What Martin Luther King, Jr. Can Teach Us About Politics and COVID Today
From Political Turmoil to Roiling Pandemic, What Would King’s Birthday Message Be?
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Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 93 this week. This April marks the 54th anniversary of his assassination.
This month marks the second anniversary of when all started living with COVID-19.
On the surface, King's death and pandemic lives would seem to have little in common. But in recent days, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about how they’re related. The reason: They're both about coping with shattered dreams.
A number of years ago, I traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit the site where King gave his famed “Mountaintop Speech” on what turned out to be the final night of his life.
The Mason Temple is about a ten-minute drive from downtown Memphis. Built in the 1940s, the blocky, concrete headquarters of the Church of God in Christ was the largest Black sanctuary in America at the time. With steel in low supply because of the war, the church was built with a tin roof and wooden folding seats that encircle the pulpit, which is at the lowest point of the room.
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking in the Mason Temple.
In 1968, Mason Temple became ground zero for civil rights. More than a thousand sanitation workers began a strike that winter for greater benefits. King had spoken at the temple in March and returned on Wednesday, April 3. His Eastern Airlines flight from Atlanta was delayed for more than an hour by a bomb scare. King turned down an FBI escort fearing, correctly, that it was an excuse for the agency to spy on him.
King checked into Room 306 at the Black-owned Lorraine Motel, a frequent haven for traveling musicians and preachers. A storm blew in, complete with tornados and sheets of rain. Fearing a low turnout, King asked others to go on his behalf.
“Martin had been depressed and feverish,” Andrew Young told me in an interview in his office in Altanta. “But when we got there, the sanctuary was full and people were standing outside with umbrellas. We walked in and people started clapping. Ralph Abernathy said, ‘These people ain’t clappin’ for us. They think Martin’s comin’.” So we called and told him he had to come.”
King arrived on the pulpit just as the winds reached their peak. “The tin shutters kept banging against the wall – bam! bam!” the Reverend Billy Kyles told me. “Every time they would bang, Martin would flinch. He thought it was a shot. I called over the custodian and told him to turn on the fans that blew out the air so the noise wouldn’t disturb Dr. King.”
Finally, at 9:30 PM, King rose to speak. [You can see a recording of this talk below.]
He began with a bit of whimsy. “If I were standing at the beginning of time, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you live in?’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt and would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there.”
He also wouldn’t stop in the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, or the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, he would tell the Almighty that he wanted to be alive right now.
King went on to celebrate the accomplishments of the Memphis movement and stressed the importance of maintaining unity. Then he turned to Moses’s farewell speech to the Israelites at the end of Deuteronomy, in which the beleaguered leader said the Israelites could choose life or death, success or division.
“Choose life,” Moses says.
God showing Moses Jericho prior to Mose's death.
“One thing I learned from Martin,” Andrew Young told me, “is that the price of leadership is death. We knew every time we left home it could be the end. But he never wanted to talk about it. He’d just say, ‘You don’t know what it is to face death. But you all need to get ready because your time will come.’ And then he’d switch it and go all jovial.”
That night King didn’t pull himself out of it. “I don’t know what will happen now,” he said. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.” He paused as the crowd cheered. “And I’ve looked over. And I have s-e-e-e-e-e-n, the promised land.”
Pulitzer-prize winning historian Taylor Branch captures what happened next:
His voice searched a long peak over the word, “seen,” then hesitated and landed with quick relief on “the promised land,” as though discovering a friend. He stared out over the microphones with brimming eyes and the trace of a smile. “And I may not get there with you,” he shouted, “but I want you to know, tonight [“Yes!”] that we as a people will get to the promised land!” He stared again over the claps and cries, while the preachers closed toward him from behind. “So I’m happy tonight!” rushed King. “I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glo-ry of the coming of the Lord!” He broke off the quotation and stumbled sideways into a hug from Abernathy. The preachers helped him to a chair, some crying, and tumult washed through the Mason Temple.
We are living today through challenging times. Political division, roiling pandemic, fights about our bodies, our minds, our rights, our freedoms. Conversations on topics that were once unthinkable—from civil war to planetary warming—surround us at all hours.
At similar hours in the past, the greatest among us have turned to the same passage for inspiration.
When William Bradford landed with the pilgrims on Cape Cod in December 1620, one of the first comparisons he made was to the final scene of the Five Books of Moses when Moses climbs to the top of Mount Nebo and peers longingly over the Jordan into the Promised Land he will not enter. When George Washington died in December 1799, one of the most quoted verses in his eulogies came from the same chapter of the Bible. When Abraham Lincoln was killed in April 1865, the scriptural passage that Henry Ward Beecher and many others cited to comfort a shocked nation was from the same part of Deuteronomy.
On the eve of his death in April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked the same passage. Can we keep walking when the road is darkest? Can we keep hoping when hope seems to be lost? Can we rebuild after so many of our dreams have been shattered?
“It’s almost unbelievable,” I said to Andrew Young.
“It is,” Young said, “except that I had heard him make similar speeches on at least two other occasions. They were speeches when he was afraid.
Andy Young with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967.
“When Martin was killed,” Young went on, “I was really fussy. Death was the easy way out. My attitude was, ‘Dammit, you’ve gone off and left me.’ I would much rather to have died with him, or instead of him, than to have to face the world without him.”
He sat silent for a moment. “But we never had to face the world without him,” he said. “His spirit has been more powerful in death than it was in life.”
“So it’s not a tragedy,” I said.
“It was a triumph. That’s where the Christian angle comes to the Moses narrative comes in. We switch very quickly from the cross to the resurrection. From the wilderness to the Promised Land.”
If the greatest among us have carried on through shattered dreams, can we expect that the same won't be demanded of us? If those figures were forced to keep going in the face of darkness, who are we to give up?
The lesson of Martin Luther King, Jr, on his birthday this year, is that: Shattered dreams and broken hearts are unavoidable on any journey of meaning. And no one makes it to their destination without leaving at least some of our expectations behind. The only failure is to stop dreaming at all.
Today, like so many moments of the past, we face a choice: Keep walking or collapse to the ground. Keep hoping or give up entirely.
Do what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have wanted: Choose hope.
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