By Neil Earle
Five decades ago a group of concerned Christians reached out across the racial divides of this nation and helped ignite the dormant civil rights movement. It was almost 100 years after Emancipation and millions of African-Americans and others were legally forbidden to drink at public drinking fountains or eat in a public restaurant or lodge in a decent hotel in many parts of America – not just the South.
It was America the Segregated, the world of Driving Miss Daisy.
But, oh, how those walls would come tumbling down.
In this special month we pause and reflect on the heroic days of that struggle and its inspired leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King was a preacher's son from Alabama who first came to national attention during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 when well-trained black advocates successfully protested a busing policy that was clearly segregationist.
Dr. King was not the only hero when the Supreme Court ruled against the city buses of Montgomery but it was the first time Americans would come to hear the clear resonant tones and the strident baritone voice of the man we celebrate today.
How many times can a man look up
before he can see the sky?
And how many years must one man have
before he can hear people cry?
How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The Answer my friend is Blowing in the Wind.
The answer to the question of full equality under the law for all Americans was indeed blowing in the wind as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. Using a skilful combination of peaceful protest and non-violence, the civil rights movement slowly began to move towards Dr. King's goal – to subpoena the conscience of the nation.
But it was never easy. Bloodshed and violence met those protestors at virtually every turn. Nor did it spare the children.
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama had been a rallying place for the civil rights movement all throughout 1963.
On Thursday, May 2, a line of fifty teenagers, well-trained in non-violence, emerged from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church singing hymns. The police were waiting for them and hauled them into paddy wagons until a second line emerged from the church and then a third. Amid mounting confusion police commanders called in school buses as jail transport and sent reinforcements to chase after singing youth headed to the downtown district to protest segregation.
Those singing children converted many doubters in Birmingham.
Sunday, September 15, 1963 was Youth Day at Sixteenth Street Baptist. Mamie Grier, superintendent of the Sunday School, met four young girls who had just left Bible class talking excitedly about the new school year. All four were dressed in white from head to toe ready for the 11 o'clock service. Mamie Grier urged them to hurry along and went upstairs. A few minutes later a loud bomb blast shook the entire church. Amid moans and sirens schoolteacher Maxine McNair stumbled through the smoke searching for her only child, sobbing. She soon met a weeping old man. "I can't find Denise," she blurted out. The man replied: "She's dead, baby, I've got one of her shoes."
All four girls from the basement died that day.
Later that day Maxine McNair's husband, Chris, returned from the morgue. He entered a store shopping for items needed for the funeral. Everywhere white sales clerks burst into tears, saying they had seen him on television. That same afternoon dignified, overwrought white strangers knocked at his door to express their extreme sorrow. Some of them arrived in cars bearing Confederate plates.
The world was stunned at the news from Birmingham but that afternoon Chris McNair had unknowingly muttered a prophecy: "Maybe her death will do some good."
It did do some good. A lot of good. 8000 people braved the vigilantes and jeep patrols to attend Birmingham's largest funeral. Among the mourners were 800 Birmingham pastors of both races, making Denise's funeral the largest interracial gathering in the city's history.
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The times they were a-changin' indeed.
It was the support of allies from the dominant culture that helped turn the tide. Martin Luther King and his followers were arousing the conscience of white America at last.
Mary Peabody was the bluest of Boston bluebloods. A grandmother seven times over, her husband was the respected Episcopal Bishop of Boston. Her son was the Governor of Massachusetts. Now here she was in Florida on March 29, 1964 determined to help integrate the stubborn city of St. Augustine. Driving from the airport with civil rights leader Hosea Williams, Mrs. Peabody calmly exclaimed: "I do not believe the local authorities will deny me the pleasure of lunch with my Negro friends."
Williams replied: "Mrs. Peabody, these folk will deny Jesus."
After being escorted off the premises of McCartney's Lunch Counter and the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge for fraternizing with "undesirable guests," Mrs. Peabody found she was barred from attending the all-white Trinity Episcopal Church that Sunday. She found the doors locked and the sheriff standing guard. Later that day news came to her that her friend, Esther Burgess, the wife of the black Bishop of Boston, had been arrested.
Mrs. Peabody was asked: Would you be willing to join Esther in jail for maximum publicity. She said yes, but none of the men were willing to escort her. Up spoke Georgia Reed, a small, short seamstress with a leg crippled by polio: "I'll go." The Bishop's wife and the Seamstress were soon duly arrested on a trumped up charge and the Bishop's wife entered the overcrowded jail where 57 black women were held in a cell with only four beds.
One of the ladies gasped at the sight of the well-dressed Mary Peabody striding elegantly to the "whites only" section of the penitentiary: "You look just like Eleanor Roosevelt."
"We're cousins," Mrs. Peabody proudly replied.
Martin Luther King was a preacher's son but he was a public theologian. Through marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and with the thunder of his voice, King hammered out his theology. He turned the nation's TV networks into his pulpit and the jails his classroom. He challenged all Americans to face the great moral crisis of racism in the United States and the world. He gave the black church and the white church a social conscience it has never lost.
And he changed the country. The landmark Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 is still being debated as to its full meaning and application but there is little doubt that it marked America's public repudiation of segregation as an organized system.
We still live in a time of racial tension. Ours has been described as a time of racial and moral fatigue. That is why we always need to remember the creed of a man called King. Like all prophets, his visions are still out there ahead of us; his dream is still waiting to be totally fulfilled.
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom
ring.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Racial reconciliation is an important theme to us as Christians. Each year our church recognizes the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the Saturday before the U.S. national holiday that bears his name. Our pastor and several of our members are actively involved in reconciliation ministry.