Sermon

“THE WHOOSHING UP EFFECT OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR’S I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH.”[1]

INTRODUCTION: It’s been more than 40 years since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, TN, where he was working on behalf of the garbage collectors of Memphis. When something is that long ago, events grow dim, and we tend to forget the dimensions of the times and the harsh injustices of that struggle. So for all of us, let me offer some highlights of the modern civil rights movement, that is, the modern Civil Rights movement after World War II.

It really began in July 1948, when President Harry Truman signed an Executive Order integrating the military of the United States. In hindsight, it’s hard to believe that we sent racially divided troops to Europe to fight in a war against a racist foe, who put to death some 6 million Jews. Yet racism was part and parcel of the American experience. For example:

n It wasn’t until May 1954, that the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. I lived in Oklahoma at the time and our Republican Governor, Henry Bellmon, a farmer from Helena, spoke out against the court and the subsequent bussing that followed. Then he accepted the invitation of the NAACP to spend a day visiting Black schools and determine for himself if segregation – “separate but equal” – was fair in any sense of the word. What he saw turned him into a strong advocate for reversing the racist practices and supporting bussing to remedy it.

n In August of the following year, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Two white men were arrested for his murder but acquitted by an all-white jury. They later boasted about committing the murder in a Look Magazine interview.

n In Dec. 1955, the secretary of the local NAACP in Montgomery, AL, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger at the front of the "colored section" of a bus. She was arrested and taken to jail for that “crime.” In response, the black community of Montgomery formed the “Montgomery Improvement Association” and elected a young 26-year-old as president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Under his leadership, they then launched a bus boycott, which lasted for more than a year, until the city’s buses were desegregated Dec. 21, 1956.

n In Sept. 1957, in Little Rock, Ark, at the formerly all-white Central High School, nine black students were blocked from entering the school on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus. President Eisenhower sent federal troops and the National Guard to insure their safe passage.

n In Feb. 1960, in Greensboro, NC, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College tried to order food from the racially segregated Woolworth's lunch counter. They were refused service, so they chose not to leave, but to keep sitting in their seats. That practice triggered a sit-in movement across the South in parks, swimming pools, theaters, libraries, and other public facilities, where Blacks were not allowed. Six months later, in Greensboro, the original four protesters were served lunch at the same Woolworth's counter.

n In May 1961, student volunteers begin taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities, which included bus and railway stations. Several of the groups of "freedom riders," as they were called, were attacked by angry mobs along the way.

n Oct 1, 1962, James Meredith was the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Violence and riots surrounding his enrollment necessitated President Kennedy’s sending in 5,000 federal troops to keep order and insure public safety.

n In April 1963, Dr. King was arrested and jailed during anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, AL; while in jail, he wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," arguing that individuals have the moral duty to disobey unjust laws, even if they are “breaking the law.”

n That following May during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Commissioner of Public Safety "Bull" Connor used fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. These images of brutality were televised and published around the world, gaining new sympathy for the movement.

n In June of that same year of 1963 in Jackson, MS, the NAACP’s field secretary, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, was murdered outside his home. Byron De La Beckwith was tried twice in 1964, both trials resulting in hung juries.

n Then on Aug. 28, 1963, in Washington, D.C., about 200,000 people joined in a March on Washington. They congregated at the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. King delivered his now famous "I Have a Dream" speech. It was a “whooshing up” moment (which I will explain in a moment).

n Two and a half weeks later, in Birmingham, AL, four young girls attending Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

n In Jan. 1964, Congress abolished the 24th Amendment allowing a poll tax, which originally had been instituted in 11 southern states after Reconstruction to make it difficult for poor blacks to vote.

n That summer, in a direct test of the new legal reality, a network of civil rights groups, launched a massive effort to register black voters. They also sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention to protest the credentialing of the official all-white Mississippi contingent.

n In July 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin. The law also provided the federal government with the powers to enforce desegregation.

n In Aug., in Neshoba County, MS, the bodies of three civil-rights workers who were college students — two white and one black — were found in an earthen dam. Two were 21, and the third, Michael Schwerner, 24, was studying to become a Unitarian minister. They had been working to register black voters in Mississippi, and had gone to investigate the burning of a black church. They were arrested by the police on the pretext of speeding, incarcerated for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered them violently.

n In March in Selma, AL, Blacks began a march to Montgomery, the state capitol, in support of voting rights but were stopped at the Pettus Bridge by a police blockade. Fifty marchers were hospitalized after police used tear gas, whips, and clubs against them in what history has dubbed "Bloody Sunday."

n Then in Aug., Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote. Shortly afterwards, six days of race riots erupted in Watts, CA a black section of Los Angeles, in which 34 people were killed, more than a 1,000 injured, nearly 3,500 arrested, and with more than a 1,000 buildings and $40 million worth of damage inflicted.

n That year, Dr. King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities, decrying the huge income gaps between rich and poor; he called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

n On Sept. 24, 1965 President Johnson issued an Executive Order enforcing affirmative action toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment.

n In June 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the law that 11 states had prohibiting interracial marriage.

n Then on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, TN Martin Luther King, at age 39, was shot as he stood on the balcony outside his hotel room.

Though it is always uplifting to remember Dr. King’s I have a dream speech from 1963, I felt it was especially appropriate to set the context in our nation leading up to that presentation and the many facets of Dr. King’s involvements and commitments that followed.

In ALL THINGS SHINING: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, the authors label the kind of items just described as the backdrop for the civil rights movement of the day. They were the practices and presumptions in the culture of the day which Dr. King was assaulting head on. And when he did, the people who heard him knew exactly what he meant. Dr. King was not only articulating those evils, but he was working in tandem with President Lyndon Johnson to rewrite the laws that supported them. It was this teamwork that resulted in President Johnson’s signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin; it also had teeth, providing the federal government the power to enforce it.

Their continuing teamwork resulted in Congress passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote. Their teamwork also gave the president support in 1965 when he issued an Executive Order enforcing affirmative action toward prospective minority employees in all facets of hiring and employment.

Had he lived, Dr. King would be 82 tomorrow; when only 35, he was the youngest man ever to receive the Nobel Prize. In his last year on Earth in 1968, the three things he was most involved in still resonate loudly today:

One, he was opposed to war…Though it’s seldom mentioned on his birthday, by 1967 he had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy. On April 4, 1967, he gave his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at New York's Riverside Church, a year to the day before he was murdered. In it, he called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." You can imagine how eloquent he would have been with the Cheney-Bush use of supposed “weapons of mass destruction” as a disguise for invading the sovereign country of Iraq. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan not only kill and destroy young women and men in the military on both sides, but also innocent civilians.

Here on the mainland, not only are we now having to come to terms with eight years of unregulated greed and refusal to live within our means, these two wars are like malignant cancers eating away at our fiscal soul. Most of us are so tired of the wars that we try to ignore them – out of sight and out of mind. But they are there, and they are our wars as well…paid for by our taxes and our young women and men. Dr. King was an eloquent voice against the American imperialism and militarism we still see today.

Two, Dr. King was increasingly opposed to our economic system…and the greedy and rapacious policies of multinational and global corporations, what he called "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries left behind."

Why can giant corporations buy out other corporations and then fire a significant number of the employees? Why aren’t there mandatory posts on every board for employees who have a say in the future well-being of their company and its workers – not just a concern for bonus hungry CEOs, and the stock prices and stock holders?

Third, he was concerned for the poor… In his last months, he was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He was crisscrossing the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be, and staying until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. It called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor"— constantly appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

Anti-war, anti-corporate greed, and deeply concerned for the poor…that’s the positions from which Dr. King would speak to us today, but there is no 82 year old Dr. King around, nor one 39 or 26. What we have left is we – you and I. We are his legacy…people who believed in him and his message. The awareness we have is a gift that he gave to each of us to do what needs to be done.

In the book I mentioned earlier, the authors describe a “whooshing up” effect that presentations like Dr. King’s I have a dream speech created. By that unique use of words, they mean something quite special.

On the one hand, there is the cold reality before which we all stand – the sometimes outrageous reality of life and living of which we are a part…

On the other hand though, there are times when certain events can make that reality so much more clear and hope so much more present for us than ever before.

I’m sure that those of us who have heard Dr. King’s 1963 presentation were aware of the issues it described. But when he gave his address, there was a sudden “whooshing up”…an awareness like never before of what those issues were and how we should respond and live before them. It’s a gift he gave to the ages.

It was somewhat like what happened last Wednesday night, when President Obama spoke at the Memorial Service for those involved in the terrible tragedy in Tucson. In a truly masterful way, there was a “whooshing up,” when he elevated the issues and the concern so that we all could participate and feel hopeful about our future.

[1] A sermon preached January 16, 2011 at the All Faiths Unitarian Church, 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.