Race, Class and Peace

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

January 16, 2011

 

Reading

Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct,” February 4, 1968

[King took as his text Mark 10:35 and following.  It recounts that the disciples James and John came to Jesus and said:]  “Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left hand, in thy glory….”

Now very quickly, we would automatically condemn James and John, and we would say they were selfish. Why would they make such a selfish request? But before we condemn them too quickly, let us look calmly and honestly at ourselves, and we will discover that we too have those same basic desires for recognition, for importance….  And there is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life.

And so before we condemn them, let us see that we all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade….

There comes a time that the drum major instinct can become destructive…. If it isn’t harnessed, it causes ones personality to become distorted. The drum major instinct can lead to exclusivism in ones thinking and can lead one to feel that because he has some training, he's a little better than that person who doesn't have it. Or because he has some economic security, that he's a little better than that person who doesn't have it. And that's the uncontrolled, perverted use of the drum major instinct.

And not only does this thing go into the racial struggle, it goes into the struggle between nations….

God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.

But God has a way of even putting nations in their place.…

[What Jesus did when James and John wanted to satisfy their drum major instinct was to say] in substance, "Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be important…. Well, you ought to be…. But he reordered priorities. And he said, "Yes, don't give up this instinct. It's a good instinct if you use it right. It's a good instinct if you don't distort it and pervert it….  Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love.  I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That is what I want you to do…."

And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new definition of greatness….

Sermon

The last sermon Martin Luther King, Jr., ever preached was at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on March 31^st, 1968, just a few days before he was assasinated.  He talked about why he was leading the Poor People’s Campaign to Washington and he continued his denunciation of the war in Vietnam.  His title was “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution:”

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day….  I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear….

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, "How do you live?" And they say, "Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it."

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches….  

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington [in a Poor People’s Campaign] to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation….  We are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses….

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." The world must hear this. I pray God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world…. [This war] has played havoc with our domestic destinies…. Every time we kill one [Vietcong soldier] we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together….

The title of the sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” was derived from Washington Irving’s story “Rip van Winkle” – the well-known story of a man who fell asleep for twenty years, awaking to find the image of George Washington wherever the image of King George III had appeared before his long snooze.  Rip van Winkle literally slept through the American Revolution.  King read the signs of the times and found that America was once again in the midst of a great revolution, a revolution of freedom, of equality, of fairness of opportunity, a revolution of hope.  Nor was this revolution confined to the United States alone; there was a similar striving for freedom in many parts of the world as people in Eastern Europe rose up against the tyranny of the Soviet Union, people in Africa and elsewhere threw off colonialism and declared their independence, and people in Vietnam struggled for national liberation.

King lost a lot of supporters when he began speaking out against the war in Vietnam.  Those who wanted to uphold segregation in the South, of course, had long hated him.  He was accused of being an outside agitator even though he was born and bred in the South.  His house was bombed, his family was threatened, and he himself was constantly at risk of being shot like Medgar Evers, another champion of Civil Rights in the South, among others. Jerry Falwell and many other preachers white and Black denounced King’s crusade for Civil Rights as a betrayal of the pulpit, which they believed should be used for religious but never political purposes.  They promoted the view that religion is a private matter, applying only to what each person believes and how each person acts as an individual  – denying that there might be something religious about the struggle for freedom that King was leading, a struggle that recalled the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt after they were finally released from slavery.  Falwell himself decided some years later that politics did actually belong in the pulpit as he went on to lead the Moral Majority. 

Despite the strong, bitter and violent opposition King aroused among defenders of segregation in the South, he began early on to receive recognition and support from political leaders outside the South.  During the 1960 campaign for the presidency, King was arrested for having a suspended drivers’ license, an opportunity for his opponents to put him in jail and threaten his ability to continue his leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. Both John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert called King, his wife and the local authorities to secure his freedom, a move that galvanized Black support for Kennedy’s election.  In October 1962 King was invited to the White House to discuss the Civil Rights struggle with President Kennedy.  After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson met with King and helped to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

The struggle for voters’ rights was punctuated by the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson, one of its Black supporters, which led to the call for a march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama.  During the march, two others were murdered, both Unitarian Universalists.  James Reeb, was the former associate minister at All Souls Unitarian Universalist in Washington, D.C.  At his death he was a member of Arlington Street Church in Boson and leader of the local American Friends Service Committee based in Roxbury that had as its mission improving housing for the inner-city poor.  Reeb was attacked and mortally wounded by a white gang as he left a restaurant with friends the day of his arrival in Selma.  The other casualty was Viola Liuzo, a white housewife from suburban Detroit who was shot and killed by four members of the Ku Klux Klan as she was driving some of the marchers home from Montgomery after the march.

King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam was a distinct turn away from the exclusive focus on the cause of Civil Rights that by 1965 had brought him widespread support among whites, including the President and other national politicians.  Many in the North regarded opposition to legally enforced segregation in the South as a righteous cause.  It’s not surprising that many of his most fervent supporters urged him not to entangle himself in political issues beyond the Civil Rights Movement, warning that he would alienate not only the President but also many of the contributors to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which he led.

King felt he had no choice but to speak out against the war, because he was, before everything else, a preacher and a prophet.  The role of Black ministers has always included an element of prophetic outspokenness against what is wrong, what is evil in the Black community and in the society as a whole.  And so, like the prophets of the Jewish Bible, Isaiah, Jeremiah and many others, he felt that he had no choice but to speak out regardless of the cost to himself.  As he put it:

Before I was a civil rights leader, I answered a call, and when God speaks, who can but prophesy?  I answered a call which left the Spirit of the Lord upon me and anointed me to preach the gospel….  I decided than that I was going to tell the truth as God revealed it to me.  No matter how many people disagreed with me, I decided I was going to tell the truth.[i]

The struggle for truth never got easier for King.  We remember him now as a great leader of the Civil Rights Movement, as one who led his people out of segregation and into the light of freedom.  But he was much more.  He was a prophet who dared to stand through his whole life for what wasn’t popular, for what wasn’t political correct, for what wouldn’t maximize his income or please many of those who supported him within limits.

Martin Luther King’s battles have not all been won.  We have not yet done away with inequality in our society, or with discrimination against Blacks and Latinos and undocumented aliens and gays.  We have not yet overcome poverty and despair in our inner cities, in Appalachia and in many other parts of this great land, not only among Black people but also among white people, young people, old people, people of all races and creeds.  We have not yet achieved the peace Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for, the peace on earth of which he dreamed.

And we all need constant reminders not to allow the Drum Major Instinct to carry us away into feelings of superiority, into forgetting that the spirit of Jesus calls us each to be servants, that to be great we must accept that we are small and that we are called to humility, not to arrogance.  As a nation we need to be constantly reminded that our greatness is founded on our goodness, not on our being uniquely chosen to be “number one.”  Today, King would be denounced as someone who “blames America first.”  Indeed, he was attacked in similar terms during his life.

The real lesson we need to learn from King’s life is not just that he was a great leader in the quest for civil rights, for freedom and equality for African Americans, but that he tried to stand for truth, whatever the opposition, whatever the consequences, however unpopular it might be.  On that path, he knew that he was in the right, and he knew that ultimately, after many long years of struggle, all of his dreams would be fulfilled.  As he put it at the end of his last sermon:

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair…. [I’m going to] go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as [Black] people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America….

We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing "We Shall Overcome."

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

We shall overcome because Carlyle is right—"No lie can live forever."

We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right—"Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again."

We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right—as we were singing earlier today,

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future.

And behind the dim unknown stands God, within the shadow,

Keeping watch above his own.

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.[ii]

That is the faith we, too, must always hold dear.  That is the faith that makes us strong.  That is the faith that will overcome.

May it be so, and Amen.

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