By Roger Lovette
This Sunday Washington will be crowded with millions who come to dedicate the national monument to Martin Luther King. Of all the monuments along the Tidal Basin this will be the only monument honoring a private citizen. This honor is a long time coming.
I was a student at an all-white college in Alabama when Stride Toward Freedom came out. This book told the agonizing struggle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the man at the center of it all. From those tiny beginnings of a lone black woman on a segregated bus we have come a long way, and it would never have happened without Martin Luther King.
I only met him once. He spoke at my seminary, and as he spoke I was moved by his words and his vision. He pointed toward the far horizon and told that mostly white-preacher audience we had some serious work to do as ministers of the gospel. After his address I went forward, shook his hand and told him how much I had been touched by those words of Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
At the center of King’s life was this incredible faith that God really was in this thing called history. He reached back to Moses and the Exodus from Egypt and the prophets and the nonviolent words of Jesus.
Taylor Branch tells in one of his books on the civil-rights struggle about the incredible courage that Dr. King exhibited time after time in moments of terrible anger. A reporter asked him one day if he was not afraid of all the hatred and venom he found everywhere he went. He said, “Of course I’ve been afraid many times.”
And then he told the story of those early beginning days of the bus boycott in Montgomery. His house was bombed but he and his family miraculously escaped unharmed. He said, “When I get afraid I remember the words of an old gospel song that came to me that night when our house was bombed. It was the song, ‘No, Never Alone.’ And he said when I have grown afraid the words of that song have come back to me again and again.”
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These are the words he remembered:
I’ve seen the lightning flashing, I’ve heard the thunder roll,
I’ve felt sin’s breakers dashing, which almost conquered my soul.
I’ve heard the voice of my Savior, bidding me still to fight on.
He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone!
No never alone, no never alone,
He promised never to leave me,
He’ll claim me for His own;
No, never alone, no never alone.
He promised never to leave me,
Never to leave me alone.
King died much too soon at the hands of an assassin. And we wonder what would have happened to history had he been able to live and work longer. But in a time when racism still runs wild in this country toward our first black president and toward all those un-white Hispanics that many despise — it is time to ponder Dr. King’s words and his dream for us all.
As I wrote this piece I remembered some words by Frederick Buechner, who was at the March on Washington, from his book The Magnificent Defeat. They are fitting to read on this weekend.
“A few summers ago I went on that famous March on Washington, and the clearest memory that I have of it is standing near the Lincoln Memorial hearing the song ‘We Shall Overcome’ sung by the quarter of a million or so people who were there. And while I listened, my eye fell on one very old Negro man, with a face like shoe leather and a sleazy suit and an expression more befuddled than anything else; and I wondered to myself if, quite apart from the whole civil-rights question, that poor old bird could ever conceivably overcome anything. He was there to become a human being. Well, and so were the rest of us. And so are we all, no less befuddled than he when you come right down to it. Poor old bird, poor young birds, every one of us. And deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome some day, as he will, by God’s grace, by helping the seed of the kingdom grow in ourselves and in each other until finally in all of us it becomes a tree where the birds of the air can come and make their nests in our branches. That is all that matters really.”
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