The mood for reconciliation

On this anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, many of the tributes (if not most) are alike in their recall of his most famous and soaring speeches and his challenging, organized marches to raise awareness and change laws. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was there as well, alongside Dr. King, and his remembrance honors the civil rights leader with poignant commentary and probing questions.

I am in a distinct minority in believing that the best single book for getting an honest feel for Dr. King and the movement he led is Ralph Abernathy’s When the Walls Came Tumbling Down…As Abernathy tells it–and I believe he is right–he and King were first of all Christians, then Southerners, and then blacks living under an oppressive segregationist regime. King of course came from the black bourgeoisie of Atlanta in which his father, “Daddy King,” had succeeded in establishing himself as a king. Abernathy came from much more modest circumstances, but he was proud of his heritage and, as he writes, wanted nothing more than that whites would address his father as Mr. Abernathy. He and Martin loved the South, and envisioned its coming into its own once the sin of segregation had been expunged.

“Years later,” Abernathy writes that, “after the civil rights movement had peaked and I had taken over [after Martin’s death] as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” he met with Governor George Wallace…Abernathy concludes, “It was a time for reconciliations.”…Others who claimed the mantle of Dr. King were in no mood for reconciliation, and are not to this day.

This is where it gets probing in a way other analysts aren’t willing to venture these days, though RJN is particularly qualified to do so in his usual intellectually honest way.

He notes that some of those others began to see Malcolm X (Nation of Islam) or Huey Newton (Black Panthers) as the more desirable figures to lead the cause of black empowerment.

They were figures much more to the liking of those who construed the civil rights movement not as the rectification of a great injustice but as the precursor to a revolutionary new order.

Which brings up conclusion that the subject of black identity is “maddeningly complicated”.

In an extraordinary new book, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard), Jonathan Rieder details the different cultures and subcultures to which Dr. King tailored his message with striking success….

He adds, “The constant for King lay beyond language, beyond performance, beyond race. The core of the man was the power of his faith, his love of humanity, and an irrepressible resolve to free black people, and other people too.” From his actions on the public stage and from our times together, that is how I remember Dr. King.

(This is a remembrance from the Forum.)