Martin Luther King, Jr.: Fear & Courage by Karen Wright Marsh
Today we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. We all know of “MLK”, our greatest American civil rights icon: larger than life and brave to the core. He saw the right thing to do and he did it. While others pushed for change “by any means necessary,” King lead with nonviolent protests, grassroots campaigns and civil disobedience to achieve the seemingly impossible: legal equality for African-Americans in the United States. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the only non-president to have a national holiday declared in his honor and to be memorialized on the Great Mall in Washington, D.C. Schools, streets and parks America bear his name.
I’m old enough to remember seeing Dr. King preach on our black and white Zenith television. “I have a dream,” he called as the March on Washington filled the screen. The grownups in our family room earnestly debated racial tension, segregation, voting rights, so many things I didn’t understand.
One thing was clear, though: Dr. King never, ever looked afraid. Facing down the terrible fire hoses and police dogs of Birmingham, he declared, “We will meet the forces of hate with the power of love.” To those he called “our white brothers all over the South,” he pledged, “Bomb our homes and we will still love you.”
When Martin Luther King was assassinated four days before my seventh birthday, my young heart shattered. I could only conclude that this is one terrifying world after all, a place where goodhearted heroes are gunned down. Courage only invites trouble.
The Zenith of my childhood flickered with protests, fiery riots, reports of assassinations, hysterical Beatles fans, soldiers in the jungles of Viet Nam. Afraid, I skirted around playground injustices and opted for quick surrender in conflicts at Paradise Elementary School. To this day, I see myself hesitate to act, inhibited by politeness, diplomacy, and potential social fallout. Too often I’m unable or unwilling to raise my voice.
And there stands the one we call MLK, sanctified by the masses as the eternal paragon of courage. Someone out of reach. It’s been said that by enshrining Dr. King, we have sought to remember him by forgetting him. Our admiration has led us to miss the complexity of his excruciatingly human soul.
Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t always a prophet. At twenty-five, he was the new pastor of an attractive wooden church in Montgomery, Alabama. The affluent congregation appreciated its dignified minister’s polish and erudition, his talented wife Coretta’s beauty, their precious infant daughter, Yolanda. Reverend King’s attention to sermons, church business matters, weddings and funerals was interrupted on December 1, 1955, the afternoon Rosa Parks simply said, “No,” when asked to give up her seat on a segregated city bus.
The young Rev. King was nominated to lead a bus boycott and agreed, convinced by the promise that the boycott would “all be over in within three or four days.” He regretted the decision immediately, “possessed by fear,” he later admitted, and “obsessed by a feeling of inadequacy.”
No hesitation was on display when Martin Luther King stood before four thousand people at a mass meeting that night. His voice resounded with majestic force: “You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” He roused the crowd to action, saying, “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight, until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream!” On the rising tide of the congregation’s shouts, a movement of cosmic proportions was born. The young Martin Luther King, Jr., would lead it.
King declared that the “regulating ideal” of Christian love inspired his African-American neighbors to “dignified social action” in the form of nonviolent resistance. With Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as the guide, they stayed off the city buses and walked as a simple expression of Christianity in action. It was Jesus of Nazareth himself who stirred the people to protest with a “creative weapon of love.”
Though some in the boycott called for a more militant approach on the grounds that “violence is the only language these white folks will understand,” Reverend King never wavered from the doctrine of passive resistance. “Nonviolence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment,” he said, “Nonviolence is ultimately a way of life that men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim.”
The exhilarating first days of the Montgomery bus boycott turned into long, grueling weeks. December and then January. The Montgomery old guard showed no signs of giving in to the protesters’ demands; in fact, they implemented new get-tough policies. Still, the commitment of the people held fast, inspired by King’s exhortations: “The fight here is between light and darkness,” he preached; time and again he reminded them that “the arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends toward justice.”
Behind the scenes, Martin Luther King, Jr., confessed that he had “started out with an unwarranted optimism” in the face of white intransigence. Some challenged King’s leadership, pointing to him as the chief stumbling block to a real solution. The pressure ramped up. Arrested on false charges, the respectable, law abiding Reverend King was thrown into jail for the first time. By the middle of January, threatening phone calls and letters were coming in at thirty and forty a day. Both Martin and Coretta’s parents anguished over their children’s safety, no matter the justice of their cause.
Martin Luther King reckoned that he was in real physical danger. He would later say, “I felt myself faltering and growing in fear.” One night at a mass meeting he silenced the enthusiastic audience with sober words, “If one day you find me sprawled out dead, I do no want you to retaliate with a single act of violence. I urge you to continue protesting with the same dignity and discipline you have shown so far.”
One lonely January midnight, just twenty-six years old and with no way of knowing the achievements that were to come, Martin Luther King, Jr., reached the end of himself, shaken and ready to quit. Sleepless after receiving one more snarled death threat, King pulled himself out of bed and walked into the silent kitchen. He heated a pot of coffee and tried to think of a way to “move out of the picture without appearing a coward.” The risk to Coretta and his infant daughter were simply too great to continue.
King recounts his experience in vivid detail. He pondered his options, thinking, “You can’t call on Daddy now, you can’t even call on Mama. You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way.” Weak and alone, King held his head in his hands. He bowed over the kitchen and spoke out loud, saying, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right.” He went on praying, “But Lord, I confess that I’m weak now, I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. Now I am afraid. “ The people who looked to him for leadership, they couldn’t see him lose courage, for then they would falter, too. But, King admitted, “I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. “
It was there in the silence of his kitchen that Martin Luther King, Jr., heard the voice of Jesus speak to him: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world.” Jesus pressed him to fight on; he would never leave him alone. In that vivid encounter, King felt the strengthening presence of the Divine. “Almost at once my fears began to go,” he recalled. “My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”
When the sun rose, King met the day with equanimity, assured that the forces of hate would not prevail. Four nights later a bomb exploded on the front porch of his house. Coretta and the baby inside but unharmed. King, away at a mass meeting, would remember, “Strangely enough, I accepted word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given the strength to face it.” He rushed home to wailing sirens and pandemonium: hundreds of angry people, many with knives and guns, had gathered outside as white policemen skirmished to restore order.
Standing in the blasted remains of his parlor, King admonished the crowd, “We are not advocating violence! We want to love our enemies—be good to them.” King continued, “This is what we must live by, we must meet hate with love. We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. Love them, and let them know you love them.” He said, “If I am stopped, this movement will not be stopped.” Why? Because “God is with us!”
The bus boycott that had been expected to last less than a week went on for 381 days. It ended, at last, in victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in transportation was unconstitutional. Through it all, Martin Luther King, Jr., took the long view. “We stand in life at midnight,” he explained, “but we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.”
We all know that contentious battles were on the way, that further violence, arrests and peril would come. As leader of the burgeoning civil rights movement, King travelled over six million miles and spoke more than twenty-five hundred times. He was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times. Yet Dr. King held on to the promises he’d heard that midnight in 1956. Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, he declared, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
The Martin Luther King, Jr., I watched on the old black and white TV had dignity, a persona which one biographer described as “an almost galactic remoteness, as if the deepest center of him were lost in a secret communion with something far beyond the furors of the moment.” That was the shining martyr I’ve always admired from afar, the man whose speeches have lived on to decorate my children’s school hallways.
So it is a particularly moving experience to return to the first days of King’s journey---to that kitchen table, to the January midnight when young Martin King found himself alone with his fears, at the limit of his capacity to follow God’s call. But Martin knew where to turn; in honest prayer he begged for God’s strong presence. In that vulnerable place, King heard the voice of Jesus. “He promised never to leave me, no, never to leave me alone.”
I have much to learn, I who dodge conflict and even mild disagreement. Young Martin Luther King, Jr., prepared for a pastor’s peaceful life; he envisioned preaching well-prepared sermons to an attentive congregation, loyal wife and children by his side. When the great crisis came, quite uninvited, King’s courage depended not on his own heroics but upon the abiding presence of Jesus. His weakness opened the way for God’s work.
Dr. King found the vital connection between prayer and action. King’s soul was nourished by his intimate connection with God, through prayer that propelled him towards courageous response. His bold protest within a broken society always drove him back to reliance on God.
Can I believe that God is truly present with me? Will Jesus be close by when I risk a worthy confrontation? King’s story holds the rarely told wisdom of the American civil rights movement: that a vibrant spiritual life sustains life-giving boldness in the real world. That even in a night of fear, God calls us to courage.