King's Death Day

Submitted by Kent Sensenig on April 8, 2008 - 12:16am.

Grace to you and peace, in the name of the Creator and our Lord, Jesus Christ. Thank you for coming out tonight to honor the life of Martin Luther King Jr., as we remember his tragic death in Memphis on April 4th, 1968…exactly 40 years ago today. The award-winning, 1-hour documentary we are about to see tells the inspiring story of the African-American garbage workers of Memphis and their struggle for dignity and a living wage. It was their courageous campaign to form a union that brought King to Memphis—against the advice of many of his closest colleagues—in what proved to be his last stand for justice. King was in the midst of planning for a nation-wide, multi-racial Poor Peoples Campaign that he hoped would culminate in another massive March on Washington in the summer of 1968, a march, of course, that never happened. What happened instead that fateful spring was burning in the streets of many of America’s inner cities, in the frustrated rage that followed King’s shooting.

In this documentary we find the best and worst of humanity on display. We see the Pharaoh-like hardness of heart of the Mayor of Memphis and the cowardly vacillation of its City Council, whose unwillingness to do even basic justice by its poorest citizens made them complicit in King’s death. We also see the dynamic synergy for social change that can occur when a grass-roots movement joins forces with charismatic leaders, both black and white. We encounter the sharp tensions emerging between younger Black Power activists and King’s older generation of civil rights leaders. We witness priceless footage of King’s last, exhausted march—in which he had to be literally held up by his friends—and his last, powerful “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon, when King momentarily embodied the persona of Moses and uncannily prophesied his own death. And we are again confronted with the lethal violence that lies just beneath the surface of American life, seen today in regular killings committed by our troops and private security forces in far-off Iraq, or closer to home in regular shootings committed by our kids in streets and schools.

I recently had the privilege of participating in a week-long Bible study with NT scholar Ched Myers that strove to overcome the divide between “sanctuary, seminary, and street,” a chasm that King’s ministry was uniquely able to bridge. Ched set the career of Jesus—as retold in the gospel of Matthew—alongside that of Martin Luther King, and made some evocative analogies between the two. He dubbed The Sermon on the Mount Jesus’ “I Have a Dream Speech.” He compared Jesus’ over-turning of the money-changer’s tables in the Temple to King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, in which he publicly denounced the Vietnam War for the first time and brought into sharp focus what he called the “demonic triplets” of American life: poverty, racism, and militarism, each of which King saw America perpetuating on a global, imperial scale.

Some believe this incendiary sermon sealed King’s fate. He delivered it in the famous Riverside Baptist Church in New York City exactly one year to the day prior to his assassination. Calling America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” at the height of the Cold War, as King did in that sermon, was not a safe sentiment to express. We know that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were engaged in an escalating campaign to destroy King, especially after his awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963 made him a symbol of liberation the world over. If you’ve ever seen the famous photograph of King’s colleagues huddled over his blood-soaked body on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, pointing in the direction of the gunshots, we now know one of those “friends” was an FBI infiltrator. Like Jesus, King also had a Judas within his circle of disciples. The King family has always been convinced that agents of the local and federal governments were involved in a conspiracy to kill King. They won a civil suit filed in Memphis in 1998 that acknowledged as much.

If King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech was his over-turning of the tables in the Temple, his last week in Memphis became his Passion Week. Let’s watch this American Passion narrative together and thank God for the gift of King’s life to this nation and especially to the transnational church of Jesus Christ. If we’ve spent “40 Years in the Wilderness” since King’s death, as some have suggested, perhaps God is doing a new thing among us in this generation, as we continue to grapple with those demonic triplets of global poverty, racism, and militarism that are still very much with us as a nation.

Following the film a Fuller student, Steve Holt, who also works for Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (or CLUE) will share a bit about some local worker justice campaigns CLUE is involved with and how Fullerites might find ways to support them.

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