God's Appeal to This Age

HE WAS ONLY 5 YEARS OLD, so the morning news report did not reveal his name. We were told only that the child lived in the Bronx and that there was now a security guard assigned to his elementary school because he had brought a loaded handgun to the school. That was more than enough for me.

Perhaps the brief report struck with such force because I remembered my own kindergarten days in Harlem, my high school years in the Bronx. But I was certainly not alone in claiming this little boy. Many of us knew his name. It was written on the consciousness of concerned parents, teachers, neighbors, and ministers of religion everywhere.

We recognized his face, in all its manifestations, in all its pain, innocent confusion, warped pride, and fear. Whether 5 or 15, or caught in any of the dangerous manchild ages between and beyond, he was recognizable to us. There, standing naked to the world, robbed of his childhood, recruited into the force-ripened armies of drug runners, gang members, macho men, in danger of early corruption by some of this country's worst values and by its terrible romance with the gun, he was our child, reminding us of so much, warning us.

Everywhere in America there is a deep, often unarticulated fear that the violence of our culture is out of hand and that our children may be among its most vulnerable victims. How do we address this great threat to our humanity, participate in the rescue of our most valuable endangered human resources?

Obviously, there are no quick fixes here. The dislocation of our values, the destruction of our play-filled childhood, the acceptance of women and children as punching bags and outlets for male anger, the fixation on lethal weapons as standard equipment for the American family -- all these run deep. But the resources that lead us out to alternative, healing paths are perhaps deeper; at least that option must not be closed down. So we search, inviting others on the path.

It may be that one of the major resources in the struggle for the humanity of our children -- and ourselves -- can be found in a careful exploration of the still-unappreciated experiments with creative nonviolent social action that were developed in the course of the post-World War II African-American freedom movement. Indeed, even more important than the specific experiments with nonviolent responses to injustice were the larger human questions the movement was raising about the spirit of violence within us, about the violence of the powers-that-be, about the creativity and courage that are necessary to develop alternative ways of challenging a destructive status quo.

IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER I had heard the news of my 5-year-old brother-son from the Bronx that my wife, Rosemarie, and I were given new reasons to suspect that embedded in the story of the freedom movement there might be unexpected hope and help for the child and the rest of us. We had been invited to West Germany by a group of American peace workers to meet with some of the thousands of U.S. military personnel stationed there, especially Army and Air Force people. In classrooms, chapels, and living rooms, our meetings in March 1989 focused on the meanings that Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent freedom movement might possibly have for people who were involved in an institution that legitimized and justified the uses of massive violence.

At every point of encounter it was clear that many of the men and women we met had made the choice to enter the service not because they were militarists, but because civilian life offered them so little in the way of remunerative employment, a sense of dignity and security, or a relatively desegregated opportunity for advancements in non-professional work -- to say nothing of safety. Indeed, more than one black male reflected on the dangerous urban communities from which they had come and said, "I came to the military to save my life."

Our visit occurred before the magnificent upheavals in Eastern Europe, but even then, without exception, the conversations we had were candid, stimulating, and often moving. Most important for our Bronx child, though, was the openness of the men and women we met, their willingness to explore, raise questions, examine beliefs, and especially to recollect old truths and powerful hopes that had sometimes been long repressed beneath the camouflage of their uniforms and their lives.

Perhaps the most vivid example of these encounters took place in a company chapel one afternoon where more than a hundred enlisted persons and officers gathered for a presentation I was making on Dr. King. As I faced the group in the chapel it was obvious that the power of the freedom movement had already been at work, for that earlier struggle in the United States had made it possible for us to have a meeting in Germany in which so many of the military participants were people of color, were women, and were in positions of responsibility. Considering such fascinating paradoxes, I raised with them one of King's central concerns through the use of a story and a set of questions.

We were talking about the Birmingham, Alabama campaign of 1963, where the attention of the world had been drawn to the cannonades of water smashing against determined, young bodies, and police dogs snapping at the limbs of courageous, nonviolent demonstrators. Two of the black young women in the chapel had grown up in Birmingham during those years, and they helped recreate the feeling of the situation, reminding us of the city's well-earned nickname, "Bombingham," because of its record of violent attempts at intimidation, especially against any black initiatives for justice. Recollecting that danger, I asked, "When King and SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] were invited by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to come to this violently segregated city to challenge its unjust ways, how many guns did they take with them?"

I could feel the sudden pause in the movement of the conversation. I watched the questioning eyes, almost heard them saying within, "What are you talking about? Are you crazy, mister?" Out loud, several persons declared at once, "No guns; they didn't carry any guns."

It was an exciting moment for a teacher whose students (and kindred seekers) were all wearing U.S. Army uniforms. Pressing them into the logic of their own announcement, I said, "What do you mean, they had no guns? How could they go into that violent city without guns? Aren't we taught here that you meet violence with violence, that you have to talk the language that people understand? Aren't we taught here that you have to fight fire with fire?"

For a moment no one spoke. Then, out of the eloquent silence, a young, black enlisted woman sitting up front spoke slowly, thoughtfully, emphatically. "You don't fight fire with fire," she said. "You fight fire with water."

As I had seen in so many other classrooms, when the essential wisdom came not from a "teacher" standing up front, but from one of the seekers in the group, her profoundly simple statement released remarkable energies. Other significant, moving comments came forth, exploring, probing not only the meaning of "water" in Birmingham and across the American South of the 1960s, but what the "water" might mean now in their lives, in their works as the keepers of the great, consuming fires, hidden in the forests of Germany.

Somehow I felt that the black, white, and Hispanic soldiers who were searching there with Rosemarie and me had been given permission by the Birmingham story (and others like it), had felt freed at least to make some tender, tentative moves into crevices of their own selves, touching places that they had not often entered. (Just as I had to explore those parts of my own being where I held captive the knowledge of my tax-paying participation in the purchasing of their/our weapons of destruction.)

OF COURSE KING AND THE MOVEMENT belonged in that setting. I could almost see his playful, serious eyes dancing in the midst of the situation. For we were dealing with themes that formed so much of the early teaching of the Southern freedom movement.

Indeed, in his first mass meeting sermon/speech in Montgomery in 1955, King called for the black people who were rising up to a new level of struggle to see themselves as the once-rejected servants who were now destined to infuse "a new meaning into the veins of history and civilization." At the heart of this messianic -- and therefore dangerous -- calling, according to King, was the combination of courageous, self-disciplined contestation for a new and just America and the uses of well-organized, militant nonviolent action to bring it about.

So in his first book he dared to declare, "This is a great hour for the Negro," dared to recognize that black people might become "the instruments of a great idea," dared to hope that "it may ... be possible for the Negro, through adherence to nonviolence, so to challenge the nations of the world that they will seriously seek an alternative to war and destruction."

King understood and tried to convey to others his conviction that "today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence." So he placed the descendants of America's slaves into a healing, cosmic context, proposing that "the Negro may be God's appeal to this age -- an age drifting rapidly to its doom."

Clearly his was a vision that pressed on far beyond civil rights and legalities. It was the same vision put forward in more earthly ways by the early members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in their founding statement of purpose. They said, "We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions seeks a social order of justice permeated by love."

In the light of the degradation of the word "love" in our contemporary culture, it will be important to rediscover what these earlier nonviolent warriors meant by the word. Exploring the writings, speeches, and actions of King, nonviolent strategist James Lawson, their teacher Gandhi, and thousands of movement participants, we are soon enlightened. We recognize a deep, soul-level force, a will to seek out the best possibilities of oneself and the opponents, a refusal to ignore or desecrate the divine image in any of us. We sense this love as a powerful commitment to the forces of good, an opening toward the creative powers of the universe.

In the minds of many members of the church-based Southern black community, such love was a natural, modern manifestation of Jesus' call to live out our divine kinship by loving our enemies. So, from this perspective, we are able to understand the love of the nonviolent warriors not as a soft, sentimental kind of flimsy emotion but as a great, rock-ribbed, empowering force that makes it possible for women, men, and children to stand fast in the face of death, and thereby explore new paths to life, to the redeemed and compassionate community.

The nonviolent action that flowed out of such commitment made it possible for the early SNCC organizers in Mississippi to take harsh physical beatings and still confront the forces of destructive segregation without losing their basic sense of direction and purpose, without surrendering their humanity. As a result, they inspired thousands of other persons there to recollect their best selves, to stand and move forward, to break through their ancient fears.

These and thousands more were the embodiment of the movement's greatest vision -- the rising of new soldiers of freedom and democracy, armed with love, courage, and fierce determination, empowered by a relentless commitment to an emerging, but unrealized, democratic America. Turning away from the weapons of violence, manifesting the disciplined, healing energies of a profound soul force, for a time they seemed to be precisely what King had foreseen: "God's appeal to this age."

And when their stirring images were carried across the globe by the news media, men and women everywhere responded to the message of their lives at levels that only the passing of decades could begin to reveal. Now the freedom songs echo back. Now we see King's words on signs above swirling throngs in distant squares.

THE IMAGES THAT ALMOST TOOK MY breath away in Beijing's Tiananmen Square were the great banners announcing, "We Shall Overcome," and the T-shirts painted with the same familiar words of our African-American freedom movement anthem, T-shirts soon to be soaked in blood.

The overwhelming shock of recognition came again as I watched the television images of a night-time march in Leipzig, East Germany. Once again, half a world away from our own fields of struggle for the expansion of American democracy, the theme song of our movement had helped to embolden and empower other men and women in search of freedom: "We Shall Overcome."

Then, at the top of the Berlin Wall, as the past exploded in our midst, there was yet another encounter with a profoundly remembered history, mediated by that power of music which transcends so many of humanity's external and internal barriers. Citizens from both sides scaled the wall and began physically and symbolically to work at tearing it down, and at one point, as they labored to open a new day, they were singing a song whose words simply repeated, "The wall is coming down." But the tune they sang was wrapped up in generations of shared memory, for it was music created in the struggles of slavery, music made popular by Fannie Lou Hamer, the great singing soldier of the modern African-American freedom movement. The tune was "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and I was on familiar ground again, remembering Mrs. Hamer's version: "Go tell it on the mountain ... to let my people go."

Now we realize how deep King's example and his comrades' hope penetrated into Czechoslovakian lives, how they engaged South African hearts, reinforcing the model of Chief Albert Luthuli, reaffirming the people's own deepest longings for a democratic, nonracial society, for a nation at peace with itself.

WHO DARES RAISE SUCH HOPES IN the United States today? In the face of many forms of personal and structural violence at home, listening to the misguided applause for bullying and immature military intrusions abroad, considering the thousands of families for whom the military offers the only possibility for a decent income in our unjust economy, who dares to remember and to dream of nonviolent alternatives?

Obviously, we must dare. We who seek to inform our lives with some real vision for the advancement of democracy in our country and the world -- we are the witnesses. It is we who realize that our telling of the story of the Afro-American freedom movement can be authentic only as we reveal these original, magnificent dreams of nonviolent transformation, recollect the quest for creative alternatives, and suggest these connections to the world's best dreams of new democracy.

For this is a unique and compelling story. Never before in our nation's history had the participants in a major social movement grounded themselves in so magnificent a hope, dared to dream a possible human transformation so deep -- and then proved willing to put their lives on the line in courageous acts of faith. For those who stood on the front lines of battle against the terrorist system of American segregation were indeed displaying great faith, in themselves and their mission, in the power of courageous love, in the capacity of their enemies to change, and sometimes in a divine reality whose central identity is compassion. Perhaps this is part of what made our experience so attractive to those hidden crevices around the world where the seeds of democracy were germinating.

In such a context, for the sake of the 5-year-old gun wielders who wrench our hearts, for the sake of hundreds of millions of men and women everywhere who are in search of new hearts, those who teach the freedom movement are presented with a marvelous opportunity to open vistas. For many persons the new approaches will at first be only dimly seen and superficially understood. Still they must be shared.

For the movement's bold strand of nonviolence (and we surely know that there were other, sometimes competing, strands) provides a chance and a challenge that cannot be left unmet. It allows us to go as deeply as we choose toward the sources of that lifestyle, delving, for instance, into the experience and experiments of Gandhi and his movement, into the paths of the Buddha, working our way toward Jesus of Nazareth and his justice-obsessed brother and sister prophets of Israel, moving quietly, firmly into the river-deep meditations of Howard Thurman -- perhaps even reading more of King than the worthy and well-worn 1963 March on Washington "I Have a Dream" speech.

We must work our way into the depths of spirit which supplied the movement with so much of its early power. For someone needs to help our Bronx-American child, and so many adults and children like him, to understand and to care why great teachers and spiritual guides of every age and tradition have come to affirm the same nonviolent vision of life. Who knows, perhaps with insight, courage, and serious study we could introduce ourselves and students of all ages to some of the basic tenets of this nonviolent way, exploring such convictions as:

--The fundamental unity of all creation, including our essential oneness with those we call "enemy."

--The deep and often hidden capacities in human beings to become much more than we realize; to approach much more closely the essential oneness of life; to create many more social, political, and economic manifestations of our unity than we dream.

- The purpose of true civilization, which is not to focus on higher and higher technology or greater material wealth, but to help us live more deeply and grow more fully in the humanizing work of mutual responsibility and respect.

- The necessity of challenging anything -- or anyone -- in society (or in ourselves) that appears to destroy the God-ordained oneness, or which seeks to damage our great capacities for an ever-expanding development of our humanity.

- The greatest necessity of all -- to seek out and hold firmly to the truths of our oneness, our hope, our mutual responsibility, our capacity to create, our refusal to destroy. Included here, of course, is a willingness to die, if necessary, for such truths, but not to injure or kill others.

- The constant disciplined quest for personal and collective communion with the One, the divine and ultimate source of all our unity.

OF COURSE, AS WE HAVE ALREADY discovered, this quest for nonviolent alternatives in the movement is not a one-strand story. We, like King and the other nonviolent warriors, must struggle to absorb the pain, the fierce determination, and the broken hopes that finally led to urban fire, to popular calls to "pick up the gun," to demands for defensive and occasionally revolutionary violence.

Let that intense and powerful debate on the value of violence and nonviolence be picked up from the past and carried on in the churches and the classrooms. Let us be sure to recognize how clear King was by the late 1960s that nonviolent protest had to evolve beyond its Southern-based experience into even more dangerous and militant nonviolent revolution, eventually challenging the federal government and all the anti-democratic status quo values and structures of the entire nation. Let us read his last book, The Trumpet of Conscience, and hear him say in the midst of the explosions of the cities and the anguish of poverty and war:

Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more than a statement to a larger society. There must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point.

Go to the "key point" for nonviolent confrontation that King was choosing at the very end of his life, the federal establishment in Washington, DC. Envision what he might have had in mind for his multiracial Poor People's Campaign in the nation's capital, his campaign of "mass civil disobedience on behalf of economic justice and democracy." Then we may understand the larger context of his assassination. Then we will be walking on far more controversial ground, accompanying a much less safe and smoothed off national hero.

Can we be faithful to our history, to the movement, to our 5-year-old brother, without such a walk? Can we understand those who died in China, who shake South Africa, or those who now transform Eastern Europe without a sense of this part of our own powerful history?

Whatever our answers to these questions, it will be crucial to ponder why it was that a clear majority of the people who were most deeply committed to the way of nonviolent struggle for justice and humane social transformation in the movement are still at work on that path. On the other hand, most of those freedom workers who once announced most loudly the need for "the gun" are no longer making such calls, publicly or privately. Among other reasons, many of them have surely seen too much of what the gun has done in the black and white communities of America.

They, too, know our brother-child in the Bronx kindergarten, and they realize that his deepest needs cannot be met by guns, neither the ones children bring to school nor the ones our country stockpiles in the name of "security." For all these guns have left our child naked to the enemies of fear, ignorance, self-doubt, and insecurity, have abandoned most schools and communities of the poor (and many in the middle class) to a shameful state of deep educational and spiritual unprotection. And all these guns are obviously being challenged by the unrelenting forces of nonviolent revolution now at work in the world.

Young people know such things. They recognize such children, too. And at hungering levels of the soul they are longing for alternatives to violence for other lives as well as for their own.

In the light of the self-destructive violence that stalks our land, that now seems endemic among black young men, in the light of the curse of drugs and the drug economy that is partly a result of our refusal to create an economy of compassionate sharing for our society, is it too late? Is it too much to hope that some of our young people -- and adults as well -- from every racial background, will find alternatives for the many forms of violence they are experiencing in their lives?

Is it too much to hope that some of those who have broken through to high school and college and jobs and "security" will recognize the fragility of any security built on the wasting of our children in the Bronx? Is it possible that some of them (us) will move in compassionate firmness and skill toward that gun-carrying child, holding him, challenging all the conditions that have helped to create him?

Is it even possible that some of my early-retirement friends who leave the "security" of the U.S. military will become recruiters for a new army, a still decentralized gathering of nonviolent rainbow warriors? And do we dare dream that one of those peace-force sisters or brothers will eventually find our child from the Bronx, help him to grasp the beauty and creative power within him, and move forward with that manchild into the next stage of our nation's never-ending struggle for its own best truths?

Will that self-respecting child eventually be accepted into one of a score of American peace academies that we must create, or find his way to a U.N.-sponsored peace brigade, serving skillfully, nonviolently, in the midst of some setting of armed tension and fear? Somehow I choose to imagine him bringing his audacious creativity to participate in the expanding international explorations of civilian-based, nonviolent national defense forces. I hear his voice among the rising chorus of those younger persons who will soon challenge much of our old thinking about "national security," military strength, and the power of disciplined soul force. I see him becoming all that he can be on behalf of human life and creativity.

SUCH DREAMS AND VISIONS CONCERNING the life of our young brother and son return us to the large and fundamental questions for us all, prompt us to wonder if it is too much to hope that some of us may be drawn into King's great dream of an alternative to the ways of destructive violence. Is it possible that we might all become part of what he called "God's appeal to this age"? Is that one meaning of the amazing democratic developments around the world -- a divine appeal, arising as much from within us as from any outer ranges of the universe?

What a marvelous possibility: The ferment across the globe, the life-affirming hope that our own movement helped to engender, may be a sign that there is still time for us all to rediscover our creative calling, time to nurture our best responses to the divine summons away from violence and destructive fear, moving toward sanity, toward humanity, toward home -- a new home, a new beginning for our Bronx manchild, for all God's children.

Is that too much to dream? And if dreams die, what is left? Dreaming is believing in possibilities that no one else sees and being willing to work sacrificially toward the realization of those potentials. In essence, this is the deeper story of the freedom movement: By our dreaming, in the crucible of active hope, we begin to create new realities. Who dares to dream without acting?

Vincent Harding, a Sojourners contributing editor, was a professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, when this article appeared. This article is excerpted from Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, by Vincent Harding (Orbis: Maryknoll, New York; ©1990), a new edition of which appears in January 2010.