[For the full text of his speech, see here; for the video of the entire speech, see here.]
"Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord." With this citation of the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. turned, physically and emotionally drained, and walked away from the podium at the Mason Temple in Memphis on the evening of the 3rd of April, 1968. He would be dead less than 24 hours later, assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a sniper's bullet.
I have often written about Dr. King over the years―his "I Have a Dream" speech (here), his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (here), his powerful, prophetic calls for justice and against war (here), his 1960 Christian Century article, "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" (here)―perhaps as a reflex to my evangelical background's at best marginalization of him, and at worst disparagement or disowning of him as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yes, he was no evangelical (the fundamentalist preacher and future Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, in a letter to Wheaton president Carl Armerding protesting the school's holding a memorial to the slain civil rights leader after his assassination, referred to him as "an outright theological liberal heretic"). Yes, he had documented academic and moral failures. But, as one who lived through the time period and knows the people who most disparaged him, I greatly suspect the real reason lies elsewhere. After all, significant moral failings have not diminished their assessments of such other monumental historical figures as Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, and Winston Churchill.
What still strikes me, as it has struck nearly everyone over the years, is that King, in alluding to the experience of Moses on Mt. Nebo (Deuteronomy 34), appears to have foreseen his approaching martyrdom for the cause of civil rights. What showed his true greatness was his courageous refusal to shrink from what he saw to be the mission he had been given to do ("I just want to do God's will") in the teeth of implacable opposition. As I have often reflected, King saw himself, first and foremost, as a minister of the gospel. And, for those of my evangelical friends who might demur, let me remind you that the genuine, "biblical" gospel is the gospel of 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, yes, but it is also the gospel of Mary's Magnificat; it is also the gospel of Jesus' Nazareth Manifesto in Luke 4. In other words, the New Testament gospel is not the pinched, desiccated, dualistic, "soterian" "life-after-death"-exclusive gospel of much popular evangelicalism. As I argued, ten years ago now, in a 9-part series on this blog, the New Testament gospel is the announcement of the inbreaking, through the events of Jesus' death and resurrection, of the long-awaited kingdom of God/new creation promised in the Hebrew scriptures. It may include such elements as substitutionary atonement and justification by faith, but it cannot be limited to such things, divorced from ultimate social, and societal, ramifications. As Dr. King proclaimed, prophetically as it were, "Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord."
One more thing strikes me. It has been close to 54 years since Dr. King spoke these words. He claimed to have "seen the promised land." There are some, indeed, who, seeing laws passed in the wake of the civil rights struggles of the '60's, believe the promised land to have been reached. This, of course, was the rationale of Chief Justice John Roberts and the four other conservatives of the Supreme Court, who gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by striking down its Section 4(b) in their Shelby County v. Holder ruling in 2014, believing it no longer to be necessary. The results could have been predicted: many southern states have once again acted to purge registration rolls, enact voter ID rules, end or restrict early voting and same-day registration, shuttering polling locations in minority districts, etc., in efforts to hold the vote down. The manufactured crisis over "critical race theory" in schools, or even the more general issue of "systemic racism," is yet another issue. Many people―I won't mention their race to protect the guilty; hint: it's the same as mine―continue to insist, in what must be a vain attempt to salve guilty consciences, that the problem is only a matter of the individual prejudice of a few bad actors. What a load of rubbish. And nothing will change until a large enough number of the majority community in this country comes to grips with the problem and acknowledges it. But there's the rub: such would involve the actual teaching of history, something many in this country are not really in the mood for these days.
Today, in the wake of Donald Trump's refusal to acknowledge his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, multiple "red" states have passed laws both restricting the vote and placing the elections in charge of partisan Republican legislatures in transparent efforts to game the system for future potential steals. In each case, the target of their vote suppression are the very demographic King fought, and ultimately died, for. Biden and the Democrats in Congress, of course, have a voting rights bill ready to counteract these measures, but thus far it remains stalled. The problem? Of course, the anti-democratic Senate, split 50/50 along partisan lines, even though the 50 Democrats represent 40 million more people than the 50 Republicans. The fly in the ointment, however, remains the two recalcitrant "moderate" Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who, though they say they believe in voting rights, pledge ultimate fealty to the traditional, though not constitutional, institution of the filibuster. Hence, since they can't get ten (!) Republicans to vote for the bill, they won't either. Better, I guess, incipient authoritarianism than unilaterally-sanctioned democracy? I won't pretend to guess as to the motivation for Sinema's and Manchin's bull-headedness on this matter. Certainly they can't be as naïve as they appear. But my only question is this: if 51 votes is OK to pass Trump's tax cuts for the rich and confirm Supreme Court justices, why not voting rights to secure democratic outcomes to our elections?
Such seems like a no-brainer to me. And it would be the most fitting tribute to the memory of Dr. King. Don't honor his memory unless you mean it.
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