Thursday, April 4, 2013

April 4

U2's lead man, Bono, thought he had heard somewhere that  the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. occurred in the morning.  In the group's song Pride(In the Name of Love) he wrote, "Early morning April 4/ shot rings out in the Memphis sky."  The group gathered at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4 were getting ready for dinner, or supper as most folks called it then.  Bono has had to either announce the lyrics are wrong or change them in performances, but the next set of lyrics tells the true story: "Free at last they asked for your life/ they could not take your pride."  In many ways, I am shaped more by that song and its reflection on King, Gandhi, and Jesus (the fourth taken in the name of love has escaped me) than King's actual life or his death.

Tucked between the death of two grandfathers, the first dying in early February and the second dying in mid-May, King's death apparently barely registered on my family's life.  My father says that he remembers the news blurb but does not recall the family saying anything about the news of King's death.  My parents were likely adjusting to life with a ten month old and dealing with the loss of a parent.  Funny how the grand stories of history pale in comparison of daily life of average people.

But King's life and death loom larger on me than either of my grandfathers, both good men but lost to me in time and distance.  The young minister from Atlanta has complicated my thinking about heroes ever since U2's song brought me to him and energized my sense of justice as something beyond lists of right and wrong.  I often have to get students to think about the man beyond the "Dream."  The man who failed in Albany, Georgia, and Chicago, Illinois, was willing to let his mind expand to include the war in southeast Asia under the umbrella of civil rights, often in the face of criticism from his fellow civil rights activists brethren.  In seminary, I was drawn to his thinking by my own sense of racial injustices I had experienced through the lives of two friends.  But at the same moment Boston University's investigation into his dissertation revealed significant cases of plagiarism, and his marital infidelities were no longer allowed to stay in whispered conversations.  The saint was human.  By the time I reached a doctoral program, I must confess I was tired of Dr. King.  Call it hero fatigue.

Before I let him go, however, I wrote one more essay on the change in his thinking that occurred around the time of the "Dream" speech.  Earlier that summer he had given a speech where he linked the war in southeast Asia to the fight for equal rights in the U.S.  His sense of justice included criticizing his nation for using its political and military influence in a place that required neither.  He was willing to wage a prophetic campaign against the nation's might.  When I began teaching at Mercer, we required students to read "Letter from Birmingham" and "Dream."  While teaching the second text, I realized for the first time how much the opening of that speech is a threat, a prophet's call.  I still think we misread the "dream" section because we want to feel better about ourselves, but the speech contains the power of the change that was occurring in King's thinking.  His death in Memphis was the culmination of that shift in thinking.  While racial issues played a role in the Memphis conflict, particularly since the strike occurred as a result of two black workers' deaths, he was there because the sanitation workers were asking for better wages and working conditions.  These were the very things his Poor People's Campaign highlighted.  He saw the movement beyond the right to vote to a place where the kingdom of God bends toward the least of these.  Forty-five years ago, I was learning to stand up and walk around in a world slouching toward Bethlehem.  I have spent the better part of my forty-five years trying to figure out how we can live in that vision, failing as often as he did in ways far different than he.  But his greatest gift is his ability to see the kingdom through his fallenness; hope remains.

No comments:

Post a Comment