On Martin Luther King Day

January 16, 1994
Location Unspecified

Yesterday was the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Tomorrow will be observed as Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, remembering the great contributions he made, not only for achievements in the civil rights struggle, but also for his unqualified commitment to peace and non-violence. Our assigned theme today is “Universalism”, but it is not inconsistent to especially honor MLK because there is a connection.

In his belief in peace and non-violence, MLK often attributed much to the influence of Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi said that his philosophy of peace and non-violence was strongly influenced by Leo Tolstoy and Adin Ballou.

Adin Ballou was not only a pacifist and also the founder of the Hopedale community, but a Universalist minister who served Universalist churches in New York and Massachusetts. He also wrote the words for the hymn with which we will close our service today.

There is another connection. Among the 31 men and 30 women who signed the Charter of Compact of the 1st organized Universalist Church (pict.) was Gloster Dalton, a Black man. When he died and his funeral was held in the church, the minister, Thomas Jones (who succeeded John Murray) officiated and entered this in the church records, “April 11, 1813, Gloster Dalton, an African. In this country from a youth, Supposed to be 90 years old. Gloster Dalton was an honest, industrious man. He had been infirm about two or three years ... belonged to the Independent Christian Society for many years. He was a native of Africa and brought away as a slave (so-called). For there are no slaves! All men are born free. T. Jones”

In tribute and memory of MLK and a reminder from our Universalist roots that tasks are not completed until all persons are free, let us sing 149, sometimes known as the Negro National Anthem.

Slavery – The Perverse Thread In Human History

January 20, 1985
Lakeland

In choosing this subject, the purpose is neither to re-ignite the inherited shadows of white collective guilt, nor to castigate the memories of the slave owners of this nation. The purpose is to examine, briefly, the history of human slavery and to look at what Gunnar Myrdal called “The American Dilemma.” My purpose is to try to deepen awareness and to sharpen perception that the ghosts of the past are still rattling chains that are a discordant sound in our best dreams.

Myrdal wrote (Intro, Vol. I – lxxi) “The American Negro is a problem in the heart of the American ... At bottom our problem is the moral dilemma of the American.... The ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the general plane we shall call ‘The American Creed,’ where the American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian precepts, and on the other hand, the valuations on specific plans of individual and group living, where personal and local interests; economic, social and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits dominate his outlook.”

Because the history of slavery is so complex, the literature so vast, this talk is limited to a few divisions:

The definition and origins of human slavery.
Slavery in antiquity.
Slavery in the age of the dominating religions of the West, Christianity and Islam.
Slavery in the Americas.
The ghosts that haunt us today.

What is a slave? “His/her person is the property of (another); the slave’s will is subject to the owner’s authority and the slave’s labor is obtained and maintained through coercion.” (SLAVERY, Davis, p. 31) Furthermore, the slave was a chattel, a piece of property, a thing. This economic definition – that a slave is property – pervades the entire sorry history. Human rights and humane considerations need not stir the conscience if a slave is not a person but a thing, a chattel, an outsider.

When people were wandering hunters and food gatherers in pre-historic times, almost surely slavery did not exist. The subsistence level of the economy did not allow for such a practice. American Indians and Australian Aborigines did not seem to have practiced slavery. Enemies captured in battle were killed, not enslaved. The primitive economy had no place for them.

When animals were domesticated and required tending, and when people developed agriculture and settled in at one location, the exploitation of outsiders became characteristic. Perhaps captured women were the first victims. In ancient Sumeria, the word for slave women meant “women from a foreign land.” Prostitution is commonly called the world’s oldest profession, but the ancient tradition for that was slavery because the brothels and harems were supplied with women captured in wars and raids. The laws of Hammurabi prescribed the death penalty for anyone who harbored a slave fugitive.

In ancient Egypt all slaves belonged to Pharaoh, a story well told in the accounts of Moses in Egypt and the Exodus.

In the Old Testament, slavery was not only part of the culture, but in these scriptures there is no explicit protest against slavery on any grounds. In Nehemiah, after the return of the Jews from captivity, they sold their own children into slavery in order to pay the high taxes levied by the King. (5/5)

In ancient Greece, which we think of as a high classical civilization, human slavery was never seriously questioned. While some philosophers raised questions that human slavery was contrary to nature, most took the opposite view. Aristotle argued that slaves lacked the higher qualities of soul necessary for freedom.

In the civilizations of Greece and Rome, the source of slaves was not only those captured in war, but also [those] enslaved for debt, or punishment for crime. Impoverished parents sometimes sold their children in to slavery. It is told that many unwanted children were “exposed” and left to die. Scholars write that “exposed” meant, many times, that the children sold into slavery.

Rome required large numbers of slaves to work in the huge agricultural estates (lat. fundia) acquired by the upper classes, a high point being in the second and first centuries B.C.E. The size of the revolt led by Spartacus (73-71 BCE) illustrates both the large number of slaves and the enormous discontent of the slave with his lot. The gladiators in the death sports of the Roman arenas were slaves, but were the strongest, fiercest warriors in the slave revolts.

In spite of the humane, ethical, person-centered teachings of the prophet Jesus, the growth and eventual domination of the Christian religion made little difference in the institution of slavery. Paul's letter to Philemon epitomizes the difficulty the early Christians had with human slavery. Paul sends Onesimus back to his master, Philemon, who also is a Christian. Paul urges that Onesimus be treated well, but Paul does not condemn slavery as an institution. Debates have raged for centuries about what Paul meant, but at bottom it shows that Christians were allowed to hold fellow Christians as slaves.

Some of the early Christian theologians explained slavery away on the grounds that it was punishment for the original sin of Adam’s fall from grace. Others tried to rationalize a rather flimsy proposition that there was a distinction between physical and spiritual slavery. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote to Polycarp, “Despise not men or women slaves. Yet let them not be puffed up, but rather bear their slavery for the glory of God that they may win from Him thereby a better liberty.” (SLAVERY, Davis p. 87)

Some differences began to emerge in later centuries. Christians were forbidden to enslave Christians. But it was O.K. to enslave Moslems captured in war or the Crusades. In 1488, Pope Innocent VIII accepted 100 Moorish slaves as a gift from King Ferdinand of Spain and distributed these slaves among the cardinals and nobility.

Similarly, Islam – slavery was well-established in the time of the prophet Muhammad, but he proclaimed that no follower of Islam could be enslaved. However, Christians and followers of other religions could be enslaved, and they were.

But it was in our Western Hemisphere that human slavery has affected every one of us. Because the West Indies (and later the American colonies) were appropriate for development of large plantation crops – rice, tobacco, sugar, cotton, there arose the greatest demand for slaves and the most large-scale abuse. The need for slaves was huge, and Africa became the source. Native tribes fought each other and the captives were marched to the hell of the slave ships. Moslem slave traders had no compunction because the slaves were not followers of Islam; Christian slave-ship traders and captains had no restraints because the black Africans were not Christians.

Statistics may be unreliable, but it is estimated that in the two plus centuries of the slave trade, 15 million Africans were transported to the Western Hemisphere, not counting the 20% of each human cargo who perished or were killed on the long sea-journeys.

A distinctive feature of the African slave trade was that being black became the definition of availability for slavery. In antiquity, Rome, Greece, and early Europe, there was no such racial distinction. The slaves were of all colors, races, nations.

The story of American slavery is too well-known to fully rehearse its sad, sorry, and bloody history leading to our Civil War, the most traumatic event in our American history. If you viewed the series ROOTS, or have read any of the many novels, histories, or analyses, not much can be added.

There are a few key observations. If Northerners felt morally superior to the southern slave-holders, there was little justification. New Englanders transported the slaves the Southerners bought. Ship captains and owners sailed from Boston, Salem, or Newport with cargoes of rum to the African coast to be traded for slaves, then the slaves were carried to the West Indies to be traded for sugar and molasses which was brought back to New England to be distilled into rum – the infamous three-cornered trade. [CJW note: 60 rum distilleries]

At the time of the Declaration of Independence, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies. In the northern colonies, most slaves were household servants, not field hands, not because of greater kindness, but because in the North, climate and land were not suitable for the large plantation crops which required numerous field hands.

The American dilemma – the Declaration called for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but its author was a slave holder and the 1st President [was] as well. Beautiful Mt. Vernon and stunning Monticello were built by slaves.

Washington’s will provided that his slaves be manumitted (freed) upon the death of Martha Washington. In his lifetime at Mt. Vernon, he refused to buy or sell slaves.

In his NOTES ON VIRGINIA, Jefferson wrote, “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise in the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other.... And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

Nevertheless, all his life Jefferson bought and sold slaves, even when he was President. His will freed a few slaves, but most remained in slavery.

The dawn of conscience about the evils of slavery arrived late. Not until the 18th century did any protests begin. Slave trade was not abolished by Great Britain until 1807.

Gradually the values sifted out by Enlightenment thought had influence; some religious groups like the Quakers generated moral disapproval. But in our country, general feeling about abolition did not prevail up to the very dawn of the Civil War.

David Brion Davis, whose studies of human slavery are authoritative, comments, “It is more difficult, however, to get around the simple fact that no country thought of abolishing the slave trade until its economic value had considerably declined.”

Legal slavery came to an abrupt halt with the defeat of the South in the Civil War. But the cost lingers on to this very day.

[insert: Ibsen]

Mrs. Alving is suffering the blow in courage and faith; and she is rewarded with her deepest insight:

“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of sand, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.”

Ibsen’s insight about the personal tragedy of the Alving family is an analogy writ large for the ghosts that haunted America after Emancipation and the Civil War.

The attempts to achieve more equality for the freed slaves, voting rights, property rights foundered after the strange events called the Reconstruction. There was the greed of the Scalawags and Carpetbaggers – the determined efforts of the defeated to regain their lands and recoup their fortunes – and permeating it all the prejudice against black people – not only in the South but all through the land. And that prejudice persisted. The civil rights struggles, equal opportunity laws, the claims for educational equality all are efforts to dispel the ghosts of slavery and racism. That is the meaning of the life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Holidays seem to become diluted. The Fourth of July and Labor Day are more occasions for picnics and sports than they are solemn occasions of memories of human struggle for greater freedom and a more fair way of life.

As a writer in the Christian Century wrote (and this is my conclusion also),

“Let’s concede that institutions can take the salt out of anything. But we can preserve King’s motivation for justice.... Many white as well as black Christians did follow King’s leadership; we have that memory to celebrate. Many opposed; we have that memory to lead us to repentance. The church can use this birthday as a time to remember other parts of our past that are ignored in patriotic speeches: the work of William Penn for religious liberty, Roger Williams’ courage, the abolitionist movement, and the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday just might become that time of self-reflection that our nation needs.” (Jerry Gentry, Christian Century, 1/16/85)

Holiday For Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 1984
Lakeland

The Congress voted and the President signed a bill providing that the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. – January 15 – will be a national holiday beginning in 1986. There has been a mixed reaction. Some persons are troubled that King has been honored with a national holiday while such national heroes and historic persons as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR (to name a few) have not been so honored and commemorated. Others have said there are too many holidays already.

There are also those who have commented cynically that many who voted for the measure did so only because it was politically expedient. The black voters, although a minority, now represent a substantial enough group to be a swing vote in certain elections. To vote “no” would be akin to voting “no” on motherhood (or so it has been said). Of course, there were those who voted “yes” simply because they believed that King was a primary force in establishing civil rights for black people and that he personified, exemplified, and was a martyr to the turnabout in American history where we came to ourselves and accepted the beginning, basic value of the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Before I state my views on whether I think this is a proper national holiday, I would like to remind us of Martin Luther King, Jr., – how he lived, how he died, the convictions he held, and the influence he exerted.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15, 1929 to Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. The father (for years he has been “Daddy King”) was the son of an impoverished sharecropper. The branch grows from the root. There were many events in the father’s early life that must have molded the son. Let me recount just one, for it throws light on the urgency which the King family felt about civil rights and a fair chance.

Martin Luther King Sr. was about seven years old when he witnessed a murder which he never forgot (DADDY KING, p. 42). In the back country of Georgia, when times were bad, white men out of work were enraged when they encountered a black man who had a job. This rage was not diluted even when it was the case that wages for black men were much lower for comparable work.

Outside the country store, a group of white men, well-stoked with corn liquor, saw a black man walk past after collecting his wages. When profanely insulted by the white men, the black man walked past them trying to smile his way peacefully. Further insults, and of course, no retaliation. Then they tried to take his pay away. The victim put up a struggle, “This money’s for my children, I can’t let you have that.” Attacked, beaten by tree limbs, the black man was overcome. Then one of the whites took off his belt and put it around the victim’s neck and lynched him on a tree. King Sr. writes in his autobiography (p. 44), “I was still there when they’d all gone, staggering off down the road, laughing to themselves, waiving the jugs of corn whiskey they carried. The black man was dead, his head all twisted over, his feet five or six inches off the ground. Suddenly I could hear my breathing coming through me harder and harder, and then there was a scream pouring through my lips that nobody heard but me. Why, I thought, why did they do ‘that.’”

King Sr. did not stay in the poor back country. He was a minister at 15, but an uneducated one. Determined to learn, at the age of 21 he was in the fifth grade [CJW note: working his way/job]. But he went on, learned, and was eventually accepted at Morehouse College. He succeeded to the prominent pulpit of his father-in-law, Reverend A. Williams at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

To this couple, Martin Luther King Jr. was born, went to public schools in Atlanta, and at 15 years old passed the entrance examination at Morehouse College – before graduating from high school. At Morehouse, King received a B.A. in sociology. From there he went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA, a liberal Baptist seminary. (Those of you who have attended our Wednesday night discussion groups have heard me frequently cite Morton Enslin in our considerations of the New Testament. Dr. Enslin was for many years Professor of Bible Studies at Crozer).

At Crozer, King began his serious studies of the life and teachings of Gandhi under the stimulus of lectures by A.J. Muste (for years the courageous pacifist of the Fellowship of Reconciliation) and Dr. Mordecai Johnson.

Graduating in 1951 from Crozer, King went on to Boston University school of theology where he earned a PhD. In 1953 King and Coretta Scott were married. They had met in Boston where Coretta Scott, born in Marion, AL, was studying voice at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music after graduating from Antioch. Four children were born to this marriage: Yolanda, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott, and Albertine.

In October 1954, King was installed as minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL. In 1955 and 1956, the young minister was propelled into national attention by events in Montgomery. This is the bare outline of these events:

December 1, 1955 – Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, refused to yield her seat on the bus to a white man, and she was arrested.

December 5, 1955 – First day of the bus boycott. King, then 26, was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led the effort.

January 26, 1956 – A bomb is thrown on the porch of Dr. King’s Montgomery home. Because she had been alerted to such a possibility, Coretta, with baby Yolanda and a friend, hurried to the back of the house when they heard a thud. They were not injured, but the house was damaged.

The Montgomery buses were integrated on Dec 20, 1956 after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a June decision of a U.S. District Court.

In February 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded, with King as its first president.

In September 1958, he was stabbed in the chest in New York City by a deranged woman.

In early 1959, Dr. and Mrs. King spent a month in India studying Gandhi’s techniques of non-violence. They were the guests of Prime Minister Nehru.

In January 1960, they moved to Atlanta where King became co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist with his father.

In February 1960, the lunch counter sit-ins begin to desegregate eating facilities in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and other parts of the South. King is arrested with others at an Atlanta sit-in. The charges are dropped for all jailed demonstrators except King, who is held on a traffic violation and transferred to state prison, where is is subsequently released on bond.

In 1961-1962, King was arrested several times for his part in demonstrations in Albany, GA, and Birmingham, AL. On May 20, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Birmingham’s segregation ordinances were unconstitutional. August 28, 1963 – at the great March on Washington, King delivers his “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to 250,000 civil rights marchers from all parts of the nation.

There have been notorious murders: Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS; James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, MS; James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister and Viola Liuzzo in Selma, AL.

December 10, 1964 – Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

August 6, 1965 – President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act.

In 1966, King leads a Washington rally to protest the war in Vietnam.

July 1967, the Justice Department reports that more than 50% of all eligible black voters are registered in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina.

A pattern of riots had punctuated these years. July 1967, Newark and Plainfield NJ, Detroit Michigan. 23 die in Newark and 43 in Detroit; hundreds were injured.

In 1968, sanitation workers went on strike in Memphis, TN.

In March, King led 6,000 demonstrators through downtown Memphis in support of the strike.

April 3, 1968 – King delivers his last speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” in the Masonic Temple in Memphis.

On April 4, he is shot by a sniper and dies in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Memphis.

Much has been said and written about this man for whom a national holiday has been declared. I believe the holiday is appropriate and that he is justly honored and singled out.

First of all, he gave the Black people of this nation a sense of their own worth and dignity even amid the sad and awful oppressions not only during the centuries of slavery, but discriminations, bigotry, deprivations, lynchings, and injuries that followed emancipation. Speaking of the civil rights struggles, King said it best:

“I think the greatest victory of this period was something internal. The real victory was what this period did to the psyche of the Black man. We armed ourselves with dignity and self-respect. The greatness of this period was that we straightened our backs up. And a man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.” (WORDS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., p. 47)

So, in answer to the cynical charge that the votes in the House and Senate and the signature of the President were political expedients in deference to the voting power of Black people, it can be asserted, accurately, I believe, that had it not been for King and all the others in the civil rights movement, there would have been no substantial Black vote to warrant political consideration.

Then, too, as writer David Halberstam pointed out, King compelled white Christians of the South to confront their own beliefs. Halberstam said that this was so because the South was the most seriously religious of any area of the country. I had very little personal experience of the South, so I cannot pronounce on that point.

But I do believe that all over the land, King’s life and death forced many to look at the Black struggle in the light of religious beliefs. To persons in the Judeo-Christian streams of belief, there was difficulty in denying or obviously obscuring the reality that the great Hebrew prophets and Jesus claimed generosity, understanding, acceptance, and assistance to the poor, the disinherited, the persecuted. The ethical premise of all the religions was that every person was of worth and entitled to full dignity and all rights.

Again, King’s words penetrate: “Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind that Marxists like to see – an opiate of the people.” (WORDS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., p. 66)

One thing more, as engulfing as was King’s absorption in the struggles of his people, his vision was wider still. He spoke out against the Vietnam War. He was criticized for doing so by some who believed he was diluting the strength of the civil rights movement in this country.

He maintained his stand of non-violence, although some black leaders, particularly in the North, thought him more naïve. They believed more in the militancy of Malcolm X, who too was assassinated. And it seemed that King’s influence in the North was far weaker than in the South, which may be so.

But he maintained his values and beliefs. One knew where he stood. Gandhi’s influence on King was immense, although he never knew Gandhi in the flesh. But from his seminary days, he studied Gandhi’s life and words. King wrote,

“I’m tired of violence. And I’m not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use. We have a power, power that can’t be found in a Molotov cocktail, but we do have a power. It is a power as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth and modern as the techniques of Mahatma Gandhi.” (WORDS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., p. 71)

The national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. is worthy to be celebrated. George Washington, is justly honored; he led the armies of the Revolution and wisely presided over the early days of the Republic. The Fourth of July recognizes the great document of our independence.

But a King holiday, at least in one important sense, represents the past and the future. Not only what he was, what he did, and what he valued, but also it can be a holiday for what we could be if we cherish and stand for not only a nation fair, free, and at peace, but a world fair, free, and at peace.