Martin Luther King Jr

Review: Lead Boldly

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Cover image for "Lead Boldly" by Martin Luther King, Jr. with Robert F. Smith

Lead Boldly, Martin Luther King, Jr with Robert F. Smith (Foreword by Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King). HarperCollins Leadership (ISBN: 9781400244102) 2025.

Summary: Leadership principles from seven speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and how they may be integrated into a leadership journey.

The speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr are among the most significant in the history of American oratory. Their lasting value is reflected in the reading of these speeches and how they continue to inspire striving for the Beloved Community, the realization of “the dream”, and the pursuit of our nation’s highest ideals.

This work explores seven of those speeches. Some are familiar, such as the “Dream” speech, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and “I See the Promised Land,” given in Memphis the night before his assassination. Others are less familiar but no no important. “Justice without Violence” was given at Brandeis University in 1957. In it, King laid out his principles for non-violence and his vision of the Beloved Community. “The Other America,” given at Stanford in 1967 describes the two Americas and also links the civil rights struggle to our nation’s involvement in Vietnam. “The Three Evils of Society,” given in Chicago in 1967, highlight the struggle for economic justice and the evils of racism, materialism, and poverty. Finally, his address to the American Jewish Congress in 1958 extends an invitation to allied action for civil rights that many Jewish leaders accepted.

A reflection by Robert F. Smith follows each speech. Smith is an investor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He relates his own experiences to each of King’s themes. He recounts his family’s cross-country pilgrimage to the March on Washington in 1963. Smith reflects on the Beloved Community and the horrible assault on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa in 1921. He had family there. In response to King’s speech on the two Americas, he recounts his own experience of the differences between himself and white students. Finally, a number of reflections include descriptions of leadership lessons and opportunities Smith has had to practice them.

Another feature of the book is a concluding question for readers to ponder. For example, after the “Dream” speech he asks, “What part of King’s mission resonates most with you? How has persistence and overcoming played a role in your own march?”

Lastly, the book is printed on high quality paper, includes a number of photographs, and a readable font size. It is equally suitable for a reception area in an office or a coffee table. However, it is also suitable for a discussion group. Likewise, it is a great introduction to King’s important speeches. Smith’s reflections challenge us to “walk the talk.” Finally, I think it would make a great graduation gift for a high school or college student.

In an era that is erasing the work of civil rights leaders, it is important to read King’s words afresh. We haven’t yet realized the dream. We still have two Americas. And we are far from the Beloved Community. Likewise, today’s “resistance” needs to understand the philosophy and practice of nonviolent direct action. This is an inspirational book with substance.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.

Review: King: A Life

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King: A Life, Jonathan Eig. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Summary: A new biography of King that focuses not only on his civil rights leadership but his personal life and struggles.

The sources for the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life continue to open up as both government records and new private sources become available to researchers. Jonathan Eig, in writing this biography had access to these and offers a portrait of King that not only underscores his greatness but the complexity and humanness of the man. We have the man of peace who would talk with a man who assaulted him, forgive him and refuse to press charges. We learn of a man of courage, who knew his life would likely be ended by an assassin’s bullet. We hear the eloquence of a man who lifted us all by his “dream” and challenged our complacency with the Letter from Birmingham jail. Yet there are also the moral inconsistencies of his plagiarism of portions of his dissertation and his appropriation of material his sermons and his affairs with women and his guilt-ridden struggle with his unfaithfulness.

Other biographies introduce us to all of these. Eig takes us deeper. He explores the powerful influence of his father (also a womanizer) and his attempts to define himself apart from Daddy King, particular when this meant going against the powerful peope who were his father’s friends. Another powerful influence on his life was Coretta. Arguably, she was initially more deeply committed to civil rights than Martin but as the call upon his life became clear, she was fully on board as a partner, despite the restrictions she faced as a woman in the male world of the Black church and civil rights leadership. She endured the imprisonments, the threats on the lives of the family, the modest life they maintained. It seems she may be worthy of a biography in her own right.

Other accounts have discussed J. Edgar Hoover’s animus against King and the surveillance by the FBI that revealed many of King’s sexual affairs. Eig goes deeper into this, particularly his long relationship with Dorothy Cotton. Like David Garrow, he discusses memos of recordings at the Willard Hotel, where King was allegedly on hand as a woman was raped by a Baltimore pastor, Logan Kearse. Eig is more reluctant than Garrow to credit these, recognizing the effort of the FBI to smear King. Both note the recordings themselves remain sealed until 2027. Eig discusses at length the anonymous letter with a compilation of recordings sent to King to induce him to commit suicide. Neither King nor the FBI come out looking good here–King persists in affairs even when he knows he’s being surveiled.

Eig explores deeply King’s relationship with other civil rights leaders. I had never before realized the importance of Ralph Abernathy in King’s life. He was both alter ego and counterbalance–the trusted friend and fellow pastor with whom King could confide, laugh with, and it appears, even carouse with. Eig also develops the tensions that arose, particularly in the years after the March on Washington, a high water mark. King acted intuitively, could raise money but did not have the organizational talents sorely needed in movement leadership. Furthermore, as racist forces doubled down and President Johnson became more engulfed by Vietnam (which King opposed), it became harder for King to persuade those who felt violence was the answer, of its futility.

Eig also develops King’s opposition to the Vietnam war and his courageous stand which he knew would alienate Johnson and others. King recognized how the war would thwart the efforts of Johnson’s Great Society, robbing it of money and focus in the national agenda. He also recognized the disparate proportion of Black young men who were dying.

The book explores King’s struggles with depression, particularly as divisions and resistance developed and his attempts to address northern racism struggled. Some, no doubt was simply exhaustion as King drove himself hard to fulfill his sense of call. While never formally treated, he did consult with a psychiatrist. Mostly, it was his friends, including Abernathy who would pull him away long enough to regain equilibrium.

What Eig also gives us is a man of deep religious faith, who believed his calling was from God, whose trust was that God would carry him through, even in the daily face of death. One particularly senses this in Eig’s accounts of Kin’s last visit to Memphis and his prescient message of the night before.

Eig covers both familiar ground in this biography as well as take us deeper into the complicated man King was. King’s namesake Martin Luther once stated that “God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.” Eig shows us both a courageous leader and a grievous sinner who would be excoriated for his plagiarism and called out by #MeToo and #ChurchToo for his treatment of women. He also shows us how King’s life offered America a mirror in which to see itself and recognize the deep stain of racism. His vision for non-violence, for justice, and for a reconciled beloved community was a gift that the America of his time sadly rejected. The book reminds us of the truth we are inclined to deny and of the gift that we continue to refuse.

Some Writers I Just Can’t Ignore

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“A New Harvest, With Wendell Berry, Henry County, KY” by Guy Mendes is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

James T. Keane, in a current America article titled “Wendell Berry: the cranky farmer, poet, and essayist you just can’t ignore,” asks this question:

“My reaction was a simple one: Did Wendell Berry just leap off the page and hit me over the head with a fencepost?”

Wendell Berry is one of those writers I can’t ignore. I recently read and reviewed his The Hidden Wound, is a profound essay on racism, written, not in 2018 but 50 years earlier in 1968. Berry seems to speak from somewhere else with a voice unlike other voices, and it got me to thinking who some of the other writers are who have spoken from somewhere else with a voice I cannot ignore. Here are some I came up with:

Marilynne Robinson. Her essays and novels, steeped in, of all things, Calvinism, challenge both modern scientism and our easy moral equivocation and dismissal of the relevance of God. I’m reading her lectures at Yale in 2010 right now, Absence of Mind.

C.S. Lewis. He brought his love and encyclopedic knowledge of old books and Christian theology to the questions of the day as well as in children’s literature in a way both timely and timeless.

Kristin Hannah. This is an author who keeps me awake at night, after I put her books down, with her strong female characters confronting personal and systemic inhumanity, often at the hands of men. They make me as a man want to fight against the wrongs done to subjugate women.

Eugene Peterson. I heard Peterson speak to the staff of the organization I work for after a hugely successful conference, warning of the dangers of believing too much in our success. He wrote trenchantly during his life on the calling of pastors, and how he saw many exchanging noble for ignoble work. He ought to be assigned reading for all our celebrity pastors.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I may not believe all he would say theologically, but I cannot ignore words that come out of resistance to totalitarianism and his experience of leading a Christian community of resistance.

Mary Oliver. I’ve only come to discover her poetry in the last few years, but her perception of the transcendent in the ordinary, the large issues of life in small incidents nudge me to be aware of the same.

Nicholas Wolterstorff. Wolterstorff is a philosopher who teaches at Yale. Whether writing about the death of a son, justice in South Africa, philosophy of education, or his defense of religious ideas in scholarly discussion, he brings head and heart, reason and passion together. Read his memoir In This World of Wonders and his “Advice to Those Who Would Be Christian Scholars.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. Reading his sermons and speeches is like a trumpet call. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a powerful response to the moderate white pastors who counselled patience.

Fleming Rutledge. Anyone who would argue that women cannot preach or teach theology should read her work. Her The Crucifixion is the most significant theological work I have read in the past ten years. Three Hours is preached reflections on the seven last words of Christ. Advent is also quite good.

I don’t know about you, but in a world of amusement, distraction, and obliviousness, I need to be “hit over the head with a fencepost.” This is part of the company of writers who serve that function for me. These are writers who do not so much answer my questions, as question my answers. Who does that for you?

Why I Remember Dr. King

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Civil_Rights_March_on_Washington,_D.C._(Dr._Martin_Luther_King,_Jr._and_Mathew_Ahmann_in_a_crowd.)_-_NARA_-_542015_-_Restoration

King at the Civil Rights March — Washington, DC, By Rowland Scherman – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, via Wikimedia

I am spending half of my day today remembering the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I suspect that there will be some who read this who will wonder why I would do this, particularly if it is a holiday and I can do anything I want.

To be honest, part of the reason is that I sing in a community choir has been invited to sing in both citywide and local celebrations–I’m spending a good part of the morning singing. Our director is an African-American man, a gifted musician steeped in the tradition of the music of the Black church, much of which became the music sung during the Civil Rights movement. The music is different from that of my church upbringing. It teaches me to exuberantly praise, to cry out in lament, to endure for the long haul, to hope and aspire.

As a white man, I will never fully understand what it is to be black. Days like this are part of a process of understanding more. The songs, as they sink into my being, put me in touch with the long struggle of a people and invite me to join in that struggle. The speakers invite me into a different set of stories from those I ordinarily hear. I admit that there is much more to understanding what it is to be black than joining in a one day celebration. It is one of many steps. I always learn something.

The day honors the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was this rare combination of Christian who was a prophet, a peacemaker, and a martyr.

  • Prophets not only foretell, they “forth tell.” They call people forth to God’s highest ideals and expose when we are less than that. King said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Injustice at the lunch counter, on the bus, or at the voting booth threatened our whole fabric of justice, our aspirations as a nation for “liberty and justice for all.”
  • He was a peacemaker. He said, “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” He taught church people to put these principles into practice with non-violent resistance. For the same reason, he opposed the Vietnam war.
  • He was a martyr, not merely for the sake of his own people. He understood the tremendous soul-burden racism placed upon whites as well as blacks. He said, “If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

His life and death are worth remembering for these and many other things. It always does me well to remember the noblest words and deeds of others, rather than the tawdry words and deeds that are so much a part of our news.

I can imagine someone at this point interjecting with the imperfections of King’s life. I’ve read the biographies and know them well. I won’t offer any justifications. But it seems that we only call up these things against those we don’t like, and overlook them in those we favor. Worse, we overlook them in ourselves. King admitted “the evil in the best of us.” Do we? Perhaps it is not a bad thing to engage in some self-examination on a day like this. What is the log in my own eye that needs removing?

I use this day to remind myself of the reason Dr. King is known to us, the log in our national eye, as it were. Our sins around how we displaced one people and forcibly enslaved another, and after Emancipation, have persisted for another 150 years in finding ways to oppress our Black fellow citizens have been called “America’s original sin.” Even a bloody Civil War failed to bring us to lasting repentance. Abraham Lincoln seemed to understand better than most how this war was a judgment of God upon the nation:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether (From Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address).

I tremble as I think of God’s judgment that we failed to heed the scourge of the Civil War and have perpetuated for another 150 years in different ways the oppression of slavery, and often nurtured racial hatred in our hearts. The lament songs that ask “how long” speak powerfully to me, calling me to persist in prayer for repentance from our national sin, and the healing of our racial divisions.

But I cannot stop there. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man of hope. On the night before he died he said,

I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

If a man like King, who had faced so much opposition and evil and hate could continue to hope, why shouldn’t I? To gather with others across racial boundaries on this day is to remind ourselves of that hope, the “Dream,” and to strengthen our resolve to persist in that hope. It cannot be just another “kumbayah” moment, quickly forgotten. It means continuing to stand together to seek justice in our communities, in our prison systems, and in loving resistance against structures that try to perpetuate white supremacy in a country formed around the “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” of all of our people.

All this is why I remember Dr. King today.

 

Review: Nonviolent Action

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nonviolent actionNonviolent Action by Ron Sider. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015.

Summary: Ron Sider argues from a number of instances over the past seventy-five years that nonviolent action can work and bring about political change.

“I ain’t gonna study war no more”

Ronald J. Sider thinks we have spent far too long and far too much studying war. It is time, particularly for persons of faith, to devote ourselves and our money and our lives to study peace: the use of nonviolent means of protest and resistance in the pursuit of peace and a just order. He argues that both pacifists and just war advocates actually have much in common in advocating the use of nonviolent efforts as much as possible, with the only difference being between war never being a resort and war being a last resort.

Sider builds his case by recounting the numerous instances of nonviolent resistance over the past seventy-five years beginning with Ghandhi’s effort to secure Indian independence from the British empire. The first part of the book recounts Ghandhi’s, and India’s, long road to freedom and Ghandhi’s persistent and principled decision to renounce violence. Following chapters recount Martin Luther King, Jr’s leadership of the civil rights movement and commitment to loving, nonviolent resistance, seen most vividly at the Edmund Pettus Bridge as chronicled in the recent Selma. He tells the story of his own involvement with Witness for Peace’s work in Nicaragua standing between invading Contras backed by the U.S. and the Nicaraguan people. And he tells the story of the peaceful People Power resistance to the Marcos regime in the Phillipines including the instance when a wheelchair was more powerful than a tank:

    Cardinal Sin tells the story of bedridden, eighty-one year-old Mrs. Monzon, owner of Arrelano University. Everywhere she went, she used a wheelchair. But Mrs. Monzon insisted on joining the people in the streets in front of the camps. When the tanks came, she wheeled in front of the advancing war vehicles. Armed with a crucifix, she called out to the soldiers, “Stop. I am an old woman. You can kill me, but you shouldn’t kill your fellow Filipinos.” Overcome, a soldier jumped off the tank, and embraced the bold nonviolent resister. “I cannot kill you,” he told her, “you are just like my mother.” She stayed in the street in her wheelchair.

    The marines finally withdrew without firing a shot.

Part Two of the book focuses on two instances of nonviolent resistance in the defeat of the Soviet empire. First he tells the story of a Polish pope and a ship yard worker, Lech Walesa, who led the Solidarity Movement, which over ten years, brought an end to the Communist leadership in Poland. Then he turns to the Revolution of Candles in East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall and eventual reunification of Germany.

Recent developments are the focus of Part Three. He begins by describing how Leymah Gbowee led a movement of prayer among Liberian women pursuing peace and justice for the women and children of Liberia during the dictatorship of Charles Taylor. He recounts the nonviolent efforts in the Arab Spring, including the wonderful shalom moment of a ring of Christians forming a protective circle around Muslims at prayer. He ends this section by talking of the work of Peacemaker Teams and similar groups in many parts of the world including in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He concludes the book with the contention that it is time to devote serious attention to nonviolent action. We spend billions on military defense and military academies but virtually nothing for nonviolent resistance and peace academies. He argues that pacifism that engages in nonviolent action is in fact as courageous as armed resistance because it also is willing to die in the pursuit of just and peaceful conflict resolution. He further contends the following:

  1. Nonviolence often accomplishes its aims with far less loss of life.
  2. Nonviolence accomplishes its aims more often than violence.
  3. Nonviolence is more likely to lead to democratic institutions.

One of the sobering implications of all this is the willingness to die without killing. One of the questions Sider left unanswered for me was whether there are circumstances where one should not pursue nonviolent resistance, where force must be met with force. I think particularly of instances when a regime has determined a course of genocide. Here, the evidence seems to be that armed peacekeeping forces have been both necessary and successful in places like Kosovo and South Sudan in stopping genocidal regimes.

Perhaps what this points up is the necessity of what Sider argues. Many nonviolent efforts have been spontaneous and sometimes undisciplined. It is time for rigorous studies and the devotion of resources that inform and make possible disciplined and strategic action. War calls for these things as well as courage. It just makes sense that the pursuit of peace requires no less.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Crying Out Day and Night For Justice

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I never saw this before.

This past Sunday, I preached on the Parable of the Persistent Widow in Luke 18:1-8. I’ve often heard others preach, and have myself taught the message of this parable that we should “always pray and not give up” (v. 1). I’ve thought in terms of things like seeing people come to faith, praying for the sick, praying about needs related to our work and our lives. I don’t think that is wrong, but as I studied this parable I was struck by the fact that the widow was seeking justice from the unjust judge (v. 3). Furthermore, in Jesus’s own application of the parable verse 7 says, “will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?” Verse 8 reinforces this theme: “I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly.”

One of the basic things I learned about Bible study years ago was to pay attention to repeated words. They are a clue to what the writer or speaker considers important. Clearly in this passage, one of the things Jesus considers important is justice, and praying for it.

In recent months and weeks, we’ve been inundated with news stories about the death of a young black man in Ferguson, a black youth in Cleveland, and an older black man in New York City. In two of these cases, local grand juries refused to charge police with any wrongful death and there has been a great outcry in the press and in social media either decrying the injustice of these decisions and the deaths that occurred at the hands of police, or in defending the police officers, who often put themselves at risk in protecting public safety and have to make split second decisions that, if wrong, may cost them their lives or the lives of others.

While I personally have decided that it is fruitless to raise my voice on one “side” of this discussion or the other in social media, I will say a couple things. One is there is something wrong with this pattern with so many dying in the streets, some at the hands of police. It is clear to me that we still are a racially divided society. If nothing, the vehemence in the outcries on both sides of the discussion reveal we are a long way from what Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned as “the beloved community.”

It seems to me that in the predominantly white church community (the one I know best) we either resort to attempts at personal justification (“I’m not racist” or “I’m personally colorblind”). Or we attempt to join and justify one side of the outcry, and, from what I can see, simply perpetuate and deepen the divisions in our society.

None of this is to say that the bereaved and their communities shouldn’t pursue justice nor that police shouldn’t be supported in their hard work. In fact, in a society where the rule of law is upheld, our legal system should be the place where these things are adjudicated, and it is right for those who believe that justice is denied to continue to pursue it via legal means. It’s not a perfect system, but the best we humans can devise in a fallen world.

But the parable (remember the parable!) also exhorts us to prayer to God for justice as well. For those of us who are Christ-followers, obedience to Jesus means that we keep praying for justice. Our first work in these matters is to seek the Lord. But the parable also says it is to be our persisting work. And this is where I fall down. I see advances in civil rights. I see a president of African-American descent in the White House. I mistake progress toward King’s “dream” with fulfillment. And I stop praying.

What the succession of events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York do is challenge me to renew my efforts in prayer and become aware that this is an area where persistence is vital. As I look for God’s answers, such praying can also change me. Praying helps me listen both for God’s invitations to join him in pursuit of the “beloved community” and opens my ears and my heart to listen to other voices than simply the ones that most resonate with me, voices that need to be heard if real reconciliation and not simply self-justification are to occur.

I’ve concluded that I need to persist in crying out to the Lord to bring justice (all that that means) into the racial divides in our country. I pray the Lord’s prayer each morning and night. As I pray, “Thy kingdom come” I will include in my prayers the coming of Jesus’s just rule into our racially divided land. It occurs to me that I could be praying that the rest of my life. I hope not, but Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” What sustains our persistence over that “long arc” is the promise of a God who will grant justice, who will bring a kingdom of shalom.

Going Deeper question: For what do you believe God wants you to persist in prayer? How is a concern for justice a part of that?

This post also appears on my church’s Going Deeper blog for this week.