By Neil Earle
Almost four decades have passed and the words of Civil Rights leader
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remain timely and prophetic: "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability, it comes through the tireless efforts
of men willing to be co-workers with God and without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation."
Or this: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." And sadly: "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the great stumbling block is not the Ku Klux Klanner but the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice."
To Christian folk huddled around their black and white television sets as the grainy images came beaming into their homes of peaceful protestors sprayed with power hoses in Mississippi or pounded with clubs and night sticks in Selma, Alabama, King's voice was and will be the authentic incarnation of those times – the radical, harum-scarum, partly-dysfunctional, partly-glorious 1960s.
For those people who keep faith with the goals of racial progress the soundtrack to the decade will always be a brushed-up version of a Christian hymn: "We shall overcome/ We shall overcome/We shall overcome some day." When people ask me why myself – a white Canadian male who grew up on a rocky coast as far removed from Selma or Montgomery as one can get on this continent – when they ask why I edit a racial reconciliation newsletter for a black preacher in Los Angeles I give them a simple answer. For those of us who lived through the idealism and hopefulness of the early 1960s when the times seemed to be a changing', we remain haunted by the successes of what was, at heart, a Christian confrontation against the unjust powers that be.
We should never forget that America officially repented of bitter segregation in the legislation passed by Congress in 1964 and 1965 – legislation that made multi-racial churches such as our Worldwide Church of God live long and prosper.
We live in a time of race weariness. It is important during this Black History Month not to mix up the efforts of the late 1950s and early 1960s (King won his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964) with the flower-powered-pot smoking years after 1967. Few historians mark this distinct dichotomy but it is an important one. Why? Because there is a lingering perception that the civil rights movement of the 1960s failed, that the fervent but peaceful insurgency of Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and others – many, many others such as Boston blueblood Mary Peabody and the head of the Presbyterian church – people often feel that this was a failed cause.
Not true. Not true at all. King was a public theologian, insists black theologian James Cone. "He turned the nation's television networks into his pulpit and classroom, and he forced Christians to confront their own beliefs." He challenged us to live by the better angels of our natures. "America, I don't plan to let you rest until that day comes into being when all God's children will be respected...until you live it out what you have read in your Bible, that out of one blood God made all people to dwell upon the face of the earth."
King ripped the guts out of official segregation. The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 barred discrimination on the basis of race in all public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandated that voting would no longer depend on literacy or character fitness. "Hope alone is to be called 'realistic,'" wrote Jurgen Moltmann in 1964, with one eye on the struggle in the American South, "because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught." But perhaps Christian hope can sometimes verge too much on utopianism, perhaps they may never be fulfilled exactly as we would like. A letdown was inevitable. Today there are black pastors who disagree with many of Dr. King's tactics, who claim that thoroughgoing integration was never a real possibility, that there was a limit to what the federal government could do, and what Americans would tolerate.
Still, having said all that, one thing remains clear: the King years were a watershed for the United States. All the "rights" movements of the 1970s drew strength from the heroic phase of the civil rights struggle. Civil Rights legislation opened up many, many opportunities in education, in housing, in business. Real change occurred. The world of "Driving Miss Daisy" portrays a different America. Today it is said that Mississippi leads the nation in race relations, with more black legislators per capita than any state in the union. More importantly, Martin Luther King and the movement he spearheaded destroyed racism's moral legitimacy.
Given the tenor of the times, that was – and is – an awesome accomplishment.
They subpoenaed the conscience of the world. And the legacy lives on.
In Eastern Europe in 1989 marchers lit candles and sang, "We Shall Overcome." In Tiananmen Square brave protesters sang "We Shall Overcome." In South Africa in the 1980s "We Shall Overcome" came swelling out of Soweto.
During MLK Day and Black History month let's remember the King years as something of which all Americans can be proud. "King came before the nation, not as an outsider shoving in with threats of force," summarizes Garry Wills in Certain Trumpets. "He had sneaked around to the back places of the American heart. He was singing its song to the country, asking how people can drive away black demands without disavowing what is best in their own history."
That is still a good song to be singing. Let freedom ring!