The Rev. Ron Sala
The Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford
January 18, 2004
What message could he bring the people of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta on what was to have been a joyous holiday, now shrouded in grief? What did he have to say to the people of America, so deeply divided by race, class, and ideology? What did he have to say to the people of the world now that this great people’s leader lay dead?
Abernathy called his sermon that Easter morning, “My Last Letter to Martin.” He said to his friend, “In Heaven I know you have so much to do, so many people to see. … But look up these black friends and talk to the ones you and I have talked about. Say thanks to those prophets we quoted. Find Mahatma K. Gandhi, the one who inspired us so much in our struggle to free black people. But above all, I want you to see Jesus.” [1]
Abernathy asked King to thank some other people, too: Nat Turner, who had led a slave rebellion so long ago; Frederick Douglas, who wrote our first reading this morning, the former slave who called so passionately for freedom for all; Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican who, in the early years of the 20th century, called black people around the world to take pride and liberate themselves.
Abernathy also asked King to see Viola Luizzo, a white volunteer from Detroit, a homemaker who had come south to help black people. She preceded King into Heaven by driving a car full of demonstrators back to Selma. After seeing her out-of-state license plate, four men attacked. Luizzo was killed. A fifteen-year-old boy traveling with her only escaped by pretending to be dead, too.
Abernathy even asked King to visit Malcolm X, with whom he had often strongly disagreed. Malcolm, Abernathy said, “may not have believed what we believe but he was a child of God and he was concerned about the welfare of his people.”
Abernathy continued, “My dear friend, Martin, I want you to know that black people loved you. It may seem that they are denying our nonviolence for they are acting out their frustration even a man of good, as you were, was killed in such an evil world. They do not see a way out. But I want you to know, Martin, that we’re going to point to them a way. That was the frustration of Jerusalem during this same season nearly two thousand years ago. But we know, Martin, that after the venting of frustration, there will be the need for reconciliation. There you will be invisible but real. There has been a crucifixion in our nation, but here in this spring season as we see the blossoms and smell the fresh air we know that the Resurrection will shortly appear. Sincerely, Ralph.” [2]
To me, Ralph Abernathy was saying several things by his remarks that morning over a third of a century ago. He was saying to the heartbroken believers in human equality, black, white, and other, that King was one in a long series of those who have worked for the cause and often died for it. That line included Jesus and Gandhi, both people of nonviolence who lost their lives by violent means after criticizing the injustices of their day, and continued even through the killing of his friend, Martin Luther King.
Abernathy implies that the struggle is a long one, and there will be setbacks—sometimes devastating ones. And, yet, the struggle goes on, and will as long as there are those who believe in a better world.
He also seems to be saying that the struggle is for many hands. Though some leaders may stand out in history, there are many more lesser-knowns with no less courage or conviction.
I call my sermon this morning, “Kings of the Underground.” Kings, because there were many who worked in the Civil Rights movement, who shared King’s vision of human equality across race and class lines and over national borders. In a sense, they were kings by virtue of recognizing the inherent royalty of the human soul. No matter what how societies may try to bury those of one group or another, universal dignity shines through. They were of the Underground in the sense of being part of a broad movement in resistance to injustice. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind at the term “underground” is the resistance to Fascist oppression during the Second World War. In his now famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King has this to say about those times:
“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. [King continues,] Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.” [3]
King and those who worked with him were arrested countless times for committing illegal acts for moral purposes. I recall that, back in the 80’s, the socially conscious rock and roll band U2 was called the world’s biggest underground act. King and other Civil Rights leaders were also big on the national and world scene, but also definitely “underground” and outside the Establishment of their time, many of the descendents of which now hypocritically praise them.
There were, of course, if you will, Queens of the Underground, dedicated women who devoted themselves to the cause. Some of these were members of King’s own family. He once wrote this about his mother, Alberta Williams King:
| “My mother confronted the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child. She taught me that I should feel a sense of ‘somebodiness’ but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are ‘less than,’ you are ‘not equal to.’ She told me about slavery and how it ended with the Civil War. She tried to explain the divided system of the South—the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing; the white and colored signs on drinking fountains, waiting rooms, lavatories—as a social condition rather than a natural order. She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. Then she said the words that almost every Negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: ‘You are as good as anyone.’ At this time Mother had no idea that the little boy in her arms would years later be involved in a struggle against the system she was speaking of.” [4] |
King’s wife, Coretta, was another great source of strength for him:
| “Through all of these trying and difficult days, [King writes], Coretta remained amazingly calm and even-tempered. In the midst of the most tragic experiences, she never became panicky or overemotional. She was always strong and courageous. While she had certain natural fears and anxieties concerning my welfare, she never allowed them to hamper my active participation in the movement. And she seemed to have no fear for herself. She was always a deep consolation to me and supported my every move. … In the darkest moments, she always brought me hope.”[5] |
There was also, of course Rosa Parks, who by her simple act inspired so many people to action. Parks was secretary of the Birmingham chapter of the NAACP, an organization one of the founding members of which was radical Unitarian minister, John Haynes Holmes. King describes her illegal action this way:
| “On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to move when she was asked to get up and move back by the bus operator. Mrs. Parks was sitting the first seat in the unreserved section. All of the seats were taken, and if Mrs. Parks had followed the command of the bus operator she would have stood up and given her seat for a male white passenger, who had just boarded the bus. In a quiet, calm, dignified manner, so characteristic of the radiant personality of Mrs. Parks, she refused to move. The result was her arrest. [King writes later,] No, she was not planted there by the NAACP or any other organization; she was planted there by her sense of dignity and self-respect.” [6] |
Ralph Abernathy, King’s first lieutenant and successor at SCLC, was, like King, a young, black minister. Both had gone to jail many times for their protests. Both had had their homes bombed by those determined to stop them. But he never lost his sense of humor as he and King kept each other’s spirits up. For instance, Abernathy once played a joke at the expense of Jim Clark, the infamous segregationist sheriff. At that time, activist Amelia Boynton of the Dallas County Voters’ League had earned the rank of Sheriff Clark’s “Public Enemy #1” for helping black citizens through the intricate system designed to keep them from voting. Clark’s brutal arrest of Boynton for her “crime” was captured in a dramatic photo printed in the Washington Post and New York Times, which helped the cash-poor movement to raise money. Abernathy nominated Jim Clark for honorary membership in the Dallas County Voters’ League “for services rendered in publicity and fund-raising above and beyond the call of duty”! [7]
There was Bayard Rustin, who fellow Civil Rights leader A. Philip Randolph referred to as “Mr. March” for his organization of the 1963 March on Washington. When the late Senator Strom Thurmond tried to discredit the march by publicly referring to Rustin’s homosexuality, Dr. King stood up for him.[8]
Opponents of civil rights had more than criticism in store for Medgar Evers of the NAACP. Evers told a reporter, “If I die, it will be in a good cause. [He continued,] I’ve been fighting for America just as much as soldiers in Vietnam.” (Evers was a veteran himself). A few days later, an assassin’s bullet took his life. Outside the funeral home in which Evers’ body lay, thousands of mourners gathered. Janus Adams describes the scene this way:
| “Silently, the mourners walked to the funeral home from which the body would be flown to Arlington Cemetery. From somewhere deep, a voice welled up. “Oh, Freedom,” she sang, and was quickly joined for “And before I’ll be a slave.” Then “This little light of mine.” They could not give up Medgar ad be silent. With that, a police riot broke out: hundreds of jackbooted, club-swinging police lunged into the crowd, heaving their victims into garbage trucks and hauling them off to jail. As blood flowed in the streets of Jackson, Medgar Evers did not go down without a fight.”[9] |
The Rev. James Reeb was a white Unitarian Universalist minister who went with many other clergy to protest segregation with King in Selma, Alabama. King had this to say about what happened to him there:
| “… I received shocking information that the Reverend James Reeb had just passed away as a result of the dastardly act of brutality visited upon him in Selma. Those elements that had constantly harasses us and who did their cowardly work by night, wet to the Walkers’ Café and followed three clergymen and beat them brutally. Two of them were from Boston—the Reverend Miller and the Reverend Reeb—and Reverend Clark Olson was from Berkeley, California.” |
King also wrote, “This murder, like so many others, is the direct consequence of the reign of terror in some parts of our nation. This unprovoked attack on the streets of an Alabama city cannot be considered an isolated incident in a smooth sea of tolerance and understanding. Rather, it is a result of a malignant sickness in our society that comes from the tolerance of organized hatred and violence. We must all confess that Reverend Reeb was murdered by a morally inclement climate—a climate filled with torrents of hatred and jostling winds of violence. He was murdered by an atmosphere of inhumanity in Alabama that tolerated the vicious murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson in Marion and the brutal beatings of Sunday in Selma. Had police not brutally beaten unarmed nonviolent persons desiring the right to vote on Sunday, it is doubtful whether this act of murder would have taken place on Tuesday. This is additional proof that segregation knows no color line. It attempts to control the movement and mind of white persons as well as Negroes. When it cannot dominate, it murders those that dissent.”
Another leader during King’s time and now is Jesse Jackson. Those of us who are active in the ongoing struggle for justice for workers at Stamford Hospital and Tandet Center, a great many of whom are black, are grateful to Rev. Jackson for calling public attention to their plight by rallying here on their behalf. If you would like to translate good intentions into good actions and be involved in helping those who help us when we’re sick, please let me know.
No, racism is not dead. Study after study continues to show that bad old fashioned discrimination is alive and well in employment, in housing, in education. King and his generation of activists achieved great victories we can look back on with pride, but the struggle goes on. Those of us who are paying attention will not be fooled by the simplistic media formula that private and public racism belongs to the south and the past. Nor should we allow ourselves to be led into thinking that King and his compatriots were only about racism. King criticized the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism. All three continue to haunt America in 2004.
It is easy to become discouraged. But let us hold close the words of Dr. King: “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.”
Let us all dream that dream, and make it more each day a reality!
Amen.
| [1] | Freedom Days: 365 Inspired Moments in Civil Rights History by Janus Adams, (New York: Wiley, 1998), entry for April 7.
| [2]
| Ibid
| [3]
| The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clay Borne Carson (New York: Warner, 1998), 194-95.
| [4]
| Ibid, 3-4
| [5]
| Ibid, 89
| [6]
| Ibid, 50-51
| [7]
| Adams, entry for January 19
| [8]
| “Remember Bayard Rustin” (www.lambda.net/~maximum/rustin.html)
| [9]
| Adams, entry for June 15
| |
