MLK 2021

MLK Day 2021

It has become my habit that each year on this observance of the birthday of Martin Luther King, I re-read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Each reading brings familiar phrases and each reading strikes a new note in my thoughts. Most recently, I have taken to writing those thoughts; this note is my response to today’s reading.

In 2015, as a church member who was struggling with the church, I hung on his similar issues. King wrote with a prophetic voice, “There was a time when the church was very powerful…… In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. ……. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

In 2016, I edited MLK slightly when I wrote,”If this were written today, he would have written it like this, …….”You deplore the demonstrations taking place by Black Lives Matter ( in place of “Birmingham”). But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes“

However, the phrase that resonates within me with each reading is the same as the one that struck me at its first reading, and the one that called me to be an active participant in the work for justice. King wrote, “ I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”. I was guilty as charge.

During my time I had been a vocal advocate for labor and the environment. It was this first reading, this expression of disappointment that led me on the road to advocate for Justice, not in a limited concern but as a universal principle. It is the echos of this passage that remind me that the work may not be popular*, but it is necessary**.

*A 1967 poll showed MLK one of the most disliked people in the US.

**Check out the work of our team on Anti-Racism