A Voice of Radical Courage and Love

And he set his face To go to Jerusalem.
--Luke, Chapter 9

Today is the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech" at the March on Washington. In the decades since, it has become customary for politicians and commentators to celebrate King's commitment to the American Dream, his belief in equal opportunity, and his hope that one day, the children of black and white families might be judged "not by the color of their skin," but by "the content of their character."

Yet these assessments are one-dimensional and fail to do justice to the struggle of Dr. King's religious journey, the complexity of his political convictions, and the radical courage of his commitment to social justice. Only when we understand the full range of King's vision of equality can we appreciate his true legacy--a transforming belief in what a truly beloved community might look like in America.

The first point to note is the overwhelming power of King's religious faith. Because King was a new arrival in Montgomery, and had almost no enemies, local leaders asked him to take leadership of the mass boycott that followed the 1955 arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white person. Drawing on his study of Mahatma Gandhi, King immediately articulated the signature theme of the movement. How could African-Americans justify breaking the law and engaging in civil disobedience, he asked? Because, like Jesus, they would use non-violence and love to redeem and make whole a divided nation.

But King's faith soon became searingly personal. Nightly phone calls threatened death to his family. Unable to sleep, tormented by visions of his little girl suffering, King broke down one night in his kitchen. As David Garrow writes in his biography of King, at that moment King heard an inner voice saying, "Stand up for justice, stand up for truth. . . . [It was] the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone." From that point forward, the voice in the kitchen was King's personal anchor of faith, the message that enabled him to overcome the most dire threats. What had once been an intellectual creed had now become personal, deep, and overpowering faith.

The second point to recognize is the tension King insisted upon between his embrace of the New Testament's gospel of unconditional love and the Old Testament's prophetic insistence on righteous justice. "It is not enough for us to talk about love," he told movement supporters. "There is another side called justice. . .Standing beside love is always justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion--we've got to use the tools of coercion."

It was King's harnessing of love and justice that led him to write his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" to the moderate white clergymen who attacked the movement's demonstrations in Birmingham as too radical. To those who pleaded for patience and a reduction of tension, King wrote: "non-violent direct action seeks to create. . .a crisis and foster such tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue." "I confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension'," King went on, declaring that "the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not . . . the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers the negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice." In words that would ring forever, King insisted that if America wanted the healing balm of love, it also needed to live with the scorching intensity of militant protest.

The third and final point is the degree to which King insisted that racial justice also required economic justice. "We are engaged in a social revolution," he insisted "[that seeks] basic structural changes in the architecture of American society." Long before sociologists started talking about the "declining significance of race," King focused on the connection between racism and poverty. "The evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together," he said, "and you can't really get rid of one without getting rid of the others." The only answer, he said, was "a radical redistribution of economic and political power."

All these themes came together in the last months of King's life. Pre-occupied with death, he talked constantly, his wife Coretta said, "about the fact that he didn't expect to live a long life." "A profound sadness" had settled on King, one of his associates said. But there was also the voice in the kitchen that gave him the courage to continue standing up for justice and love.

King was now committed to the Poor People's Campaign, the embodiment of his understanding of the ties between racism and poverty. He knew this was an even harder message for America to hear than the insistence on an end to Jim Crow. Yet he persisted, in the face of government wiretaps, and a scurrilous letter, written in FBI headquarters, threatening to expose his sexual infidelities and inviting him to commit suicide.

And so he "set his face" toward Memphis, to seek justice for the sanitation workers on strike there, even though he knew the city was a powder keg. He acknowledged that, "I don't know what will happen now, we've got some difficult days ahead." But he would not be dissuaded from the course he had set, or his insistence on non-violence. "It doesn't really matter with me now," he declared the night before his assassination, "because I've been to the mountaintop. . .and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

As we remember King's life on this 40th anniversary of the March on Washington, let us honor the depth of his faith, his vision and his courage--not the antiseptic version that has become part of our official culture, but the rich and radical legacy of his struggle for freedom.

William Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He writes about the civil rights movement.