King's Dream Is Our Dream Too -- Justice and Equality
Episcopal News Service. January 11, 1991 [91011]
E. Gene Bennett
As an Arizona resident, I am confident that our diocesan family is committed to keeping Dr. Martin Luther King's dream alive.
King's prophetic vision -- though often painful -- opened our eyes, enlarged our hearts, deepened our faith, and strengthened our will. As God did in Moses, God found in Martin Luther King a voice. And, like Moses, he was a man who was fallible and frequently troubled, who was subject to bouts of depression and inner turmoil. Yet, Martin Luther King was a man who was uniquely qualified to fulfill the role that God had thrust upon him.
I am no stranger to the controversy surrounding Dr. King. I was born and raised in the South... [and] I suspect that the witness of King penetrated my consciousness at a very young age. When I saw the police in my hometown use dogs on people, I remember wondering what Jesus would have thought and what he would have done.
For more than 20 years I served as a parish priest in Tennessee and Mississippi. Members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council were often communicants and sometimes members of the vestry of my parishes. And Jim Crow was everywhere.
For those who do not know who Jim Crow was, let me tell you. It was the name given to state laws, city laws, and local customs that separated whites and blacks in public places: separate drinking fountains, separate bathrooms, separate rooms in restaurants -- even separate Bibles on which blacks and whites were sworn in as witnesses in court. Martin Luther King seriously wounded and almost killed Jim Crow.
I have known and lived with the racist most of my adult life. In the words of Will Campbell, a native Mississippian and fellow churchman, "I have shared his joys and his sorrows in birth and death, in success and failure. I have known his frustration, his hostility, and his need to blame and punish. I have lived with him in an atmosphere of suspicion, distrust, ignorance, misinformation, and nefarious political leadership."
Perhaps I, like Campbell, have been too close to racism because sometimes I am not able to distinguish between the racist and me. Perhaps if I had not been one with the racist in so many "gales of tragedy," I would be able to condemn him without hesitation. Perhaps I would not pity the racist and love him as I do if I were not a part of him. But pity and love him I do.
Martin Luther King, Jr., taught many of us to see racism in ourselves and in society more clearly. And through him we learned to have compassion, love, and understanding for the racist. However, he also taught us to root out the causes of racism -- and all injustice -- which is a malignant cancer that kills not just the oppressed but the oppressors, and which threatens not just a few, but slowly and surely the whole body of humankind.
King taught us that racial injustice is an "insidious disease for which there is no quarantine, only a cure made of spiritual vision, moral action, dogged faith, and ingenious love." From him we learned that if the planet is ever to be whole, the struggle for the cure to injustice must be common and engaged in by us all. From him we learned that none of us is free until all are free.
I remember as a young seminarian marching along, with several of my classmates and professors, beside Dr. King in early March 1965 from Selma to Montgomery. The Alabama march was about voting rights and segregation.
Many of the marchers were beaten, attacked by dogs, and driven to the ground with fire hoses. Perhaps some remember the pictures that were flashed on television screens across the country. With those pictures there was no denying the obscene reality of racial injustice in our land.
A call went out for others to come and join the march. More than 25,000 people responded -- young and old, black and white. Many of them were clergy, some now bishops in our church.
As we marched we sang, sometimes to bolster our courage, and sometimes to drown out the violent threats and insults hurled at us by people along the way. We passed though Confederate Square, the site of the former slave auctions, and gathered in front of the state capitol where we held hands, prayed, sang, and listened to Dr. King's address.
I think Martin Luther King, Jr., taught us something about courage that day. He taught us that courage is contagious, liberating and joyful. We learned that when people stand together for what they believe, even when they are afraid, courage wins the day.
He passed on to us, too, an enabling gift from God, a dogged confidence in the future, a stubborn belief that, however long it takes, God will have his way with us and establish justice and peace.
We left Montgomery believing, as many believe still, that oppression and exploitation will not win the day.
It was on that day in March 1965 -- in front of the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama -- that Dr. King spoke some words that have haunted the back roads of my memory every since: "What we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience."
Dr. King closed with some words that only God could have given him, some words that I can still hear, some words that I read often when my discouragement borders on despair.
In considering how long it would take for our society to be at peace with itself, Dr. King said: "How long? However frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth shall rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you will reap what you sow. How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Our gathering on the third Monday in January affirms that Dr. King's dream is our dream, too. We, too, dream of justice and equality, of freedom and peace, of a kingdom, of a time in which "the wolf and the lamb shall feed together."
God is in that dream. Jesus Christ died trying to teach it to us.