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I realize now that I should have ignored the separation of theology and ethics in the Garrett curriculum,
Thus, I have never questioned Niebuhr’s greatness as a theologian, but instead admired his intellectual brilliance and social commitment. What I questioned was his limited perspective, as a white man, on the race crisis in America. His theology and ethics needed to be informed from critical reading and dialogue with radical black perspectives.
Although Niebuhr is often called a “prophet,” and he claimed that “all theology really begins with Amos,” he was no prophet on race.
Prophets take risks and speak out in righteous indignation against society’s treatment of the poor, even risking their lives, as we see in the martyrdom of Jesus and Martin King. Niebuhr took no risks for blacks. On the one hand, “Courage is the primary test of prophesy,” Niebuhr said. “There is no national community today in which the genuine word of God does not place the prophet in peril.” But, on the other hand, Niebuhr acknowledged his prophetic limits in Leaves, especially appropriate regarding his views on race: “I am a coward myself . . . and find it tremendously difficult to run
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The Social Gospel advocates held conferences on the status of the Negro in Mohonk, New York, in 1890 and 1891 and felt no need to invite any blacks, because, as Lyman Abbott said, “A patient is not invited to the consultation of the doctors on his case.”[61]
One who made the connection real was Billie Holiday, with “Strange Fruit,” her signature song about southern lynching. When she sang that song, in the words of Elijah Wood, “You feel as if you’re at the foot of the tree.” Upon hearing another singer, Josh White, sing “Strange Fruit” in Chicago, Brigitte McCulloch, a German woman who grew up in “war-torn Hamburg, Germany,” did with her imagination what Niebuhr did not do, even though he identified with the Jews there: “On those southern trees, along with black men, hung the murdered Jews,” she said, “hung all the victims of violence. And one
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I will die standing up for the freedom of my people. —Martin Luther King Jr.
If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. —Martin Luther King Jr.
If anything was remarkable about the Till lynching, it was not so much the callousness of the deed as the militant response it evoked. If lynching was intended to instill silence and passivity, this event had the opposite effect, inspiring blacks to rise in defiance, to cast off centuries of paralyzing fear. The signal of this change was marked by the actions of Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett’s mother, who refused to allow this heinous act, like so many similar cases, to remain in the shadows or to fade from public memory. When Emmett’s body was brought back to Chicago, she insisted that the
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“Lord you gave your son to remedy a condition,” she cried out, “but who knows, but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.”
While African Americans had heard about many previous lynchings, the murder of Emmett Till was an unforgettable event, a horror etched in black memory forever. He was so young; only fourteen—just a child from Chicago, not really aware of the etiquette of Jim Crow culture in Mississippi and what it could mean if he failed to observe the “ways of white folk.” Although blacks followed the trial closely, they knew that the two white men directly responsible for the shameful act, J.W. Milan and Roy Bryant, would never see a day in jail, even though they admitted in court to the federal crime of
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One Mississippi court awarded the family of a lynched victim just one dollar for their loss.
“Mamie, it was ordained from the beginning of time that Emmett Louis Till would die a violent death. You should be grateful to be the mother of a boy who died blameless like Christ. Bo Till will never be forgotten. There is a job for you to do now.”[11]
We do not know what really happened in Mrs. Bradley’s revelatory experience; its meaning remains locked in mystery. What we do know is that her spirit of resistance caught fire in black communities throughout the nation, justifying the claim of author Clenora Hudson-Weems that Emmett Till was “the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement.”[12]
Only three months after the Till lynching, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, and a “New Negro” was born. Rather than ride segregated buses in humiliation, blacks decided to walk the streets with pride until the walls of segregation, like the Jericho walls, “come tumblin’ down.”
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”[14]
In considering the subject of God and the problem of race in America, King reflected that God’s love created blacks and whites and other human beings for each other in community (thesis). White supremacy was the sin that separated them in America and in much of the world (antithesis). God reconciled humanity through Jesus’ cross, and thereby white supremacy could never have “the final and ultimate word” on human relationships (synthesis). God’s reconciling love in the cross empowered human beings to love one another—bearing witness with “our whole being in the struggle against evil, whatever
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Thus, blacks and whites together were free to create the American Dream in society and the Beloved Community in our religious life.
King believed that love in society is named justice.
Hate and white supremacy lead to violence and alienation, while love and the cross lead to nonviolence and reconciliation.
Niebuhr believed that laws that violated the mores and customs of the southern white majority would not be obeyed; if such laws were enforced, the result would be anarchy.
“Not tomorrow, not next week, but now!” was the persistent cry for freedom among people who had never known it. “I am tired of fighting for something that should have been mine at birth,” King often said. That kind of language created a revolutionary spirit that sent people into the streets, prepared to shoulder the cross, ready to meet whatever fate at the hands of mobs or the police. There was no talk about proximate justice—that little bit of justice that whites dole out to blacks when they get ready. God’s justice called for black people to bear witness to freedom now, even unto death.
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This justice language was defined by a love of freedom derived directly from Jesus’ cross, and it led more than forty martyrs to their deaths in the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King Jr. initially encountered the meaning of the cross at home and at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where his father was the pastor. At Ebenezer, young Martin heard a lot of singing and preaching about the cross. Black Christians sang, “Surely He Died on Calvary,” as if they were actually there. They felt something redemptive about Jesus’ cross—transforming a “cruel tree” into a “Wondrous Cross.” Blacks pleaded, “Jesus Keep Me near the Cross,” because “Calvary,” in a mysterious way they could not explain, was their redemption from the terror of the lynching tree.
Though wonderful and beautiful, Jesus’ cross was also painful and tragic. Songs and sermons about the “blood” were stark reminders of the agony of Jesus’ crucifixion—the symbol of the physical and mental suffering he endured as “dey whupped him up de hill” and “crowned him wid a thorny crown.” Blacks told the story of Jesus’ Passion, as if they were at Golgotha suffering with him. “Were you there when dey crucified my Lord?” “Dey nailed him to de cross”; “dey pierced him in de side”; and “de blood came twinklin’ down.”
When blacks sang about the “blood,” they were wrestling not only with the blood of the crucified carpenter from Nazareth but also with the blood of raped and castrated black bodies in America—innocent, often nameless, burning and hanging bodies, images of hurt so deep that only God’s “amazing grace” could offer consolation.
He was a scapegoat like Jesus.
“Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even to the end of the world.”[25]
And my great prayer is always that God will save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fear of the consequences for his personal life, he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems that we confront.[29]
So I’m not afraid of anybody this morning. Tell Montgomery they can keep shooting and I’m going to stand up to them; tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning I will die happy because I’ve been to the mountain top and I’ve seen the promised land and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.[30]
As he would later note, we do not know what we truly believe or what our theology is worth until “our highest hopes are turned into shambles of despair” or “we are victims of some tragic injustice and some terrible exploitation.”
King began to realize existentially what bearing the cross of white supremacy would mean as he also voluntarily bore the cross of black leadership. Two crosses—white supremacy and black leadership, one imposed and the other freely assumed—weighed heavy on his young life.
King had no “martyr’s complex.” “I’m tired of the threat of death,” he proclaimed in a stressful moment during the later protests in Chicago. “I want to live. I don’t want to be a martyr. And there are moments when I doubt if I am going to make it through. . . . But the important thing is not how tired I am; the important thing is to get rid of [injustice].”[33]
At a National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago (1963), he challenged white religious leaders who hesitated to support the civil rights movement to take up the cross of fighting for racial justice, even though “it may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering. . . . Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.”[37]
Throughout his civil rights ministry, the cross was a burden King could not escape. During the violence in Birmingham, St. Augustine, Selma, Chicago, and the Meredith March and the rise of Black Power in Mississippi, King had to bear the cross of black leadership as he struggled against white supremacy—trying to keep hope alive in the midst of burning cities in America and Vietnam. In May 1967, about six weeks after his great “Beyond Vietnam” address at New York’s Riverside Church (April 4, 1967), King reflected at a staff retreat on the flood of criticism coming from the media, government,
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“I can’t be neutral on this [Vietnam],” he said to his staff. “The word of God is upon me, [and] it’s like fire shut up in my bones. And I just have to tell it.” What King had to tell was the truth about war, racism, and poverty.
While accepting nonviolent direct action as the best political strategy for blacks to fight white supremacy, they rejected King’s religious faith. But for King nonviolence was more than a strategy; it was the way of life defined by love for others—the only way to heal broken humanity. Hate created more hate and violence more violence. King believed that the cycle of violence and hate could be broken only with nonviolence and love, as revealed in Jesus’ rejection of violence and his acceptance of a shameful death on a cruel cross.
He knew he was going to be killed, but this did not stop him from fighting for justice. His faith that God would be there for him cast out his fear of death, and thereby gave him the interior resources to cope with whatever came his way. He also knew that in the end there was no way to prevent someone from killing him. Every time someone was killed, he knew it could have been him. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he told his wife: “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is such a sick society.”[41]
It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chills of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.[44]
For King, Jesus never promised that his disciples would not suffer. Quite the opposite: suffering is the inevitable fate of those who stand up to the forces of hatred. Jesus freely accepted the consequences that led to Calvary without turning away.
He called upon his disciples to do the same.
Unlike most Christians, however, King accepted Jesus’ cross,
Theologian John Macquarrie is among those who have compared King’s decision to go to Memphis with Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem.
Benjamin Mays when he was asked whether King’s martyrdom was inevitable.
Inevitable, not that God willed it. Inevitable in that any man who takes the position King did . . . if he persists in that long enough, he’ll get killed. Now. Anytime. That was the chief trouble with Jesus: He was a troublemaker. So any time you are a troublemaker and you rebel against the wrongs and injustices of society and organize against that, then what may happen is inevitable.[47]
I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats. . . . What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter to me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. . . . But I’m not concerned with that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has 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
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King refused to lose hope or to relinquish the belief that “all reality hinges on moral foundations.”
Poetry is often more helpful than prose in expressing our hope. Through poetic imagination we can see the God of Jesus revealed in the cross and the lynching tree. Those who saw this connection more clearly than others were artists, poets, and writers.
The South is crucifying Christ again By all the laws of ancient rote and rule: The ribald cries of “Save Yourself” and “Fool” Din in his ears, the thorns grope for his brain, And where they bite, swift springing rivers stain His gaudy, purple robe of ridicule With sullen red; and acid wine to cool His thirst is thrust at him, with lurking pain. Christ’s awful wrong is that he’s dark of hue, The sin for which no blamelessness atones; But lest the sameness of the cross should tire They kill him now with famished tongues of fire, And while he burns, good men, and women, too, Shout, battling for
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Most black artists were not church-going Christians. Like many artists throughout history, they were concerned human beings who served as society’s ritual priests and prophets, seeking out the meaning of the black experience in a world defined by white supremacy. As witnesses to black suffering, they were, in the words of African American literary critic Trudier Harris, “active tradition-bearers of the uglier phases of black history.”[2]
