Martin for the Ages

  Periodically I have wondered if born in say 1885 in my teens I woulda met anybody who saw Lincoln in the flesh. Now near 70 and 15 years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated I cherish the acquaintance of two folks who knew him,  was in a room with him on more than one occasion. Herman Kerley  of Collinsville Alabama who died couple years ago was a member of Dexter Avenue in Montgomery as a student in the 50s at Alabama State. He heard King preach in a congregation that included Rosa Parks. And in the last two years through Jim Pitts who died in January of Covid I got to know Grady Butler, Pitts long time friend in Greenville SC.  Butler as a young man was in jail with King in Atlanta when King got the call from John Kennedy. King told the group, I think our cause has just gotten a new level of significance.

   So here we all are, almost 55 years after he died, about the same time New Testament writings began to talk about the significance of the life of Christ. Of course a lot has already been written about King, but a similar amount of time has passed, to think about King as a Third Testament, the flesh around which a grand historical time transitioned into a new understanding of humanity and an implementation of that new consensus of community.

   I think there is none better than Paul Harvey to mark this moment in time on the life of King on the downside of a half century since he was taken from us. Harvey first came to my attention in Moses, Jesus and the Trickster, his hundred pages of a lecture series at Mercer in 2008. In terse clear language it registered with me the essence of Black Theology and Black studies that have emerged in the last thirty years or so. It is a jewel of a piece, must addition to any library of ministers who are part of what passes for progressive Baptist thought, teaching and preaching.

   And earlier this year a lecture series at Stetson became Southern Religions in the World where he makes a strong case, not to win a debate about the legacy of Billy Graham, but as a matter of conviction, the lesser known thinker, the mentor to King, Howard Thurman will be seen as the evangelical of the 20th Century whose vision for America and insight into the Scripture for the Public square prevails. As Such as many of us are already convinced, Marilynne Robinson, Obama, the Senator Coons of  Delaware have better grasp on the Gospel as it America than Nixon, Karl Rove and Steve Bannon and the Birch Society Franklin Graham has embraced though his father leaned that way.

   And it was Harvey in a work about white activists in the first half of the 20th Century, especially Howard  Kester as a foreshadowing of Will D. Campbell increased my knowledge of folks preparing the way for King.

   Harvey's added relish of the books Ive read about King -- my list is strong but not exhaustive--with reference to letters especially in the fifties offering advice. Furman's Martin England, a man eulogized by Albert Blackwell in 1983 as having an "appetite" for justice, .......And Lillian Smith....

   One disappointment is a lack of reference to Kings contemporary Dorothy Day. They traveled among similar circles but in a biography of this scope wouldve been nice to have recorded any instance of a face to face meeting. The fact is likely there never was one though Dorothy was on the steps of Catholic Church when King spoke at Vietnam War protest to 100,000 marchers in New York City near the United Nations.

    With his focus on King, Harvey however does not dismiss the courage and wisdom of the masses he awakened. My favorite anecdote of the unknown saints of the movement comes from Taylor Branch who said of his thousand page trilogy on the Movement, his favorite story if of the anonymous aging Black man from Lowndes county Alabama who joins the march from Selma second or third day in. A national reporter saddles up to him and asks: Do you think you will win anything when you get to Montgomery, to which comes the reply, We Won When We started Walking.

    In 1977 in a Shoneys in Gaffney SC, James Dunn's mentor, Stewart A Newman the SEBTS professor and great friend of my Dad met with us after a presentation at nearby Limestone College . Just  a decade earlier Newman  had written WA Criswell a personal letter upon Criswell's election to presidency of the SBC reminded Criswell of their fame in Columbia SC in 1956. Criswell at the invitation of Strom Thurmond addressed a joint session of the SC Legislature to repeat a demagogic performance he'd given a day earlier to the SC State SBC Pastor's Conference in which he made such utterances to the hoots and howls of both gatherings: Now You wouldnt call a chigger a chiggerow, now would you; and I wouldnt let my daughter within two city blocks in Dallas Texas of one of those big black bucks.

   Newman followed Criswell to the pulpit in Columbia and grandly proclaimed what I consider a great Baptist proclamation of the twentieth Century: "WA Criswell doesnt speak for me."

    In Gaffney in 77 Newman take on King was he caught the crest of a wave. Newman wasnt the only person of that era with that assessment but Harvey a half century and later makes the strong case King was special, had the gifts that no other had at that moment and evolved into the man worthy of Stone on the National Mall. One Lincoln, One King.

     What Harvey also does is wade through the various versions of King since his assassination and reminds us how despised in many quarters he was in his lifetime. And Harvey is stark about Where King would be now in this Trump Era. Harvey is wise as a serpent knowing the Atwater Nword memo and its evolutions with abortion and guns and the second amendment strategies refined by Karl Rove and with further menace and mendacity in the hands of Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the leadership of the National Rifle Association. He understands with the likes of Ken Sehested founder of the Baptist Peace Fellowship   Quote

    The NRA is among the most sinister institutions in our national landscape. And the second amendment has been ravaged by blood-soaked hands.

    And a native of Benjamin Mayes hometown of Greenwood SC was on NPR this last summer weighing in on Project `1619 and the penumbra of Critical Race Theory. Tomiko Brown-Nagin of the Harvard History faculty, now Dean of Radcliffe, without naming her took aim at SC Governor Nikki Haley, now a Clemson Trustee, when she said the Likes of Fox News distortions of the 1619 project are comparable to the FBI war on King portraying him as a Communist.

   And it is clear, Harvey would abhor Bama US Senate Candidate Katie Britt recent invocation of a "plastic" King to support her perversion of his legacy for the weaponization of Critical Race theory as a political strategy  which she joins Tim Tebows Mother and the Eagle Forum dancing in the devils playground.

    There are three people in bust in Westminster Abbey, martyrs of the twentieth Century. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King Jr. There is a transitional figure from Bonhoeffer to King in Frank Fisher of the shared days of Bonhoeffer and Fisher in Union Seminary in 1931. Fisher's Father was the pastor of the 16th Street BC in Birmingham in the twenties, and was Ralph Abernathy's predecessor in Atlanta. Fisher and King met at least on one occasion in the Movement days in Montgomery.

   Harvey minces no words for his disdain for Jesse Helms and Helms attempt to the bitter end to deny King a national holiday.

    To close it is the Baptist preacher's son and Furman grad Marshall Frady that capsules King. This from him 2002 Penguin Bio series, Quoting:

   Marshall Frady

   But we have not yet learned to accomodate in our understanding of such figures what the ancient seers, Sophocles and the King David chronicler and Shakespeare and Cervantes knew--that while evil can wear the most civil and sensible and respectably rectitudinous demeanor, good can seem blunderour and uncertain, shockingly wayward, woefully flawed, like one of Graham Greene's dissoulute, shabbyk God-haunted saints. And what the full-bodied reality of King should finally tell us, beyond all the awe and celebration of him, is how mysteriously mixed, in what torturoulsly complecated forms, our moral heroes--our prophets--actually come to us.