Sermons

On this Martin Luther King Sunday, I have chosen to link the life of Dr. King with that of the great Frederick Douglass, who in many ways commanded the same sort of attention in the 19^th century that King did in the 20^th. Both men were noted for their eloquence, for their personal courage in the face of physical violence, and for their willingness to Speak Truth to Power.

They were quite different people in many ways, of course. Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1817 or 1818, while King was born into relatively comfortable middle class status in Georgia over a hundred years later, in 1929. Douglass never knew his father – who may have been a white man – while King not only knew his father, but in many ways sought to emulate him.

Both Kings, father and son, drew their strength from the Gospels and their teachings, while Douglass, like Abraham Lincoln, was not a regular church-goer, but also like Lincoln, was familiar with the rhythms and cadences of both the Hebrew and Christian Testaments, and was not afraid to use them when it suited his purpose.

Before retiring here, I spent over thirty years teaching at a college in a town on the Erie Canal, a few miles west of Rochester, New York. Rochester is in the middle of the “snow belt,” a term often used, not without some pride, by those living in the area between Syracuse and Buffalo.

But in Douglass’s time the land was better known as “the Burnt-Over District,” not in the literal sense, but as a metaphor that alluded to the “fires” of religious and reformist enthusiasm that seemed to be sweeping over the area.

It was here, just outside of Rochester, that Joseph Smith claimed to have been visited by the angel Moroni, who showed him the tablets that later became the Book of Mormon.

It was here in the 1830s that the great Charles Grandison Finney led a revival that set the city of Rochester on its ear, not just in terms of religion but in the relationships between employers and employees, between masters and apprentices.

It was here in the 1840s that Susan B. Anthony would come with her family and begin speaking out in favor of women’s rights, abolitionism, and temperance.

It was here in 1847 that the first women’s rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, spearheaded by Anthony and her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In short, the Burnt-Over District had the reputation for being a fertile ground for all sorts of religious and reform enthusiasms, including but not limited to the crusade against slavery.

So it was here, then, in 1847, that the 29-year-old Douglass, the nation’s most famous escaped slave, arrived to begin publishing his weekly newspaper The North Star, committed to both the cause of abolition and of women’s rights. Its masthead proclaimed “Right is of no color; truth is of no sex”.

By 1847 Douglass’s fame had been well established, owing to the publication of his Autobiography two years before. There were many who regarded Douglass and his book as a fraud. No one with a slave background, they said, could possibly be as articulate and as persuasive as Frederick Douglass.

Surely, they said, the Autobiography must have been ghost-written, as indeed a number of slave narratives had been. But the Autobiography was the real thing. His talents were the real thing. And his escape from slavery was the real thing, too.

Yet, his critics were partly correct. Douglass was no ordinary slave. He was a skilled craftsman who had been taught to read by the wife of one of his owners, until, that is, her husband made her stop.

But it was too late. The Autobiography is replete with the rolling cadences typical of nineteenth- and twentieth-century preaching, even when the preaching was turned against the preachers themselves. Martin Luther King could not have done any better. As Douglass wrote about the churches in his native South:

We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members.

The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin [whip] during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus.

The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation.

He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity.

He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me.

He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution.

The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families – sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers – leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate.

We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles . . . .”

Five years later, on the 4^th of July 1850, Douglass stood before the citizens of Rochester and gave another example of Speaking Truth to Power:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence;

Your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Unlike the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who rejected political action on the ground that politics in a corrupted, slaveholding America was hopelessly tainted, in the 1850s Frederick Douglass joined in promoting the new antislavery Republican Party.

In 1860 he rejoiced in its victory, although he had his doubts about new president, Abraham Lincoln, and his commitment to complete abolition. Once the nation was plunged into the Civil War, however, Douglass was among those pressing the president to emancipate the slaves. He also urged him to allow free blacks to enlist in the Union army. This was not only because that was the best way to win the war, but because Douglass knew it would open the doors to full citizenship for former slaves. He said:

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket . . . there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”

Douglass attended Lincoln’s second inauguration in 1865, and, as he recalled years later, was greeted personally by Lincoln at the reception that followed.

Ending slavery was one thing; achieving full citizenship and the right to vote for all blacks was quite another. In the remaining years of his life – he died in 1892 – Douglass and others found themselves on the losing side of the struggle to guarantee equality for the freedman, as terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and its allies murdered, lynched, burnt, brutalized, tortured and terrorized, those who believed in full legal and economic equality in the former Confederacy.

It would be left to Martin Luther King, Jr., a full century after the Civil War, to lead the effort to fulfill the promise set forth by Frederick Douglass.

King’s words on August 23, 1963 before the Lincoln Memorial and 250,000 of his fellow citizens are an example of Speaking Truth to Power. Now, over half a century later, they are familiar enough.

But they are not the only example.

In 1963 Dr. King and the cause for which he spoke enjoyed growing support throughout the North and in many parts of the South. The March on Washington was well-financed by the United Auto Workers, with help from other unions and organizations.

It received wide television coverage. Dr. King was only the last on a list of speakers that afternoon, from Marion Anderson to A. Philip Randolph to the young John Lewis. And his remarks were praised, not only throughout most of the nation, but in many parts of the world as well.

Another example of Speaking Truth to Power are not the words spoken in Washington in August of 1963, but those spoken in New York City in April of 1967; not at an outdoor rally before a quarter of a million people but inside Riverside Church before a few thousand on the Upper West Side. There was no television coverage. There was no support from labor unions. On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King stood alone. His subject was not racial injustice, but war, specifically the war in Vietnam.

According to Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume account of America in the King years, he had been moving toward a statement about the war for some time. For months there had been growing opposition to the war on college campuses, and among some, but by no means all, of the clergy.

The list of battle casualties seemed endless. So too did the calls from the Pentagon for more and more troops. Thousands of young men were defying the draft. Mohammed Ali had already announced that he would not report for duty in the Army, citing religious grounds. The time seemed ripe.

Yet most of King’s advisors and inner circle, including Andrew Young and Bayard Rustin, had doubts about the wisdom of any forthright, public condemnation of the war. The cause of civil rights at home and that of opposition to the war abroad should not be mixed, they said.

But Dr. King disagreed, and promised to explain why at the Riverside Church.

By the middle of the afternoon all 2700 seats in the pews in the church were filled, along with an additional 1200 folding chairs. Outside, there was an overflow crowd that stretched toward 120^th Street.Dr. King began by explaining the connection between the cause of social justice with that of the antiwar movement. Referring to the 1957 Montgomery bus boycott, he said “I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.”

Young black men, he said, were being sent eight thousand miles to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia . . . .

He had had many disputes with young black militants about his rejection of violence as a means for solving problems:

They ask, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”

Of the Vietnamese people themselves:

We have destroyed their land and their crops. . . .We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. . . .

I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam.

I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.

I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.

I speak as a citizen of the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation.”

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now.

He concluded by invoking the “Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist” unifying principles of love and brotherhood.

He was greeted with a standing ovation that lasted several minutes at the end of his hour-long speech. He returned to his hotel convinced that the first step had been taken toward a change in public opinion that would somehow bring the war to an end.

He was wrong. Sometimes, when you Speak Truth to Power, Power strikes back.

The leadership of the NAACP pronounced his speech a “tactical mistake.” Carl Rowan, formerly President Lyndon Johnson’s black ambassador to Finland, and Ralph Bunche, the only other black recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, joined in the attack. In the White House, one of President Johnson’s advisors told him that King had “thrown in with the commies.”

“Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence,” intoned the Washington Post. The New York Times criticized his “wasteful and self-defeating” attempt to fuse the civil rights struggle with the peace movement.

King was prepared for some backlash, but not for its vehemence, especially when it came from those who had stood with him at the Lincoln Memorial less than four years before. In the next few weeks, he broke down emotionally more than once.

Exactly one year later, to the very day of his Riverside Church address, Martin Luther King was assassinated. His criticism of the Vietnam War was temporarily forgotten as President Johnson led the nation in mourning.

Now, half a century later, the justice of what he had to say becomes as clear as what Frederick Douglass had to say a century before. Yet now, half a century later, there are strange voices in the land calling for more bombs, more destruction, more slaughter, more troops to be sent thousands of miles away.

 

Quoting from the final paragraphs in Taylor Branch’s volumes:

“Statecraft is still preoccupied with the levers of spies and force, even though two centuries of increasingly lethal ‘total war’ since Napoleon suggest a diminishing power of violence to sustain governance in the modern world. . . .

“Martin Luther King himself upheld nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues weary of sacrifice. In the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years.”