Beyond the Dream: The MLK Our Holiday Leaves Out

a sermon preached by Tony Lorenzen

at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Gardner, MA

Sunday, January 15, 2006

When the prophet Amos tells us that God says “I hate, I despise your festivals,  and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies,” I shudder to think that the time has now come when celebrations of Martin Luther King Day have joined the list of occasions from which God might turn away. Has Martin Luther King Day become like the religious festivals of Amos’ time? Has our holiday strayed from its original intent, its celebrations filled, if not with hypocrisy and disrespect, at the very least a great deal of misunderstanding?

I wonder if of our MLK celebrations across America have become just noisy songs? I wonder because the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was so much more than a dream he talked about on August 28, 1963. I wonder because King’s life and work were so much more radical than we usually recognize on what has become just another three-day weekend.

Martin Luther King’s keynote address at the March on Washington in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 is his most well known and most often-quoted speech. The nation heard it and saw it on television. It laid out a passionate plea for freedom, equality and justice. His wife Coretta Scott King once said about that speech that, “At that moment it seemed as if the Kingdom of God appeared. But it only lasted for a moment.”

Perhaps it was such an imprinting event because it was the first chance many Americans got to see and hear the powerful Black preacher even though he had been leading the civil right struggle for nearly a decade since the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It is an eloquent speech and contains masterful rhetorical flourishes. The hope it speaks of still stirs our hearts. Yet, and I believe, sadly, King’s life and his work and his holiday are often reduced to that one march, that one speech, and that one dream. I think it important to look at more than the dream, especially King’s work and his words about poverty, and war and peace.

There is no doubt the dream of racial equality remains but a dream for too many. Maybe that is why our celebrations focus all our attention on it. Yet, I think we focus on the dream for another reason: it is safe. We stay with King’s words of hope for a better future and a more diverse world so that we are not confronted with his harsh words of criticism about our country, our world, and ourselves. After all, we really don’t like prophets up close. They make us uncomfortable.

I think that at worst we have made another bland national hero out of a radical preacher and at best we have made such an idol out of Rev. King that we sit around waiting for someone else to lead us into the Promised Land of racial justice.

“By idolizing those whom we honor,” writes black educator Charles Willie, one of King’s Moorehouse [College] Classmates, “we do a disservice to both them and to ourselves. By exalting the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Jr. into a legendary tale that is annually told, we fail to recognize his humanity- his personal and public struggles- that are similar to yours and mine. By idolizing those whom we honor, we fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise.”

Hosea Williams puts it more bluntly: “There is a definite effort on the part of America to change Martin Luther King, Jr. from what he really was all about – to make him into the Uncle Tom of the century. In my mind, he was the militant of the century.” [1]

King’s dream was about ending racial injustice. It was about ending economic disparities; it was about gaining equal access to society’s benefits for everyone in the areas of jobs, income, health care, and education – as a current movie calls it, quoting Thomas Jefferson- the dream was about the pursuit of happiness. The dream was not about a colorblind society. When we hope for a color blind world, when we say we don’t see a person’s color, we admit to not recognizing or respecting legitimate differences that make us who we are – our color and our cultures – and the privileges or lack of them that go with being who we are. If someone is Black and I tell them I don’t see color, I negate their blackness and along with it all the discrimination and prejudice they faced because of their blackness. I also negate any celebration of their blackness and particular Black culture, from things as general as the Harlem Renaissance and Kwanzaa to the particularity of what their ethnicity might be, say their Haitian culture or Ghanaian Culture or the customs they have being from Atlanta or Houston or Philadelphia. I don’t want a colorblind world. I want a just world. This is what King meant when he envisioned a world where people aren’t judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character – Not that we don’t see color, but that color isn’t the cause of injustice. We don’t seek a dream of diversity, we seek a dream of true justice and that is what our MLK holiday and its celebrations all too often leave out – the dream’s implications for justice.

We don’t talk about how race and poverty are tied together on Martin Luther King Day. We don’t talk about how for every dollar the average white family owns in America, the average family of color owns 18 cents. How did we get to this situation? In, The Color of Wealth, a recent book by five authors connected to the Boston based non-partisan group United for a Fair Economy. The racial line of economic disparity was drawn across the centuries first by slavery, then by laws and policies of discrimination that kept people of color, as they write “from participating in government wealth-building programs that have benefited white Americans.”[2] As an example the book cites some post WW II GI Bill programs that benefited whites only.

` Now we fight for pitiful increases in the minimum wage instead of demanding a living wage law, something King sought back in the 1960s. Poverty polarizes race relations. King understood this. He addressed the AFL-CIO congress in 1961, telling them, “If the Negro wins, Labor wins.” When he was shot in Memphis on April 4, 1968, he was working on the Poor People’s Campaign and was in town to address striking sanitation workers. He worked to break the system that set poor white people against poor people of color. If poor white people can be kept discriminating against people of color in any way, say in the current immigration baiting that fills our news, all poor people of every color will be kept from uniting to fight for things such as living wages and universal health care. When our focus is only on the dream, we ignore the anti-poverty King.

We also ignore the anti-war King, the King who won the Noble Peace Prize. One year to the day before he was assassinated, on April 4, 1967, King addressed a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. He had begun to speak out against the war in Viet Nam, but this was the first speech in which he tied that opposition to the fight against poverty and the civil rights movement. His speech that day was called “A Time to Break Silence.” King preached these words that day:

“Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war….Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. 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. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

This week we heard our president ask us once again to support further involvement in a foreign war that sucks resources like a demonic tube from the needs of our poor, our children, our schools, our sick, our elderly. More and more people are finding the courage to break the silence and oppose their president and their government and as King said, it is a vocation of agony. It is never something done lightly, but the demands of inner truth require the silence to be broken.

In the Time to Break Silence Sermon, King preached words that reach out to us today as well as they did to his original audience in the Riverside Church 40 years ago.

[the Vietnamse] must see Americans as strange liberators..Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village…What liberators?

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. [3]

King spoke these words about Vietnam, but replace the word Vietnam with Iraq and he could be speaking them today. King continued his address, citing the religious response of the Buddhist leaders of Vietnam who wrote to King these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism." [4]

Again replace Vietnam with Iraq and replace Buddhist with Muslim and could not this same message be for us again today? Or is the image of a Buddhist monk sitting in meditation more palatable than that of a Muslim crying in rage to Allah with fist upraised in anguish over the same behavior of America that King himself lamented almost forty years ago? King finished that address in 1967 with these words:

“The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam…The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I am convinced 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 rapidly begin the 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.

Four decades have passed since Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words. We are still a thing-oriented society. Profit motives and property rights are still more important than people, and we have yet to fund and realize a dream that many will talk about this weekend, but fewer will act upon.

And that is the true test, not just for prophets, but all people: to not just raise a call to action, but to act. To not just dream, but do. The dreaming doesn’t carry the burden, the acting does. Until the dreamer speaks the dream, the dreamer won’t get thrown into the pit. Maybe justice won’t roll down like waters until more of us are arrested and thrown into pits, until more of us give speeches and walk on marches once again.

There is much to walk and talk about. War still rages and not just in Iraq. Murder rates and killing escalate unabated in Boston and New Orleans, but our attention is turned to Baghdad. When King was assassinated it was illegal across most of our country for black and white people to marry each other. Now we engage in the struggle for equal marriage rights for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere Dr. King told us. If we do not take the side of those who march for peace or demand equal marriage rights we dishonor King’s legacy – a legacy that is much more than a dream of diversity.

We must remember, as Ella Baker said, that “The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement.”[5] We can’t sit around saying, “I wish we had a Marin Luther King to lead us.” What we need to be asking is, “What can I do?”

It is a long, hard battle. King liked to quote a famous Unitarian and Transcendentalist preacher, Theodore Parker, who said that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”[6] At the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL in 1965 King turned this into a powerful image mixing Parker’s metaphor with the image of the arm of the law, saying, “the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”[7] Let us be about the work of the bending that arm, a little more, a little more, a little more. We may not see the mighty arm finish flexing. Like King, we may not get to walk into it, but one day, we as a people, will get to the Promised Land - and then we will see what has become of the dream.

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[1] Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross. Epilogue (625)

[2] http://www.racialwealthdivide.org/color_of_wealth/media_kit.html

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Garrow, Epilogue (625)

[6] King’s most famous use of this quote was in his speech “Our God is Marching On” delivered before the state capitol building in Montgomery, AL on 3/21/65 at the end of march from Selma’s Edmond Pettus Bridge. King’s reference is adapted as the original quote from Parker is: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.”