is hard for many people today, especially whites, to imagine the level of intimidation that racist thugs, including but hardly limited to the Ku Klux Klan, used in the post-Reconstruction South to suppress the Black vote, Black rights, Black dignity, and thus any semblance of true democracy. Eig relates one instance of family history in 1910, in which King’s ten-year-old father, then named Michael, was kicked by a white mill owner and sent home bleeding. His mother demanded to know who did that, then marched back to attack the mill owner with her own fists when he admitted doing this to her son. But her husband had to flee when a white mob arrived at their home. Black men who fought back, Eig notes, could pay with their lives.

The father remained bitter and became alcoholic even after returning home. King Sr., however, distilled the lesson that faith in God was the way out of that trap. He gained an education at Spelman College while working as a coal shoveler for a railroad company and became a preacher, ending up at Ebenezer. Later, in a 1934 visit to Germany, he was inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther to adopt that name in place of his birth name of Michael, and changed his son’s name, forever attaching the family to the legacy of the German religious reformer. Eig notes:

“He really related to Martin Luther,” said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King’s grandson. “He had that same fighting spirit in him.”

His son would need that fighting spirit once he became the de facto and then real leader of the bus boycott that followed the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Just four days later, King, at the invitation of other Black leaders in the city, gave a powerful speech to an overflow rally at the Holt Street Baptist Church that ignited the spirit of the Black community. It led thousands to spend the following year walking to work instead of riding the bus.

All that made King a huge target for an increasingly angry white community, or at least that large part of the white community that was resistant to justice. The White Citizens’ Council, which included police commissioner Clyde Sellers, claimed it grew from 800 members to nearly 14,000 as a result of the boycott. King was arrested and thrown in jail following a trivial traffic stop when he picked up Black passengers as part of an effort to provide rides for Black workers at designated carpool locations. Mayor Tacky Gayle had instructed police to tail and harass Black motorists who provided such rides. On January 30, 1956, while Coretta Scott King was hosting a friend at their home, they heard footsteps on the front porch, after which a bomb exploded, damaging the front of the house. King gave a speech that is remarkable for self-restraint while nonetheless demanding justice, instructing the crowd that assembled to “love your enemies” but also noting that he did not ask to lead the movement, but “if I am stopped this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

Reread those last five words, for I think they are key to what is often missing from people’s recollection of who King really was. How did he succeed in leading a successful nonviolent revolution for major social change in America? I think it is worth quoting a whole paragraph from Eig, in which he nails the point that is often missing from discussion of the King legacy, the fact that he was committed to a life of deep faith despite all his fears that his life could be cut short:

In years to come, journalists, historians, and biographers would speculate about what made King special, about what gave him the courage and vision to lead. Some observers have stressed the competitive nature of King’s relationship with his father. Other have focused on cultural factors, noting the guilt he felt about his middle-class upbringing and pointing out that he arrived in Montgomery when liberation battles were erupting in Africa and Asia and when radio and television made it possible for a brilliant young preacher to be seen and heard in millions of homes. But the Reverend James Lawson, one of King’s contemporaries, has argued that those interpretations miss an obvious and powerful explanation—that of King’s calling from God. “That was my case, that was King’s case,” Lawson said. “It’s not . . . boasting . . . it’s the deep-down-inside awareness that connects your life up with the life force of the universe, the God who created the heavens and the earth, to quote the Hebrew poets. So, anyone who has that kind of a calling, that’s something that profoundly alters their way of thinking and behavior.”

There is a great deal of depth and detail in Eig’s book. Last September, at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago, in a program co-sponsored by the Society of Midland Authors (Eig lives in Chicago), I had the pleasure of hearing Eig speak and relate how he got turned on to working on this biography. The very next day, I acquired the book at a local store. After a major surgery two weeks later, which I related in my January 1 blog post, I had ample recuperation time to tackle a long book. I immediately turned to this biography, plowing through it day after day in rapt fascination, thinking about how I would have faced the challenges in King’s life, which ultimately ended in his assassination at age 38 in Memphis in April of 1968, an event that triggered a wide range of reactions including, unfortunately, urban riots.

In those 13 years that followed his assignment, at age 25, as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he not only watched the world change, but helped change it. The bus boycott ended with an NAACP victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Browder v. Gayle, which effectively outlawed segregation in intrastate transportation. Later, he would deliver the famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., watch as President Lyndon Johnson signed major civil rights and voting rights legislation, march in the face of insults and brickbats for fair housing in Chicago, and support the garbage workers strike in Memphis that ended with his assassination. Profoundly aware of his own fears, flaws, and shortcomings, his faith nonetheless bolstered his courage and helped him refashion American democracy in a way that still enriches us today, even when we face new domestic threats to its preservation.

It is critical that we get in touch with the roots of that courage, so that we do not squander all that was won at such a high cost. It is critical that we believe that God meant us to be so much better.

Jim Schwab

Truth and Consequences and January 6

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

Like most people, I learned of the insurrection that resulted in five deaths and considerably more than 100 injuries to Capitol police from television news. Don’t ask me which channel; it was probably either CNN or MSNBC, but honestly, I don’t remember. I only remember what I saw—the searing image of American citizens attacking the seat of their own government on behalf of a President who lied to them because his twisted psyche did not allow him to admit that he had lost an election, fair and square. If he believes that the election was stolen, it is not because he has ever had any evidence to that effect. It is because he has repeated the lie to himself so often that he has internalized it completely. Such men are very dangerous.

There are plenty of good, well-written commentaries on the events of January 6, and it is not my aim to add another broad assessment of the day. The testimony before, and the final report of, the House Select Committee will add immensely to our knowledge, but it remains to be seen whether it can change minds. Even in 1974, as Richard Nixon was about to resign the presidency after a visit by a delegation of distinguished Republican Senators convinced him the gig was up, about one-quarter of the American public still sided with him, either disregarding or disbelieving the criminality on display from the Watergate affair. Even the most venal and corrupt politicians have always had their supporters, often until the bitter end. It is not as if the larger public is composed entirely of angels, after all. When the support fades, it is usually because the politician in question is no longer useful.

Corrupt and authoritarian politicians are almost always bullies who are highly skilled at making offers that their followers, and often others, cannot refuse. There is nothing new about this phenomenon. It is as old as civilization itself. The Bible is replete with evidence of such venality, dating back thousands of years.

So, what do I have to offer?

On the afternoon of the insurrection, I was preparing for a pair of sequential consulting meetings when the news caught my attention. That led to a mercifully brief text exchange with someone I will leave unidentified. I will paraphrase for clarity while sharing its essence. The point is not who it is, but his perceptions in the face of what effectively was a coup attempt. I understood his politics for many years beforehand; sometimes, he would needle me about it, and sometimes in recent years I was forced to terminate a conversation that, in my view, had departed earth’s orbit and no longer made sense.

But at that moment, I had to believe even this riot, insurrection, coup attempt, call if what you will, would be too much even for him. I was wrong.

I asked if he was still happy with Trump after Trump had incited an insurrection at the Capitol.

I was told that, after years of corruption that no one had challenged, except for Trump in the previous four years, “people are fed up.”

I want to step back here and make two points about this expression of frustration.

First, regarding corruption, this is a vague term that, without specifics, can be used as a broad brush against almost anything one disagrees with, and I believe that was happening here. There is, in my view, little question that corruption has at times affected both political parties. Personally, I have been perfectly willing to cross party lines to vote against candidates and office holders with documented records of corruption of any kind. I intensely dislike politicians who put self-interest ahead of the public interest. I am also aware that my disagreement with their policies does not constitute evidence of their corruption. Those are two different things, and we need to respect that difference if democracy is going to involve any kind of principled debate about what is best for our society. There are times when those lines are blurred, and times when it is clear. For instance, I was pleased last year when Democrats in the Illinois House of Representatives voted to replace long-time Speaker Michael Madigan, who had become entangled in a corruption scandal involving Commonwealth Edison Co. and its parent Exelon, with Chris Welch, who became the first Black Speaker in Illinois history. Welch may not be perfect either, but it was time for Madigan to leave. He has retired into obscurity, but he may yet face federal charges. I could name dozens of such situations in either party.

But to suggest that no one had addressed such corruption until Trump did so is ludicrous. It also demonstrates a willful blindness to facts. The litany of evidence of Trump’s shady transactions in both business and politics is overwhelming, from the $25 million fraud settlement in the lawsuit against Trump University, to the tax and insurance fraud charges now being brought against the Trump Organization by the Manhattan District Attorney, to the investigation of Trump’s demand of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to allow Trump to claim victory in that state in the 2020 election—the details have filled multiple books over many years. No matter the depth of evidence that Trump not only does not fight corruption, but personifies it, followers will insist on dismissing such evidence, almost surely without ever reviewing it. Nonetheless, it is absolutely clear to anyone reading all this, as I have, that Trump has never been the weapon against this corruption that this complaint suggests.

For those who may think otherwise, or want to better arm themselves to discuss this topic, I include a short, incomplete bibliography of Trump-related investigative literature at the end of this blog post. Beware: It may keep you occupied for weeks.

But there is also the claim that “people are fed up.” This deserves closer analysis. One could ask, Fed up with what, exactly? My correspondent cited Biden “bringing back old retreads that Obama had in his cabinet.” That is hardly a crime, of course, and may well have indicated a preference by a new president facing a crisis of confidence in government for choosing experienced people who know how to make government work. That is hardly cause for a riot, let alone a coup attempt, and I said as much, though admittedly I may have sparked further anger in referring to the corruption claims as a “bullshit excuse” for an insurrection—especially since the express purpose was to prevent certification of the election. He also noted the need for better trade agreements, for someone to “actually help the working person,” and the loss of manufacturing jobs. I would readily agree that these are all legitimate political issues, subject to debate both on the streets and in the media, and in Congress and state legislatures, but justification for an insurrection?

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

That was the red line I could not cross, nor could I accept that anyone else should be allowed to do so.

The idea that all this frustration, not all of it based on accurate perceptions, justified an attempt to overthrow an election underlines a sense of civic privilege that I find appalling. If your preferred candidate failed to make his case to the American people—and that is precisely what happened to Trump—it does not follow that the only path forward is insurrection. The presumption behind this logic is deeply rooted in white privilege, even if its advocates do not wish to consciously own that brutal truth.

After all, if anyone is entitled to a sense that they are pushing back against persistent injustice, it would be African Americans, who can cite centuries of brutal suppression and slavery prior to the Civil War, the use of home-grown terrorism through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to suppress Black voting rights and citizenship and economic opportunity, Jim Crow laws that enforced inequality well into the 20th century, vicious housing discrimination, and violent police actions, such as those of the Alabama state troopers who assaulted peaceful demonstrators in Selma in 1965, all of which make pro-Trump protesters’ allegations of unfairness pale in comparison. Yet, most African American citizens have persisted across centuries to use what levers they have within the democratic system to achieve a more equitable society. Admittedly, there are times when tensions have boiled over, but who could reasonably have expected otherwise? I am not justifying violence, but asking reasonable people to consider the disappointments to which Black Americans have been subjected for generations before making comparisons to the complaints of the MAGA crowd.

Moreover, such issues of delayed justice have affected other minorities, such as Chinese, the subject of an immigration exclusion law for decades, the Japanese internment during World War II, and widespread prejudice and discrimination against Latino immigrants over the past century. One could go on, but the point is clear. All have sought doggedly to work through the existing system to resolve injustice.

That leads to the next element of the exchange, in which I insisted that any Democrat instigating such an attack would be accused of treason, and that to react otherwise to Trump’s insurrection is “blatant hypocrisy.” I wanted to draw direct attention to the double standard that was being applied by many Republicans in this instance. In fact, I added, “Coup attempt is crime.” Democrats made similar allegations, of course, in the second impeachment trial.

That led to the countercharge that Democrats were hypocritical in allowing “looting, burning, shooting and harassing of innocent people” in the demonstrations and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020. He then referred to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “part of the elitist liberal problem in this country.” As with the corruption issue, we were back to the broad-brush approach to asserting problems without specifics.

At that point, I decided to end the conversation because it seemed clear that the discussion was going to veer off track. I made clear that “I have never endorsed violence and I never will.” But I added that in Trump’s case, “This is an official condoning this,” which separated it from mayors who did not like the violence in their cities, but were faced with challenges in deciding the best approach to handling it. His comments also ignored the fact that 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful. I contrasted such practical policy decisions to “federal crimes encouraged by a US president who should know better.” And with that, the exchange ended.

I realize, of course, that this is just one such conversation among millions of exchanges among friends and relatives with contrasting views across the country. I did not completely disagree with all of his concerns, but I also was deeply puzzled as to how those of us worried about the future of democracy when it is under attack by followers of a demagogue like Trump can wrestle with jello or shadow-box with phantoms, given the vague and disingenuous statements with which we are confronted, including some of his.

In the meantime, speaking of stealing elections, we are watching some amazing voting rights shenanigans, to say nothing of phony “audits,” at the state level. What will we say when the second insurrection anniversary rolls around? Will anything have changed?

 

Partial Bibliography: Recent Books on President Donald Trump and/or the Insurrection

 

Johnston, David Cay. The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Karl, Jonathan. Betrayal. Dutton, 2021.

Leonnig, Carol, and Philip Rucker. A Very Stable Genius. Penguin Press, 2020.

Leonnig & Rucker. I Alone Can Fix It. Penguin Press, 2021.

Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Harper, 2022.

Schiff, Adam. Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Random House, 2021.

Woodward, Bob, and Robert Costa. Peril. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Woolf, Michael. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Little Brown, 2018.

Jim Schwab