Posts tagged mlkjr

With the political firestorm surrounding Clintons’ remarks about Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson, MLKjr’s birthday yesterday, and the MLK holiday coming up this weekend, this seemed appropriate: put MLK on the 20 dollar bill.

King symbolizes the triumph of love over hatred, of nonviolence over violence, and of community values over money values.

No American is more qualified than King to replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. Jackson’s presidential legacy is marked by the barbaric Indian Removal Act which evicted at least 47,000 Creek, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokee and Seminole Indians from their homes so their land could be turned into cotton-growing slave plantations. The Indian Removal Act led directly to the infamous Trail of Tears, where four thousand Cherokee men, women and children died in a forced march west.

Our strategy is to gather names to pressure President Bush and Congress to put King on the 20. Together we can make this happen!

• Sign the petition here.
• The case for putting him on the bill is laid out here.
• I created the image above from an image of the $20 bill and an image of MLKjr from Wikipedia. Feel free to use the mockup on your site, but please link back here.

I’m a day late with this, but I was out of town yesterday so I give myself a pass.

In 1965, a Rabbi named Max Nussbaum asked Martin Luther King Jr. to address his congregation at the Temple Israel in Hollywood. King’s sermon at Temple Israel was recorded onto an old-fashioned, reel-to-reel audiotape … recently made available to the public for the first time since 1965.

Click here for the story and a link to the sermon.

Thanks to my brother, Elbert, for the heads-up.

(by Thomas Dorsey. Favorite hymn of Martin Luther King, Jr. “Dorsey penned Precious Lord in response to his inconsolable bereavement at the death of his wife, Nettie Harper, in childbirth, and his infant son in August 1932.” -Wikipedia) 

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, help me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn,
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light,
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home,

When my ways grow drear,
Precious Lord linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Lead me on lest I fall,
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When the darkness appears and
the night draws near
And the day is past and gone
At the river I stand
Guide my feet, hold my hand
Take my hand precious Lord,
lead me home

Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m lone
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on to the light Take my hand
precious Lord,

I am amazed that there was not more of an outcry when George W. Bush said that America as a nation needs to be “born again.” It’s not because during his time in the Oval Office, Dubya has run off at the mouth with biblical sounding allusions and metaphors so often that they no longer attract attention. It’s not because he said it at a private event, with only rabid, secrecy-sworn supporters around to hear it. It’s because (as far as I know) he never said these words. Martin Luther King, Jr. did.

If you’re like me, just the act of imagining a line like this (or something similar) coming out of the President’s mouth automatically changes the way that you interpret them. That makes sense, because Dubya and MLK are very different people, with very different views of the world and of what our role in the world is. In fact, Bush’s speeches have been peppered with many biblical and faith-based lines, similar to those that MLK used—and which gave his words added power.

I write this as a committed evangelical Christian, and my quandry is this: I don’t like a lot what Bush says, but I think MLK was spot on with a lot of what he said. At first glance, my choices seem to be these:

1. Shut up. If MLK was allowed use these lines, Bush can too, so quit complaining.
2. Advocate for all biblical language to be discouraged from public life (granted, MLK wasn’t a politician, but he was definitely political)
3. Try to find a way to argue that people I agree with can use biblical language, but those I disagree with cannot.

The problem, of course, is that Option 3 is indefensible while Option 2 borders on censorship and would preclude a subset of anyone whose faith or worldview influences every decision they make and every thought they have (ie. everyone) from public life—that subset being those who find moral guidance in Scripture and who don’t want to pretend otherwise or try to artificially separate their “faith” from “the rest of their life” (as if that were possible).

So I suppose what it boils down to for me is not that Bush uses such language, but that his theology is twisted and he seems to be using Scriptural language to sanction things that Scripture shouldn’t be sanctioning. Bush has bad theology—and I guess I agree with Jim Wallis that the answer to bad theology is not no theology, but good theology.

Jim Wallis in Mother Jones:

“[W]e’re dealing with a religion that is more American than Christian. He changes the words of scripture. “The light shines in the darkness. The darkness does not overcome it,” he said at Ellis Island, the first anniversary of Sept. 11. Well, that’s [from the Gospel of] John. It’s not the American beacon of freedom to the world. You don’t change the words of scriptures. That bothers us evangelicals.
Or he changes hymnology: “Power, power, wonder working power.” When he said that in the State of the Union, he got 60 million people going, “I know that song.” But the wonder working power in the song is the salvation of Christ�not the faith and idealism of the American people. This is an American civil religion. This isn’t biblical faith. I think the president just doesn’t want to be accountable to biblical faith.”

Jim Wallis (on PBS):

“See, I think those words, that biblical tradition, would critique our foreign policy, would challenge our sense of righteousness, would call our behavior into question, would not allow us to say, ‘Evil is all out there, and we are the good, and those who aren’t with us are with the terrorists.’ I don’t think biblical faith can sustain that kind of point of view. In fact, biblical faith would challenge it. So instead, the Bible is being used to justify our policies, and not to call them into question. That, I think, is the difference in civil religion and prophetic religion. Prophetic biblical faith would call the nation to account, call our policies into question, would cause us to [engage in] self-reflection and evaluation. But the use of language like this just becomes a way to sanction our behavior and our policies, and to appeal to a constituency that feels like they are being spoken to in a very unique and particular way.”

The famous line attributed to Voltaire (“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”) leaves out the part where I also tell everybody why I disapprove of what you say. The right to speak goes both ways. Let Bush talk, let other voices talk, and call them to account when necessary. People like Jim Wallis (and others) have been doing it, some of them quite forcefully, but by and large the church has rolled over and let Bush do the talking.

Let him talk, but let’s have a discussion and stop assuming (like so many seem to do) that because someone quotes a Bible verse out of context or makes a biblical sounding allusion, they represent the Christian faith.

Let him talk, and let others within the diverse tent we call Christianity also talk. And let us consider the words that he doesn’t quote from the Good Book—there are a lot of them.

At least three times in the last few months, I’ve heard people talk about how Martin Luther King, Jr. is widely revered but little understood. On MLK day, a friend told me how he has made a personal tradition of reading some of MLK’s writings which get little press these days, but which are quite radical and challenging to the very structure of our society. Then a family member told me how he noticed “at a community MLK celebration how little people really know about Dr. King especially how his ideas and actions were rooted in faith. We seem to have divorced his actions from his faith…there may be a connection to the hostility toward faith based initiatives.” A third time, while playing a game, a friend claimed that the media was presenting a sanitized MLKjr—that he had been reduced to a civil rights crusader (which, though true and good, is not all that he stood for).

How could someone so universally loved be so misunderstood? Maybe a better question is how someone so controversial in his day be (ostensibly) so normative these few decades later? The answer, I think, is that the aspects of his mission that have become generally accepted (eg. “I Have a Dream”) have been touted and repeated over and over, while the more controversial aspects (a stance against militarism, an emphasis on the need for structural change, and the extent to which his faith drove his words and actions) have been glossed over.

Using my limited resources, I’ve compiled some information on these less-well-understood aspects below. (If you’ve got others—please put them below in the comments).

There are, essentially, two Martin Luther Kings: the young, energetic leader who preached from the pulpit and led successful protests in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, who received the Nobel Peace Prize and delivered the epochal “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial; and the later, post-1965 pilgrim who was tired, discouraged, and not a little scared, who was losing faith in the American system, who suffered a great defeat in Chicago and another, just before his assassination, in Memphis, and who was beginning to lose the full confidence of his followers, particularly younger blacks.

The first King has become, for many Americans, an almost kitschy symbol of benevolent social change, of the belief that great progress has been made in the field of race relations and that enough has been given in terms of money, time, and effort to redeem the nation’s past. The other represents a different kind of legacy, a call for larger structural changes stretching beyond pleas for brotherhood into demands for economic justice for downtrodden Americans, including poor whites. The veneration of the first King, his heavy presence in the psychic life of the nation, has in a strange way come to represent payment of the debt, I think, in many people’s minds. I am reminded, in particular, of conservative Republicans, who have hotly contested affirmative action and health-care reform, and yet pushed for a memorial to King on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Is this veneration a way of avoiding meaningful discussion—of avoiding him?

MLKJr on the structure of our society

MLKJr On Faith, Action, and Calling

MLKJr on Nonviolence