What Black Lives Matter can learn from Martin Luther Kings religious faith – The Dallas Morning News

This column is part of our ongoing Opinion commentary on faith, called Living Our Faith. Find the full series here.

One of the more important and often overlooked moments of the civil rights movement was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s midnight kitchen table experience in 1956, which shaped his (and our) future.

King was 27 years old and in his second year as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, within eyesight of the Alabama Capitol. He had been helping lead the city bus boycott, which prompted an ongoing barrage of death threats to his house, mail and phone. Some days, there were as many as 30 to 40 calls, often in the evening, trying to force him to return to Atlanta.

King would just lay down the phone and, if at night, go back to bed. But one call, around midnight on Jan. 27, became pivotal for him, as he wrote in his autobiography.

While his wife, Coretta, and their infant daughter slept nearby, the caller, a man, said, [N-word], weve taken all we want from you; before next week youll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.

Shaken more than usual, King, as he later wrote, went to the familys small kitchen, made a pot of coffee, buried his face in his hands, and prayed aloud: Lord, Im down here trying to do whats right. I think Im right. I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But Lord, I must confess that Im weak now, Im faltering. Im losing my courage.

King wrote in his autobiography: It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world.

His fear quieted at that moment and left him, though the threats never did. A bomb blew up on the front steps of his home three evenings later. Fortunately, despite the wreckage, no one was injured.

From the damaged porch, King called his gathered supporters out of their anger, and into nonviolence and love for their enemies.

King lived without fear for another 12 years, always going forward, knowing his life was at risk. He said: if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. The world is better for his having lived without fear.

What we can learn from Kings kitchen table experience is the importance of spiritual grounding to move onward in the hard, sometimes perilous struggle for justice, allowing no fear to detour our journey forward.

King learned his anchoring from the Revs. Howard Thurman and James Larson, forerunners of Black Liberation Theology, and Mohandas Gandhis nonviolence. King was carried along by gospel music and spirituals.

Spiritual grounding is essential. Our human history teaches us that. This is not about religiosity, going to church, and so on, but that deep personal spiritual anchoring, whatever ones faith tradition (or none).

If we lack this tethering, our striving for justice will be short-lived and yanked away by distraction or fear of societal disapproval, retaliation, physical danger, financial insecurity, and so on. (The list is long).

Community grows because we give back; it does not grow in a vacuum.

Our annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. should honor not only him, but, as he often pointed out, all those who struggled in danger to themselves without fear. We should reflect on how their deep spirituality moved them (and us) closer to the dream. Consider Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, and all those anonymous people before us, many of whom faced repercussions or death. We should honor, and imitate, their spiritual grounding and fearless courage.

Black Lives Matter has raised up a challenge and put it directly in our faces. Likewise, the pandemic, now two years in the making, has laid bare the extravagant economic dislocations that oppress people of color and poor people.

Many want to rise to the challenge. Others will drift in their solipsism. People who want work for justice should consider more deeply grounding themselves so as to be fearlessly true to the struggle, and not wind vanes.

James C. Harrington is the retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project and an Episcopal priest in Austin. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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What Black Lives Matter can learn from Martin Luther Kings religious faith - The Dallas Morning News