CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
(A sermon delivered on Sunday after a murder)

ROBERT MEYERS
Riverside Church of Christ
Wichita, Kansas

A few hours ago, within a few blocks of my home, these things happened:

A neighbor said that when her mother first heard the news of Thursday evening she said: “Well, they’ve shot old King. I hope they killed him.”

A group of Negro students raced down the halls at North high school breaking windows and attacking anyone unlucky enough to be caught by himself. My son sat with others in a biology classroom as black fists broke out the door glass. A senior girl who lives across the street from me came home in tears after seeing a mob of Negro boys kick a white boy in the school yard until an ambulance came for him.

And at the little grocery store, only a block and a half away, a very self-important white man said to my wife: “Well, you bought your gun yet, Lady? You’re going to need it!”

Those things were done and said by whites and Negroes within a few blocks of my home. They also were happening all over America. Nothing could possibly be sillier than for me to ignore this from your pulpit, nor than for you to suppose even for a moment that these things are no concern of ours as Christians.

The immediate cause of these things is the cowardly murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. His death has focused the eyes of the world once again upon the American experiment in liberty, and it has made it chillingly clear that we must do something about the poisons of racism or face unbelievable civil terrors in years to come.

What about this man whom the world mourns and whose death has numbed us in ways reminiscent of that terrible November. Was he great, as many whites and Negroes believed? Or was he simply a stubborn agitator, as so many other whites and Negroes thought?

One thing is certain: he is a highly controversial subject and I am unlikely to win approval from all of you today, no matter how I speak.

One problem in considering him is that we define greatness so differently. For some it is perfection, mainly because the only great men they know about have been dead for so long their faults are forgotten. Such people scoff at the idea that King was great because they are positive he made many mistakes. The truth is that every great man in history has made tremendous mistakes. Only little men never make great mistakes. They make little mistakes, and no one pays much attention to them. And they make little victories, too, and no one pays much attention to those, either.

But great men—just read history—have always made huge errors. And bitter enemies. Yet it is not finally the mistakes a man makes in his gigantic struggle, but the judgment we make of the essential rightness of his cause and of the general rightness of his life, that shapes the verdict of history. So judged, Martin Luther King was a great man, and the sorrowful reaction is the correct one.

What we have to remember is that committed men always make other people violently angry. Moses, Socrates, Jesus, Lincoln—there is something about the white hot zeal and fervor of such men that triggers a violent reaction in sneaky, cowardly souls so that they hide in old buildings with guns, or mass with other cowards in mobs, and do away with their tormentors.

King, more than any other single man, welded the Negro people into a unity. He won a bus strike in Montgomery, Alabama and proved to the Negroes that they did not have to be insulted every single day of their lives on the buses in that city. He got them to vote. He encouraged them to stand up for the freedom America promises all men. And his rhetoric, singing and soaring in a deeply religious lyricism, gave them hope and courage.

One of two modern American Negroes to win the Nobel Peace prize, Martin Luther King’s last few years involved him in a seeming paradox. White men, annoyed and frightened by racial riots, believed that he was preaching nonviolence out of one side of his mouth and stirring up riots out of the other. They believed this because they noticed that of late, where he went, violence occurred.

The violence did happen, and King went on with his campaign, although he continued to speak against violence. My own feeling is that he had no choice, unless he were to bow out of the struggle altogether. There may have been times, being human, when he almost said in some corner of his heart, I don’t care if there is violence; we have waited too long! But I feel such moments would never have lasted long.

But King knew one thing, and this drove him on: he knew that freedom is never voluntarily or happily given by an oppressor. It has to be demanded. The oppressor, profiting in various ways by his injustice, always says, Wait. Be Patient. Wait. And what he almost always means is, Never, Never, Never. Hold them off, pacify them, keep life sweet for yourself as long as possible and let the next generation worry about the problem.

Against such an attitude, what can the oppressed do but keep nudging and pushing until something happens? It was that way for the Hebrews until they finally departed Egypt in violence, and entered Canaan in violence. It was that way with the birth of the American republic, born in violence, and sustaining itself when it had to through violence.

Yet I hate such violence as I hate few things else on this earth. I hate the sight of a Bull Connors-type in Birmingham kicking a Negro in the head, and I hate it when a group of Negro boys enter a high school and kick into uselessness the kidney of an unoffending white boy. I hate it when an unidentified coward shoots a world figure from a dingy hotel room, and I hate it when an angry Negro reacts by seizing his gun and going out to kill the first honkie he sees.

But I am not the only one who hates that kind of violence. It was a Negro boy at North high school who came at last to the rescue of the white lad and stood up against cowards of his own race. And in Atlanta, beside King’s coffin, Negro students handed out pamphlets charging that “black people are killing his spirit. Black people are using the death of our great black leader for an excuse to rob and steal and destroy. We are asking you in the King’s name to respect his death.”

Despite this kind of discipleship, many whites prefer to believe that King was the real cause of their grief and that if he would only go away, racial peace would come again. I can tell you one thing: racial peace will not come until racism has departed. And King dedicated his life to showing America and the world how much racism there is in this country. This is what we cannot forgive him for, perhaps. His disclosure of our secret, festering hatreds made him loved by the black community which suffered from those hatreds endlessly, but it made him hated by many whites who thought he was destroying otherwise good race relations.

So J. Edgar Hoover called him the worst liar in the land, ex-president Truman called him a troublemaker, and one white television viewer in Mississippi got so angry a few years ago when he saw King’s image that he grabbed his shotgun and blew the set into kindling. And what some of my own friends have called him, in secret moments, they would prefer not hearing this morning.

Yet he said repeatedly, “If blood is to flow, let it be ours” and his people said, Amen! And so long as it was their blood flowing, few whites hated Martin Luther King. But when whites had kicked and beaten and shot enough nonviolent civil rights workers so that black racists could stir up Negroes in despite of Dr. King, then white blood began to flow and suddenly King was feared and hated. Somehow, irrationally, white men supposed that if he would go away, their trouble would go away. To such men I can only say that he was, among all Negro civil rights leaders, the best friend you had. And for that reason his death does not surprise me. We often kill our benefactors.

Now I must say something of the riots yet to come, because attitudes are rapidly hardening on both sides. Unless we begin to feel and talk differently, our future is grim and bloody. The hardest thing I have ever tried to do, I think, is explain to whites how they must understand the rioting Negro even when they do not approve of him. Nor is this a problem for whites only. Thousands of staid, middle-class Negroes who keep up their property, honor their marriages, and practice high ethical principles simply cannot understand the behavior of some of their brothers.

Can you understand that in a strange, frightening way this antisocial behavior is a desperate call for help? A call for help can come in many different ways. If you are a parent, you may hear a call for help when your child is naughty. Unconsciously you may have ignored him, or seemed grossly unfair to him in your attentions to another child or your business, so he throws a tantrum. He knows that at least that will get him attention. He had rather be spanked than ignored, because human beings cannot bear to be ignored. It destroys their sense of self.

What I ask you to understand today is that people who have been deprived of the minimal requirements necessary to create and preserve human dignity are exactly like such children. Their burnings and looting and surly rebellions, however frightening and annoying, are in actuality one of the most sorrow-filled cries for help ever to sound inside the great halls of human misery.

So while I hate violence and arson and looting, I believe them to be ultimately cries for help. Irrational, certainly, because so far the rioting Negro has hurt himself more than anyone else. Just as a child in tantrum may harm himself much more than he harms another. But in both cases, the motive is the same: even if I do harm myself, I will get somebody to pay attention to my plight.

Now we may spend our breath forever saying, Well, if they’d just behave, we would do good things for them. The plain fact is that good behavior got them very little except second class existence and contempt for over a hundred years. If they know nothing else, they know that. And the other thing they know is that they are now forcing us to notice them, and to try to figure out what to do for them before they turn all of America into a nightmare. The tantrum, in other words, is working. One would be an idiot not to understand why it is being continued. The parent of a child in tantrum can kill the child and stop the embarrassment, or he can try to figure out where he has gone wrong and resolve upon ways of changing the environment.

Many white people honestly believe that the Negro has now been given so much he ought to be happy. It is hard to know how to counter such colossal ignorance. I suppose such people believe it because they want to believe it, because it ministers to their comfort and feeds their sense of being treated unjustly by the Negro whom they have so long wronged. We play tricky games with fair housing, for example, giving just as little as we can in order to hold back Negro militants and hedging the topic around with such language and practice that it amounts to almost nothing. We count on the slow, cumbrous, obscure machinery of the law to dull the fierce anger of militants. After all, we realize, no one can stay at the boiling point forever. After a while the most ardent civil rights worker subsides in despair, and the white neighborhoods are snug and secure again—until one hot summer night the frustration and bitterness boils over again and we sit wondering why.

And even when a neighborhood is legally desegregated, our hearts know other ways to show malice. A fireman says to his friend, “Sure a Negro can move into our suburb, but he won’t get much fire protection; and you know, his house might just start to burn.” There are a thousand ways to segregate and the law can never touch most of them.

There is little hope until our hearts are changed by some power higher than our prejudices and hates. Among us, at least, the solution has been given. We have to exercise the Christian grace of forgiveness while we labor patiently to undo the damage of a century and a half. The Negro must forgive us for working every trick in the book to keep him down economically and socially so that we could exploit him. And we now have a few violent years to forgive him for, and we must try to understand even when we most desperately disapprove.

We can never understand the explosive bitterness that has finally been released among many Negroes until we force ourselves to ask certain questions and give honest answers. Questions like these:

What would it do to me if my little six year old son came home crying one day and asked me why other children hated him and called him names because his face was dark. What would it create in my heart if he looked at me and said through tears, “Daddy, is black bad?”

What would it do to me if I were driving down some lonely highway, as Negroes have done for so many years in our history, and my wife and I were both sick with weariness and desperate for sleep, yet both of us knew with a shame we did not want to discuss that we could not enter the motels along the road? What would it create in my heart if I had to plan trips carefully so that I could be in the right places at the right time?

What would it do to me if I had some strange disfigurement of the face so that people politely avoided looking directly at me when they came near? Would I not scream out, after years of this, See me! Look at me! I’d rather see you flinch than to be ignored and become invisible. So has it been with the Negro and his color.

What kind of man would I have become if I had spent half my life carefully avoiding restroom signs, and cafe signs, and park signs that said, FOR NEGROES ONLY?

I used to ask myself in Searcy, Arkansas, what kind of hatred I would have built up if I had had to go down to the one movie in that little town and after I had bought my ticket I had had to climb some dark, dingy stairs over to one side of the building and sit in a special, segregated balcony away from all the white people sitting below me in the choicer seats.

I think I know what kind of man I would have become, because I am weaker than some of my Negro friends. They have put up with what I could never have managed. And so, although I do not approve of their outbursts, I understand them. And I will add this about my conviction: if a member of my own family were to be hurt or killed in this terrible struggle, I would be heartbroken but my mind would go right on saying to me that it was an understandable evil and that only with patient good will could I rub out the long-lasting foundations for it.

Martin Luther King spoke my own feelings eloquently in that dramatic Washington, D.C., speech before a couple of hundred thousand people of every skin tone imaginable.

I have a dream, he said, that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the people’s injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I share the man’s dream. I regret whatever mistakes he made. I condemn every act of violence committed by either white or black. I pray God that we shall find wisdom and grace and courage to solve our desperate problem. But in the meantime I shall try to understand why these bad things are happening and to confess the guilt of my own race for the hundred years of misdeeds that are now coming terribly down upon our heads. I shall realize that as my people have been cruel sometimes, so black men will be cruel now, no matter how much I hate it, no matter how much some of their own brothers hate it.

And I hope that Martin Luther King was right when he said in that strangely prophetic speech just before his death that he was ready when the end came because he had been to the mountaintop, like Moses on that peak in ancient Moab, and had seen the promised land. The dawn will come, he said. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed in America and all flesh shall see it together.

God grant that it may be so, and that every Christian in this little community of ours will act wisely and courageously in the days that lie so forbiddingly ahead of us. Above all else, let not a single one of us say or do one thing that will make the bloody tantrum worse. Having been forgiven by so many black Americans for so many years, we must now find the grace in our hearts to forgive some of them for these years. The debt will have to be canceled soon on both sides, so that we can say without embarrassment once again that America is really the land of the free.

My text? If you have wondered about that I remind you that it was illuminating every sentence from the beginning and throwing the only ray of light I can find at this moment on the darksome road ahead. It reads: Father, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article by Robert Meyers is so important that we are issuing it as a Reprint, with separate title cover and attractive format, for general distribution. It may do much in creating better understanding between the races. If you will help us to distribute them to teachers, students, business people, church leaders of both races, etc., we will make you the special price of 12 copies for 1.00 or a hundred copies for only 5.00, including postage. This is one small contribution that we want to make to our country in these critical times.