Struggle And Transformation

The following article is excerpted from a speech that Vincent Harding gave on October 21, 1983, at a conference titled "The Black Church, the Third World, and Peace," in Atlanta, Georgia. —The Editors

I could not come to Atlanta for a conference such as this without knowing that I would have to deal with Martin Luther King Jr. and what he means to all of us. Let me begin by sharing a recollection of something that happened in 1968, just a few months after our friend Martin King was assassinated. My wife, Rosemarie Harding, was visiting in the home of two poor, older black women here in Atlanta. In their two-room apartment, up on the wall in the place of honor next to the picture of Jesus, was a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. One of the women told Rosemarie that King had come "to her a number of times since his death." That seemed right, and totally at one with the meaning of Martin Luther King Jr. in our lives.

As I have reflected on that, what is also clear, especially in the light of the establishment of the King holiday, is that there is a tremendous danger of our doing with Martin King precisely what we have so often done to Jesus. That is, put him up on the wall and leave him there, to use his birthday as a holiday and an excuse for going wild over buying things, or domesticate him—taking him according to what we want, rather than what he is demanding of us. The temptation is to smooth him off at the edges and forget what the assistant director of the FBI said about him in 1963: "We must mark King now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation." A dangerous Negro, now a national hero. How shall we work with that?

What we have tried to do and are being tempted to do is forget that King was a dangerous Negro, a dangerous black man. He was dangerous in the midst of a society that had chosen to live in a way that was filled with inhumanity to itself and to the rest of humankind. He was dangerous to all of the keepers of the status quo and to all the lovers of a pleasant Christianity. He was indeed, I think, the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation, partly because, unlike Malcolm X, lots of people didn't realize how dangerous he was, and still don't.

I would like us to think about the Martin King of 1968 and ourselves now, and to ask the question, "Where are we now related to where King was in 1968?" Then we can try to understand the challenge of Martin Luther King.

The last place we see King is in Memphis, Tennessee, not at a conference, convention, or theological consultation, not even on a vacation, but at a place he felt he had to be because garbagemen needed him to stand with them. And standing with them, he was shot down. That represents one of the first issues we have to deal with as we think about the King of 1968.

One of the reasons he was in Memphis was because he was struggling with the question of poverty in American society. He had been driven by the realities of life in America and elsewhere by his continued relationship to Jesus, who knew what life among the poor was, to grapple with the question of what to do about poverty and unemployment in America. He had not come to any absolutely clear conclusion. But there was no question in King's mind by 1967-68 that poverty in American society—whether for black people or Native Americans or whites or anybody else—would never be adequately addressed without fundamental transformation of the political and economic structures of this society.

What about us? Is King challenging us to realize that this society has structured unemployment into its very well-being? It attains "the highest standard of living in the world" for some of us by making sure that others of us will never have a job. King says, I cannot live at peace with that as a child of God, as a minister of Jesus Christ. I must find a way to see how this society can be restructured much more in the image of the righteousness of the kingdom of God.

How goes it with those of us who talk about the kingdom of God? How goes it with those of us who talk about loving Jesus and loving God and do not in any way deal with the need for a radical analysis of how the children of God are doing in America, and why. Why is America, supposedly the most wealthy nation in the world, filled with millions of people who cannot get work? Is that a Christian question or is that a question for the economists and the secular humanists? I think King would challenge us to think about that.

Toward the end of his life, King said this: "The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society;" therefore, "they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of their fellow citizens but against the structures through which the society is refusing ... to lift the load of poverty."

Martin King was saying many things that challenge us. He was saying for one thing that there are adequate resources, human and natural, for the load of poverty to be lifted. He said this society refuses to lift the load of poverty; it insists on structures that will keep the 'load' of poverty. Then society tells us that this is consistent with Christianity and all Christians ought to be capitalists. And we believe them.

Martin King challenges us here. He says this society is unjust because it chooses to be unjust, and we must find a way to organize (that dangerous Negro word) a revolution, meaning a radical change in the values of our lives and in the structures of this society that causes injustice. Are we preaching about that yet? Is that in the Sunday School lesson yet? If not, how shall our people be prepared for that which must come?

This is connected to another challenge that King left. One of the last times I saw him was here in Atlanta, in what was then Ralph Abernathy's church, at a gathering that King and others had called together. It was one of the most exciting, stimulating, and scary things I have ever seen. For the first time, Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics, and poor whites were all beginning to talk about the way in which we might, together, find a way to speak to the poverty that cuts across all racial lines. This was fascinating, for it was moving toward what was to be the Poor People's Campaign.

King was trying to deal with two things there. He was trying to find a way of organizing folks to deal with poverty through some form of revolutionary nonviolence. But more importantly for us at this particular moment, this was also King's way of dealing with racism in American society.

King said that the way you deal with racism is to find a common vision that will join you together. Find a common task on which those of all races can work together, hold hands, and move forward together. That is the best way to deal with racism in American society. A thousand conferences will not do what a gathering of people can do when they are convinced that across their racial lines they have a common goal that they must work for, sacrifice for, and die for.

That was the way King was moving toward dealing with racism. Being equal in a society like this was beside the point. He was seeking to organize across racial lines to transform the society, not to be equal in it. As my friend Howard Dodson likes to say, a fundamental difference exists between, on the one hand, seeking equality of opportunity to be exploiters and, on the other hand, participating in struggle across racial lines to create a new non-exploitative society. King was about the latter.

This was hard, and King had to deal with some issues of how his leadership would fit into this kind of multiracial situation. It was clear to him that the heritage of our struggle made it absolutely necessary that black people take the lead in moving toward the transformation of society. It could not be left to anyone else—neither professional liberals nor professional revolutionaries. Black people, who had come so far, would have to have the courage to keep going and to take leadership for a new day. In other words, to be dangerous Negroes.

By 1967-68 King was calling for a new political and economic order. Is that a Christian agenda? Some Christians doubt it, saying that it is not our concern, it is not our business what this economic order is doing to the lives of other people here and abroad. Yet there is no Christian here who is not quite ready to sit and take the benefits of the present economic order.

If it is not our business, then we need to leave it and not take its benefits. But if it is our business, then we have got to put our lives in it and decide what shall be done to bring this society some inches closer to the vision of the kingdom of God.

King also said that the black movement was forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws. This is the beautiful thing about what came up from us. It started out as a black movement, and all of a sudden you look around and everything is going on—women, Native Americans, Chicanos, and Gray and Black Panthers were organizing. Everything was rising up because we had begun to tell what we saw from the underside of American society.

The black movement opened up our eyes, and even the mainstream churches began talking about change. King said the black freedom struggle was exposing the evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structures of our society. It was revealing systemic flaws and suggesting that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced, no longer simply black or women's equality.

King, by 1967-68, had seen that what we are faced with is the need for radical transformation of the major institutions of the society, reshaping them with the needs of the poor rather than the well-to-do, as our primary guide How do we put that together with the people who are telling us now that what black people really have to do is learn how to use the political process—meaning the Democratic and Republican parties?

How do we preach, teach, and pray about this? What message do we get from the living Word about this? We will get no message unless we go seeking, hungering, and thirsting after a message. And we will not go hungering and thirsting if we think that this has nothing to do with being "saved and sanctified and meeting the Lord in glory."

But if being saved means being saved from the blindness of going along with the conformity of this age, if being sanctified means really finding a "new righteousness" and a new holiness that can be shared with all people, if meeting the Lord in glory means meeting Jesus wherever he is to be found among poor people, then it has everything to do with being saved, sanctified and meeting the Lord in glory. King challenges us to deal with that.

Part of this conference has to do with the black church and the Third World. King was pressed into looking at the rest of the non-white world by the war in Vietnam. That war opened up a whole new arena to Martin King, and he came forth from his congregation in Ebenezer Church to Riverside Church in New York City and said that this country, the country that he loved, had managed to get on the wrong side of a world revolution, and it seemed to insist upon staying there. King began talking about Vietnam, about the murderous policies of our nation there. He began lifting that up wherever he went.

Lots of people said to him, "Martin King, you're crazy, because that's not Christian stuff, that's not civil rights stuff, and besides Lyndon Johnson is going to have your behind if you keep doing that." And King said, "I have been fighting against segregation all my life, and I refuse to segregate my conscience."

Some people can be very excited about black and women's rights in America, but are absolutely silent about what this country is doing to the people of Nicaragua today. King said he could not participate in that kind of moral segregation. In other words, he told us that we who have known what it is to be black in America have a particular responsibility to listen to the cries of those who are non-white and under the American heel all over the world.

Lots of people now in the so-called Third World are asking, "Where do black people in America stand? Have y'all gotten it so good in your middle-class newness that you no longer feel, or hear anything about what it costs us in Nicaragua and South Africa, Peru and the Philippines for you to be well off in New York and Atlanta?"

I remember well how happy we were in the 1950s and '60s when voices from all over the non-white world came in telegrams, speeches, and lectures, saying, "We are for the black freedom movement in the United States." Now it's our turn to stand with them—often against our government's anti-revolutionary policies. As the old folks used to say, "God don't like ugly."

But the question is not simply what we are going to say about what our country is doing to the rest of the world. As King saw it, the question is what are we going to do about our own participation in a world of the middle class, materialistically oriented values that create that kind of exploitation? Is there any way that we who have known oppression in America can hook up with those who have known oppression from America?

In the last year of his life, King proposed that all of those who believe in revolutionary nonviolence in America should try to find the brothers and sisters in Latin America who believe in revolutionary nonviolence and somehow hook up with them. He said that this country has caused so much of the misery in Latin America that we here in this country ought to take special responsibility to connect with the revolutionaries there.

People asked King why he was concerned about all of these people all over the world who have nothing to do with Negroes in America. He replied, among other things, that it was because he was a minister of Jesus Christ who loved his enemies so much that he was willing to die for them, and so he had a different way of dealing with his enemies than the State Department does. We need to think about that, those of us who want equal access to the State Department.

King went on to say, "I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men (and of course now he would say all people) the calling to be a son (child) of the living God, beyond the calling of race, or nation, or creed. Beyond the calling of race, or nation, or creed is this vocation of sonship (and daughter-hood) under God, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for the suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come here tonight to speak for them." King was suggesting that there may be something that goes even deeper than our Christianity, that our fundamental identity is to be found in our evolving life as children of the living God, who has children everywhere, of every kind, of every religion, of every color.

King moved forward from that theological position because he understood that it is not enough to say that you are going to be a child of God and act as if it doesn't affect your life, your commitment, and the way you see the world. As a child of God, as a minister of Jesus Christ, King recognized that, by and large, America is using its military power to keep the oppressors in place—largely because our anti-communist myopia and provide opportunities for our economic and military forces. Therefore, he said, I cannot encourage black young men to go into the military service to support such repressive governments. How about that for a dangerous Negro?

We have to face the personal and collective implications of the fact that King was talking in February and March 1968 about going around to black churches as well as white ones and trying to organize all the young people he could reach as conscientious objectors. What he said, in other words, was equality of opportunity in the U.S. military is not what the black freedom struggle is about. What are we saying about that in our churches? Yes, I know. For so many hundreds of thousands of young people, that is the only place they can get a job, any sense of dignity and responsibility.

I know the military provides one of the most impressive outward appearances of successful integration in our society. But that itself is one of the most terrible things in the world; that a country can give so many of its young people no real work except the work of killing, that a society can provide for significant camaraderie only in the camps of war, and we are silent, or we say "go and make a man of yourself." Spare us from such a definition of manhood, for that is part of what has brought us to this nuclear precipice.

But much to our discomfort in the churches, King didn't stop with calling rank and file young people to be COs. He didn't think that black (or white) ministers ought to escape these issues through ministerial exemptions or think that they have it made, morally or financially, by going into the chaplaincy. He was raising the question of how the 17th- or 18th-century Africans or the Indians felt when chaplains came along with the armies of destruction and colonization. He is asking us the same question: are we going to send chaplains with the armies of oppression in order to help our black young men be better fighters?

We can tell ourselves a lot of other things, but chaplains are there, according to the military definition, to increase the morale of the fighting forces. Is that what the church of Jesus Christ is meant to be about? I think King would not let us off easily on that one.

Moreover, what King would say to us now, I think, is that there cannot be an authentic, liberating, and visionary peace movement in this country unless black people are going to be part of its leadership. For even the peace movement folks can forget about a lot of things about race that they ought not to be allowed to forget, so we had better be right in the middle of the leadership to make clear that peace and justice must be tied together. So King went into the leadership of the peace movement.

We must also recognize some of the things that King wasn't as clear on and be challenged not only by his strengths, but also by his weaknesses. King left us with the provocative question of how to put together revolution and nonviolence. How do we create a loving, tough, persistent, righteous, justice-seeking revolution? King was struggling with that.

But he was very clear that revolution does not have to be synonymous with people going around shooting each other. So please lay that one aside. The deeper question that we must work on is how shall we prepare ourselves and our people for a struggle that will so transform our way of thinking and being that we will never be comfortable, quiet, or at peace until we have given ourselves to the task of overturning the injustice of this society?

James Cone says, we must never assume that because we believe in love and nonviolence we cannot believe in revolution. King was grappling with how to put those together. I am quite grateful that he was unclear, because now it opens up to us not a law, not a set of guidelines, but simply a set of questions.

What shall we do? I think that whatever we do, we shall be unfaithful to Martin and to Jesus, to Malcolm and to Fannie Lou Hamer, to all of the great men and women of our time if we do not move forward, pick up these questions, and live out the marvelous tradition of the dangerous Negroes. And I would add all of the friends who want to move with dangerous Negroes, for we invite all of our friends and loved ones to be there and to enter into danger, knowing that "nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ." (You don't have to quote that kind of verse if you ain't up against anything.)

I think finding a way of nonviolent revolution may be one of our greatest challenges. I want to remind you that if you told Gandhi, "But that has never happened before," he would say, "So what? Think of all the things that never happened before they happened."

None of us ever happened before we happened. And yet here we are, happening, right? Lots of things are going to happen that never happened. The question is, shall we be participating in the creation—with our creator God—of that which has not yet been but must be? Or will we be standing rigidly as frightened agents of the past?

It is in the search for the transformation of the people of God that the people of God will be able to participate in the transformation of God's world. We cannot stay as we are and expect to be soldiers in the struggle. King understood that and went on knowing that this was the case.

Four weeks before he died, King talked to the congregation of Ebenezer Church about his unfinished journeys, about his failings, and about his weaknesses. He was speaking for us as well as to us. He was speaking in this case of his life and his own disappointments and failures, and he said we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that, and so we find ourselves in many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled. Life, he said, is a continued story of shattered dreams, but one must strive always to hold that dream in one's heart.

He said there are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us. But he said even that truth should not cause us to lose faith in our dreams and our best possibilities. For God does not judge us by the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total events of our life.

So he said, "You don't need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh no, I want you to know this morning that I am a sinner like all of God's children. I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, 'I take you in and I bless you.'" Then you understand that being a good man, to King, meant being a dangerous Negro.

I began by telling you about a dream, and that's the way I want to end. I had a dream a couple of years ago. In the dream, I was in my home church where I had grown up, on 138th Street in Harlem. I had been away from the church for a while and I was back in my usual manner rehearsing with the junior choir. While I was singing I became conscious of the fact that, in that empty sanctuary, toward the back pews, someone was sitting. I looked over, and there was Martin sitting in the pew all by himself. I had never seen King looking so much at peace with himself. Peace, fulfilled as if the journey had finally brought him to a new and magnificent place in his own evolving life.

I took that as a marvelous sign. I offer it as a sign and a challenge to you as well. A challenge to all of us not to worry about where we aren't yet, but to encourage us to move forward beyond where King left off in 1968.

Through some amazing grace that we do not understand, each of us clearly has been granted more time, more grace, more life than King was. Let us use it in the pursuit of the new dream, of the new peace, of the new justice, of the new person, of the new community that the world has not yet seen, but that must be if the world is to continue.

Vincent Harding, the author of There is a River, was a Sojourners contributing editor and professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Religion in Denver when this article appeared.