Yesterday (April 4) was the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The day was marked by a march and rally where members of First Unitarian joined the leaders of the Albina Ministerial Alliance, the NAACP, Ecumenical Ministries in remembering Dr. King’s life and legacy. It was a time of rededication but also a time to reflect on the dream he articulated and the dream that our nation was able to hear and chose to embrace.
The brief remarks I offered at the rally began with the words of Yolanda Renee King, Dr. King’s granddaughter, at the March for Our Lives a few weeks before. “Enough is Enough,” she preached to hundreds of thousands on the Washington, DC Mall. Our nation has chosen to celebrate the vision of small Black and White children sitting together at the welcome table, judged by the “content of their character rather than the color of their skin.” Dr. King did use that image, but only after speaking at length about the bad check that blacks and communities of color had been given, the promises that remained unredeemed.
Enough is enough gun violence, Yolanda King preached. Enough police violence. Enough poverty and enough militarism we can add from Dr. King’s words. And enough watching progress turned back on so many issues. Enough is enough.
It may seem to be a complicated message to criticize a saint. And, as I said at the rally yesterday, there are critical elements of our vision of Beloved Community that Dr. King did not articulate. Women’s empowerment and BGLTQ presence, were areas of silence. But I have complete faith that Dr. King would have added them had he been allowed to live. Hopefully we have learned something in the 50 years since his death.
The critique of the way Dr. King has been used has always been part of the discourse in the African American community and in the progressive justice-making community. An article in The Guardian yesterday took this approach: “This week, the US will indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation, selectively misrepresenting King’s life and work, as if rebelling against the American establishment was, in fact, what the establishment has always encouraged.”
This morning, I returned to the writing of Dr. Bill Jones, African American UU minister, theologian and academic. In a piece entitled “I Come Not to Praise King,” written for the first published book of meditations by African American UU ministers in 1991, Bill wrote of: “the ideological abuse of King’s deeds and doctrine by those who want to negate his dream. … I have a nagging suspicion that white America desires to perpetuate a black hero who fits its needs of oppression and not those of black liberation. White adoration of King secures him more as a guardian of white interest than as a black Moses to lead his people to freedom.”
To redeem Dr. King’s death, requires an embrace of the radical nature of his vision.
Rev. Toni Vincent, another African American UU minister, writing in the same publication, offered a more pastoral but no less compelling charge:
A Fallen Friend
By Toni Vincent
Great Spirit of light and darkness:
We gather once again to remember a fallen friend,
And nourish ourselves from the fountain of reflections.
Open our hearts to the anguish of our pain,
To the tired taste of swallowed tears,
And to our unrealized vision.
Justice makes tireless demands, and we grow weary.
As we touch one another in common cause,
And with the great spirit in our midst,
Let us find the way and the courage to realize the dream
Which still lives within us.
Amen
Enough is enough. 50 years on. Enough is enough.
Bill