MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.:
SYMBOL OF PEACE OR VIOLENCE?

He was described as a modern Moses in an editorial of a Dallas newspaper. But our own Denton paper had a different view. To its editor he was a harbinger of trouble, even in death. The opinions were just as ambivalent among my associates. To a few he was an apostle of freedom or a prophet calling his nation to repentance, while to others he was an agitator or a precursor of violence.

Among our own Church of Christ folk I fear the attitude was fairly well reflected in a letter from a professor at one of our Christian colleges, who, after referring to himself as an admirer of Martin Luther King, said: “What distresses me most is the fact that I have heard very few expressions of concern about this violent act, but a number of ‘He got what was coming to him’ remarks here on campus, especially among students.”

I would be pleased to learn that all across the nation a number of our congregations conducted memorial services for the slain civil rights leader, but I fear there will be hardly any of this.

A glorious exception was “A Journey to the Mountaintop,” a service for King held at our Christian College of the Southwest in Dallas, with both races taking part. Not only was there no such service out at Abilene Christian College, but it so happened that a Negro was on the chapel program just after the tragedy, and it was explained to the student body that this had nothing to do with what had happened at Memphis!

I hate to think that our people’s attitude is one of general indifference, or perhaps more like that of Georgia’s Gov. Maddox, (who as a business man closed his restaurant rather than serve food to a Negro), than like that of Mayor Lindsey of New York, who helped to avoid riots in his city by joining hands with Negro mourners and singing “We Shall Overcome.” We are, for the most part, a southern church, and yet our witness for Christ in reference to the cause of the deprived Negro is virtually nil.

Our nation has been experiencing its greatest crisis since Lincoln’s day, and yet we have contributed almost nothing at all toward a solution of the vast problems. The Churches of Christ of the south missed the opportunity of a century to do something really significant for our Lord. Jesus ministered to the untouchables of His time. His chief concern was for the down and out, the rejected, and the deprived. But we have joined the white community in its smug indifference, parroting with disdain that foolish question, “What do they want, anyway?’

We have left the task of unfurling the Christian banner to a few Negro Baptist ministers of the south, along with a handful of clergy from the north. There is now an honor roll of martyred dead, people who gave their lives in Christ’s name to make their black brothers free, but none of our names are listed there. We have shed no blood. We did not march in Selma or Memphis. We have been in no Birmingham jail. None of our church buildings have been bombed. All because we have not been in the fight. We have not sung. We have not marched. We have not even loved.

We need to look deeply into the face of our own conscience. When we look we will see that the face is black. We have sinned against Christ and the black man by not coming to his rescue when he needed us most. What a testimony it would have been if the thousands of Churches of Christ had risen as one man in support of justice to the Negro in the south. Had we done so there might never have been that tragedy in Memphis. let’s face it honestly and penitently: the white churches of the south have failed Christ during this great urban crisis.

Martin Luther King was a symbol of a people’s struggle for dignity. His death dramatized that crucible as nothing else could, and so the response across the entire earth was simply magnificent. It was as if the world had only then got the point of what was going on. The world seemed unable or unwilling to tune in on the black man’s frequency until the tragic news went out from Memphis. And so there followed a flood of empathy that has no parallel in all our nation’s history, hardly even in the death of a head of state. The Department of State in Washington received an avalanche of condolences from capitals around the world. Thousands of memorial services were conducted throughout the nation and the world, including even Moscow. The great and the small descended on Atlanta to take part in one of the most remarkable funerals in American history.

In the wake of King’s death there was violence all across the land, an ugly memorial to his philosophy of nonviolence. The fires of violence and destruction burned in twenty American cities. Entire blocks were ablaze in Chicago and Washington. We were on the brink of a racial war. It all seemed apocalyptic.

King’s civil rights movement had its origin in two sources close to my own heart. It was southern and it was Christian. It is fitting that King should emerge from the church, and it is consistent that he be a child of the south. The revolution for the black man’s freedom had to begin in the south, and it is to the church’s credit that one of her sons led the way.

But again I say that it grieves me that our own Churches of Christ have not been among the concerned ones. This whole urban crisis has deep religious overtones, and the tragedy in Memphis depicted as nothing else could that the issues are spiritual in nature. It was martyrdom. It was time for prayer, repentance, and soul-searching. A significant chapter of church history had been written, even in our own nation, and we of the Church of Christ had taken no part in it. The community of God is catholic, but we have proved ourselves now beyond all doubt to be southern white middle-class. We may have some Negro churches, but we see to it that they remain Negro churches. We assume that not only America, but the king. dam of God as well, allows for second. class citizenship.

It is not too late, of course, for us to change our way and become a catholic community, and thus concern ourselves with the problems of suffering humanity. Our Lord tells us, “Inasmuch as you did it unto one of these, the least of my brothers, you did it unto me.” We must make this real in our lives by becoming involved in the problems of social injustice. Our hearts must yearn for those who suffer, especially when they are at our very door.

Many among us took heart that perhaps we were at last joining the human race when Wendel Scott, a minister on the Mexican border, dared to march in protest to substandard wages and other injustices to poor farm workers. It went out over the news wires that the Latin Americans were being helped by a white Church of Christ minister. But our good brother was promptly summoned home by the prominent Highland church in Abilene and summarily dismissed from the church’s payroll. He has since taken a job selling insurance. We are about as concerned with the human predicament as were those New Yorkers who watched from their comfortable apartment windows as Miss Genovese was attacked and subsequently murdered in the street below them. Oh, yes, they heard her continual cries for help as she struggled with her murderer, they conceded to police, but they did not want to become involved, not so much even as to call the police.

History will eventually make its judgment of Martin Luther King as to whether he was a man of peace or a man of violence. That judgment will be more carefully weighed than was the remark of a teacher friend who said, “He talked peace, but everywhere he went there was trouble.”

We forget that changes in cultural patterns often call for agitation. Let the church realize that it must agitate society if it is to save it. Jesus caused trouble; the prophets were agitators. The church’s mission is incendiary, for it disturbs easy consciences and threatens the status quo. If Martin Luther King agitated us, it might be that we needed to be agitated. He was in this respect like another Martin Luther.

But this does not mean that he encouraged violence, destruction, and killing in the streets. Gandhi agitated through nonviolence, and his success brought freedom to India. King was trying to do the same for the Negro, and he was convinced that Gandhi’s philosophy would work in America. But Gandhi also had trouble keeping his followers nonviolent, and when Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 there was an outbreak of violence in India even more serious than that which followed King’s death, with more than a hundred people dying in riots.

King had one problem more serious than anything faced by Gandhi, and that was that his own people were sharply divided over strategy. The likes of Rap Brown and Stokley Carmichael were crying for blood vengeance against the white man, and condemning King’s method as naive and idealistic. King’s losses in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit indicated that nonviolence was losing its hold on the Negro revolt. Memphis loomed as still another failure, for as he marched in behalf of garbage collectors there were violent outbreaks. He was disillusioned, and no doubt he feared that the Browns and Carmichaels would wrest from his hands the revolt that he intended as peaceful and turn it into a racial war.

So he had to return to Memphis. The next march would be peaceful. It had to be. He told his friends, “The doctrine of nonviolence is on trial in Memphis.” And so he died while testing that doctrine, which was indeed the doctrine of Christ. Unlike the case of Gandhi, it was this time tested by a follower of the Christ. This should be of great significance to those who make up His church. If a man’s methods are Christian, we should be eager for them to work. If a man’s dreams are Christian, we should be eager for them to be realized. To be unconcerned or indifferent is utterly unthinkable.

Eric Sevareid on CBS News spoke to the church as well as to the nation when he urged that we not forget the voice that cried out, “I have a dream,” nor forget the face of the widow who sat there “frozen in pain, a Madonna carved in black marble.”

Let us not forget the voice, for it is the voice of the church militant. Let us not forget the face, for it is the face of the church triumphant.—the Editor

Jesus told of the faith that removes mountains. May not cheerfulness in the face of difficulty and privation be an evidence of that wonderworking faith?—John T. Faris