There’s a conference on youth ministry going on this week at Montreat, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) conference center near Asheville, N.C.,—but that’s not really what this post is about.
Yesterday was the U.S. holiday that commemorates the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and because Dr. King spoke at Montreat in the summer of 1965, shortly after the Watts riots, the audiotape of his address was played last night for anyone attending the youth ministry conference who cared to come and listen.
Dr. King’s speech, delivered in Montreat’s Anderson Auditorium on the afternoon of 21 August, was obviously one he had delivered many times, but it was no less powerful for that. It contained many of the famous lines—we might call them sound bites—for which Dr. King is remembered:
- “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
- “Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. . . . Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. . . . We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
- And the stirring peroration: “. . . This will be a great day. It will not be the day of the white man; it will not be the day of the black man; it will be the day of man as man. And this will be the day that all over this great nation, all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, will be able to join hands and sing, in the words of the old Negro spritual, ‘Free at last, free at last; thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”
What’s so interesting and powerful about hearing these famous lines in the context of an hour-long speech, though, is that you realize they were more than sound bites—that they were in fact tightly linked building blocks in an amazingly tightly constructed argument.
The address had three major parts: (i) a call for an end to racial segregation; (ii) a deconstruction of racial prejudice; and (iii) a defense of social action—an emphasis on the here and now rather than on the great hereafter—by Christian churches. Indeed, running through all three parts of the speech was a call for the church to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem—no small thing, and certainly not a proposition that Dr. King or anyone else in 1965 could have taken for granted. (It’s also notable that Dr. King clearly felt that the church did in fact have the power to make a difference in society, whether for good or evil—not necessarily something that we might assume in our “postmodern” context, forty-three years later.)
Dr. King concluded by building and sharing a vision of the “beloved community,” grounded in love of enemies and an embrace of the philosophy of nonviolent resistance (a particularly salient point in light of Watts). Hearing Dr. King’s elaboration on the concept of nonviolence was another reminder of how we today may not understand his ideas and his approach as well as we might think, for this nonviolence was in no way passivity or weakness or submission—rather, it was both strategy and tactic, and it was aggressive in an entirely counter-cultural way: you can beat us up, but we’re going to keep loving you until we wear you down.
And so there we were, a bunch of privileged (mostly white) people, conscious, thanks to a lecture we’d all heard earlier in the day, of how little we’d accomplished so far in our lives, in a conference room with the lights turned down low, listening to the scratchy, somewhat muffled audio record of a piece of history that too many of us think of as, well, history. But it’s history that happened nineteen days after I was born, in the state where I was born, in a room whose toilets I’ve scrubbed—and to my mind, at least, those elements of closeness brought those events out of history’s fog, if only for a day.
[Originally published on 22 January 2008 in the defunct blog On the nature of . . . .]
