In the last year of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked on the Poor People’s Campaign, a nearly forgotten aspect of the minister’s work. Unlike the iconic March on Washington, and many subsequent marches, protests, and events, the Poor People’s Campaign was an altogether different undertaking for King. He called for poor people across the country to travel to Washington, DC. His vision was not only a speech or a march, but the creation of an “encampment city,” three thousand Americans camped out on the National Mall, an army of nonviolent protesters and demonstrators brought to the doorsteps of power. This work, combined with his anti-war rhetoric, marked the culmination of King’s efforts following the passage of the Voting Rights Bill in 1965.
This time -- 1965-1968 -- also marked an evolution in King’s economic and political philosophy, which corresponded with a continued spiritual transformation. As he reflected in May 1967:
I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[When] we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.
For King, these basic questions meant whether America was approaching a “spiritual death.” Would the “land of the free” would find itself on the right side of history? Would his government - who King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” - have a change of heart and transform itself to support “peaceful revolutions,” or continue making “violent revolution inevitable?” In his consideration of the spiritual fate of America, King’s voice reached beyond his Black brothers and sisters to all of humanity. It was this expansion that makes King’s voice relevant today.
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As he developed the Poor People’s Campaign, King’s attention was drawn to Memphis. His long-time mentor in nonviolence and colleague, Dr. James Lawson, called on Dr. King for help. The Memphis Sanitation Workers organized a strike after two garbage collectors were crushed inside the back of a truck. The strike in Memphis brought together black and whites and was an issue of human rights. Come and help us, Lawson pleaded with King. King quickly rerouted his energy to Memphis.
A rally on March 28, 1968, turned violent: one protester was killed, downtown shops were looted, and police eventually sprayed tear gas in a church with hundreds of protesters. King, undeterred by the violence, returned to Memphis on April 3 for a rally, and delivered his prophetic “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech:
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life–longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up 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 get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man.
King planned to attend another march the following Monday. Instead, on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a shot rang out at 6:01 PM on Thursday, April 4, 1968. The king of love shot dead.
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Each year, the anniversary of King’s death brings a fresh look: a closer examination of his inner life, his struggles, and the challenges that took place after his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. This speech has become a historical representation of King; a moment frozen in time, freezing King more than five years before his assassination in Memphis. Now, his image has been further manipulated by white supremacist politicians and car advertisers, conflating King’s message for selfless service with the purchase of a new truck.
King, a man who struggled against both abject and institutional racism prevalent in America, also found difficulty in being understood by his peers. In many ways, he was alone in his struggle.
The aftermath of his iconic “Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence” speech, delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. This landmark speech called for a “radical revolution of values” and named the United States government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
After his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered a year to the day of his assassination, King became an enemy of state, losing the support of President Johnson, further isolated in the national press, and abandoned by many contemporaries in the Civil Rights movement. While focused on domestic racism -- particularly in the South -- King found himself in contact with and supported by national leaders, including Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. As he saw that the moral injustice of racism was connected to the poverty created by capitalism and the senseless violence of global military campaigns, he found himself a man alone. Dr. King’s long-time collaborator, Dr. Vincent Harding, who wrote the first draft of the speech, later said King’s courage and willingness to speak out against the U.S. government ultimately led to his death.
In that speech, we see a different King than the one who spoke to the nation in 1963. He moved beyond sectional concerns of race, speaking instead of the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. He knew these words would be unpopular, but the still, small voice of his conscience no longer allowed him to remain silent.
Dr. King’s commitment to speaking his truth, to the point of risking his own life, was spurred on by two great influences in his life: Mahatma Gandhi and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. From Gandhi, he received both the “technique of nonviolent social change” and a call to share the message of nonviolence with the world. From Nhat Hanh, who King nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, King received an invitation to no longer betray his silence and to live more fully into his vision of the Beloved Community.
These two men, heavily influenced by the teachings of India, as well as many of Gandhi’s disciples who mentored and worked directly with Dr. King, helped the Baptist minister evolve spiritually, which coincided with his call for the restructuring and reorganization of U.S. political and economic structures.
This work, which King gave his life for, is the Dharma of Dr. King.
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Dharma is an ancient word, derived from the Indian language Sanskrit. There is no direct translation into English. Instead, the number of English words to describe dharma range from seven to twenty words. Dharma is a universal concept in Indian thought but is most closely associated with Buddhism. It represents one of the three “jewels”: Buddha, dharma, and sangha. For Buddhists, the Buddha’s teachings are considered dharma. It is not that the Buddha’s teachings are dharma, but rather through the Buddha’s teachings, one can find dharma: what is true. There is also a metaphysical dimension of dharma, with an acknowledgment that capital-T Truth exists in the structure and sustenance of the universe. For one to follow what is true, they bear or carry these teachings forward in their life. This then becomes their dharma. It is an energy of inclusion, compassion, and harmony. When one is engaged with their dharma, they are moving in harmony with the divine forces in the world.
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On September 20, 1958, Dr. King was stabbed by a deranged woman with a letter opener. After surviving a near-death experience, Dr. King received some advice from his mentor Howard Thurman. Thurman encouraged King to use the opportunity to take some time for inner study. Soon after, King received an invitation to travel to India, a chance to visit the homeland of Mahatma Gandhi and meet with many of his disciples who were continuing his work.
In February 1959, King traveled with his wife Coretta Scott and friend Lawrence Reddick for a five-week trip to India. For him, a pilgrimage to the “land of Gandhi” gave him firsthand knowledge of satyagraha, known as “soul force” or “adherence to truth”, Gandhi’s radical work of peace, freedom and the transformation of society, including land reform measures. At the end of their travels, King was “more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.” The trip left a profound impression on King and brought him first-hand the plight of the poor in countries like India and the destitute lives of the so-called untouchables.
When he returned to the United States, he delivered a Palm Sunday sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church. The focus of his sermon was Mohandas K. Gandhi. That King would choose to preach about a non-black, non-Christian man during the height of Jim Crow America is a testament to the high regard in which King held Gandhi.
King tells his parishioners that “I believe [Gandhi], more than anybody else in the modern world, caught the spirit of Jesus Christ and lived it more completely in his life.” He goes on to say:
For here was a man who was not a Christian in terms of being a member of the Christian church but who was a Christian. And it is one of the strange ironies of the modern world that the greatest Christian of the twentieth century was not a member of the Christian church. And the second thing is, that man took the message of Jesus Christ and was able to do even greater works than Jesus did in his lifetime.
King recollects various stories from Gandhi’s life: his birth and upbringing, his time in South Africa, and his three-decade-long struggle for freedom in India. King admires Gandhi’s discipline and his ability for internal criticism. He shares Gandhi’s work fighting for the untouchables of India, those who most closely understood the plight of Black America. Having just returned from India, King also shares with his congregation personal reflections on India, a decade after Gandhi was assassinated.
At a dinner one night with India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the wife of the last viceroy of India, Edwina Mountbatten, King witnessed a “lasting friendship” between Indians and the English. This lasting friendship, King believes, is the greatest legacy of Gandhi’s work. It is the highest form of a litmus test for the practitioner of nonviolent social change: the abiding friendship and fellowship between once rivals. King says:
The aftermath of violence is always bitterness; the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community so that when the battle is over, it’s over, and a new love and a new understanding and a new relationship comes into being between oppressed and the oppressor.
King closes his sermon with a prayer, acknowledging the different names of the one who King calls “gracious Heavenly Father”: “some call Thee Allah; some call you Elohim; some call you Jehovah; some call you Brahma; and some call you the Unmoved Mover; some call you the Archetectonic Good. But we know that these are all names for one and the same God, and we know you are one.”
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Two months after the three hundred eighty-one-day Montgomery Bus Boycott began, King’s home was bombed. Neither he nor his wife and six-month-old were injured, but local Blacks were eager and armed to retaliate. King spoke clearly to the gathered crowd, his first public proclamation of non-violence: “If you have weapons, take them home. If you do not have them, please do not seek them. We cannot solve this problem through violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you. Remember this movement will not stop, because God is with it.”
King’s exposure to nonviolence and disobedience began early in his life. To be religious and Black in the American South meant to be confronted with discrimination, forcing a conflict between the Christian duty to love your enemies with a system of oppression opposed to living a free life and making impossible a life free from violence.
At six, King was told by the father of a white friend he could no longer play with his son. The sudden loss of a playmate is disorienting to a child, and the tragic explanation given to King - the same explanation given to Black and Brown children today - led him to a desire to hate white people.
These feelings were confirmed and deepened with other incidents. Being asked to purchase shoes at the back of the store. Witnessing his father, who he revered, be called a boy by law enforcement. At the age of eight, without provocation, the young King was slapped in the face by a white woman in a downtown store. Sometimes these insults were received without confrontation, yet often enough a model of force and resistance was presented, giving the impressionable King an example of non-cooperation. “I don’t care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it,” his father told him.
Yet racism plants anger in the hearts of the oppressor and the oppressed, and the constant barrage of insults took root in King. He grew angry realizing his capacities and hard work was outweighed by the unjust laws of the land. This anger deepened as he saw economic opportunity and racial injustice were intertwined at the root and at the abject violence co-signed by the state in support of the Ku Klux Klan and a color biased judicial and penal system. From this anger grew a righteous rage.
When King enrolled in Morehouse College at the age of fifteen (after having skipped two grades, an attempt to keep up with his older sister), his education on race and evolution toward nonviolence began in earnest. His father (and maternal grandfather) previously attended Morehouse. During this time, King turned to the choice of ministry as a means of service. As he puts it in his autobiography, “My father is a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my daddy's brother is a preacher. So I didn't have much choice.”
Personal relationships like those developed with Morehouse school president Benjamin Mays proved life-long and helped guide King towards Gandhian non-violence. While attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, King heard a lecture by Mordecai Johnson, the first Black president of Howard University. King described this lecture as “so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.” By the time he arrived for his doctorate studies at Boston University in 1953, he was prepared to learn more. Lucky for him, the perfect mentor was already there.
Howard Thurman was an early twentieth-century Christian theologian and mystic. At the time of King’s doctorate program, Thurman was the Professor of Spiritual Resources and Disciplines in the School of Theology and Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Thurman had attended Morehouse College with Martin Luther King, Sr. and knew the younger King well. King was perhaps familiar and influenced by Thurman through his book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” a well-known 1948 publication. Soon after he arrived in Boston, Thurman began indoctrinating the young King to the virtues and practices of Gandhian nonviolence.
Thurman had become familiar with Gandhian nonviolence decades earlier, when in 1935, he led a Pilgrimage of Friendship, traveling to India, Burma and Ceylon. At the time Thurman was the dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University in Washington, DC. The four-month trip ended with Thurman and his group meeting with Gandhi for a long conversation, the first meeting between Gandhi and African-Americans. At the time, Thurman was probably one of the few Westerners able to engage with Gandhi about spiritual philosophy, and the practical application of spiritual laws to earthly life. In this sense, Thurman served as a translator for Gandhi’s work in India and its use in the United States. The meeting ended with a final message from Gandhi to Thurman and later King: “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”
This “unadulterated message of nonviolence” would be delivered through the booming eloquence and fierce determination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Long before Howard Thurman, Gandhi communicated with Black America, provided ‘‘the guiding light of [the] technique of nonviolent social change.’’ From the philosophical conception of satyagraha to the practical application in meetings, boycotts, and protests, Gandhi’s early freedom work in South Africa was reported by Black newspapers in America, as early as the 1920s. In 1929, a message from Gandhi was shared in W.E.B. Du Bois’ circulation, The Crisis, in which he wrote:
Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is no dishonor in being slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners. But let us not think of honor or dishonor in connection with the past. Let us realize that the future is with those who would be truthful, pure, and loving. For, as the old wise men have said, truth ever is, untruth never was. Love along binds and truth and love accrue only to the truly humble.
Just as King came out of a family legacy of preaching and Christian service, the Civil Rights movement was born out of many generations of struggle, resistance, and rebellion. Black freedom fighters in the United States looked for inspiration from other freedom fighters around the world and built alliances through messages of solidarity and support.
In this way, the well-known influence of Gandhi on Dr. King is one link in a long chain of connections. This chain connects across ideas of race, gender, nationhood, and faith. It is a connection that promotes freedom, equality, and a shared fate of humanity. While Dr. King’s work in the world was informed by Gandhi’s teachings and examples, he also learned from his contemporaries. Bayard Rustin and James Lawson, both of who traveled to India in the late 1940s to learn from Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, provided continued tutelage. (Rustin once warned reporter Bill Worthy, during a visit to King’s home: “Watch out, Bill, there’s a gun on that chair” avoiding a potential disastrous scene.) Many leaders of the Civil Rights movement carried a copy of a book called “War Without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments,” written by Krishnalal Shridharani, who first worked and learned from Gandhi during India’s Freedom Struggle. From 1934-1946, Shridharani studied and lived in the United States where he met members of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.), an early influencer in the U.S. Civil Rights movement. There was a deep and nuanced history that preceded Dr. King and the flag bearers of American freedom.
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By 1965, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Dr. King expanded his work, his first step to linking the racism he experienced in the South to the economic conditions in places like Chicago to the endless war produced by his government. As he stepped beyond the narrow concerns of his race to the broader health of humanity, he was encouraged by a man he would later call “an apostle of peace and nonviolence.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, born Nguyễn Xuân Bảo in Vietnam, entered the monastery at the age of sixteen, where he devoted himself to studies of “a grandiose cosmology, often complex ritualism, paradoxical metaphysics, and universal ethics.” He became ordained as a monk in 1945. The everpresent Vietnam War -- the ongoing destruction of his people and land through warfare and constant bombings, the attempted dominance of another colonial power, and a decades-long independence struggle -- brought Thich Nhat Hanh out of the temple. He could not sit in the temple while his country was under attack. He carried his practice of compassion and loving-kindness to his countrymen and women. He knew all people, Americans and Vietnamese alike, suffered from the bombing of his homeland. In taking his practice of meditation into the world, Thich Nhat Hanh evolved a nearly two thousand old tradition, coining his reform “Engaged Buddhism.”
He opened the Phuong Boi (Fragrant Palm Leaves) Meditation Center in 1955, and started an organization called the School of Youth for Social Service in 1957, which “established schools, built healthcare clinics and helped rebuild villages.” By 1961, when he traveled to the United States to study and teach at Columbia and Princeton University, he, like King, was on the way to becoming an enemy of the state, a threat to his government for organizing and advocating for peace and protection of his homeland. In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh would be banished from his own country, spending thirty-nine years exiled in France.
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Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức. Quảng Đức sat with his fellow monks in a traditional meditation pose on the streets of Saigon. Gasoline was poured on his body. As his robe and body were consumed by flames, he sat in serene concentration, a prayer asking for the protection of Buddhism and an end to the senseless war. A photograph of the scene, taken by Malcolm Brown, shocked the world. President Kennedy said that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”
This silent protest sparked Thich Nhat Hanh to write Dr. King. After Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation, Nhat Hanh wrote a letter to King, intending to ring the bell of the minister’s conscience. This letter, entitled “In Search of the Enemies of Man,” was written on June 1, 1965, and marks an invitation to King to move beyond domestic interests of race relations and focus instead on the “real enemies of man”: “intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred, and discrimination which lie within the heart of man.” In his quiet way, Nhat Hanh asked King to break his silence.
You are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world's greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself can not remain silent. America is said to have a strong religious foundation and spiritual leaders would not allow American political and economic doctrines to be deprived of the spiritual element. You cannot be silent since you have already been in action and you are in action because, in you, God is in action.
This letter opens a new dimension for King. In his relationship with Hanh, King’s intellectual evolution is apparent, and a furthering of his spiritual vision of the Beloved Community. In 1966, the year before King delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Nhat Hanh and King had an opportunity to meet, in Chicago, where King was living and working on housing discrimination. Their meeting was brief, but another key step in King’s evolution. His time in Chicago had already broadened his understanding of the race problem in America -- it was not a sickness affecting only the body of the South, but a threat to the soul of the nation. In Chicago, King was attacked with stones and witnessed swastikas and white hoods during his marches. As he said on July 10, 1966, at Soldier Field: “We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.”
This theme of the spiritual and economic (as well as political), was introduced by Nhat Hanh in his 1965 letter to King. The links and connections between the political, economic, and spiritual concerns became the dominant work of King in the last years of his life. His debt to Nhat Hanh is evidenced by his nomination of Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize. In his letter, dated January 25, 1967, he writes: “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam [...] an apostle of peace and non-violence.” Near the end of the letter, King shares his debt to Nhat Hanh.
Nhat Hanh offers a way out of this nightmare, a solution acceptable to rational leaders. He has traveled the world, counseling statesmen, religious leaders, scholars, and writers, and enlisting their support. His ideas for peace, if applied, would be a monument to ecumenism, world brotherhood, to humanity.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s letter, “In Search of the Enemies of Man,” plants the seeds which grow into King’s full defiance of the U.S. government. This transformation makes King an international advocate for freedom, an anti-war crusader who explicitly links the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. Although he had made some of these links before his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King had never before stood directly opposed to the U.S. government, who he calls “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” King’s solution to the crisis is a “radical revolution of values” shifting from a “thing-oriented” to a “person-oriented” society. “A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.” After delivering this speech, King had a target on his back: vilified in the national press, isolated among Civil Rights leaders, and more intensified animosity from the U.S. government, particularly the FBI.
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In May 1967 during the “Pacem in Terris II” - the Peace on Earth Conference - King and Nhat Hanh shared breakfast in between press conferences and meetings. Nhat Hanh encouraged King at a time when he saw his supporters turned away from him. “Martin, you know something? In Vietnam, they call you a bodhisattva, an enlightened being trying to awaken other living beings and help them go in the direction of compassion and understanding.” Two months before King’s death, Nhat Hanh sent King a telegram, “to express my complete support and gratitude” for King’s work, and hoping to meet again in Atlanta.
On the day Dr. King died, Nhat Hanh was visiting Columbia University. As part of a Eucharist service, the Buddhist monk was invited to read the Heart Sutra, a 2000-year old Buddhist treatise sometimes referred to as “The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom.” It is a meditation on emptiness, on the “nature of no Birth no Death,” of removing mental obstacles and overcoming wrong perceptions. One can imagine the forty-two year old, who had already suffered so much and lost many friends and loved ones to senseless violence, sharing these words as a balm to his own pain, yet affirming his faith in the goodness of all beings and the compassion of the Buddhas.
Afterwards, Nhat Hanh wrote to Raphael Gould, then the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
They killed Martin Luther King. They killed us.
I am afraid the root of violence is so deep in the heart and mind and manner of this society. They killed him. They killed my hope. I do not know what to say.
This country is able to produce King but cannot preserve King. You have him, and yet you do not have him. I am sorry for you. For me. For all of us.
I prayed for him after I learned about his assassination. And then, I said to myself: You do not have to pray for him. He does not need it. You have to pray for yourself. We have to pray for ourselves.
Undeterred, the quiet-spoken monk “vowed” to “redouble my efforts, and put all my energy into the practice of building the Beloved Community we had discussed together.”
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Thich Nhat Hanh also saw Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community as one and the same as his sangha building. The Beloved Community was a central concept that informed King’s theology, life, and work. The idea first emerged at the end of the nineteenth-century by American philosopher Josiah Royce. In his seminal work, “The Problem of Christianity,” Royce lays out a roadmap for moving beyond the American individualism and exceptionalism of his peers - the zeitgeist of his day.
Royce’s Beloved Community is a philosophy of loyalty. For Royce, “there is only one way to be an ethical individual. That is to choose your cause, and then serve it.” Royce acknowledged the social element of human beings, and from this grew his conception that only within the context of a community is an individual able to evolve and grow spiritually. Finally, the Beloved Community is how the love of God is in action in the world, what Dr. King expressed as “agapic love,” - the highest ideal of human expression.
As part of his analysis of Christianity and the Beloved Community, Royce includes a religion little known at the time in the United States: Buddhism. Among the similarities, Royce finds that both Buddhism and Christianity have helped humanity free itself “from bondage to national to racial and to worldly antagonisms and prejudices” and create a “very genuine community of spirit which belongs to these two great world religions.”
There is a final seed planted by Royce that King would later fructify. In neither Buddhism nor Christianity did Royce see the “[invention] and [application of] the arts which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love, not of mere individuals, but of communities.” When Royce spoke these words, he was unaware of Gandhi’s work of satyagraha, which had already begun, soon continued by Dr. King.
The vision of the Beloved Community is that of the sangha. African-American and Buddhist writer Charles Johnson calls Dr. King’s dream of the “Beloved Community” a “sangha by another name.” Sangha, like dharma, is part of the teachings of the Buddha, the third of the three “jewels.” In the Buddha’s time, the sangha was the community of monks and nuns. Today, it includes laypeople who benefit from practicing meditation with one another.
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Before Dr. King gained an intellectual understanding of the Beloved Community, the concept was already familiar to him, through his lived experience of being a Black man living in the Jim Crow South. The notion of an idealized community, harmonious and able to accept disagreement and agitation in a spirit of equality and acceptance, was an idea that aided the survival of Africans and Black Americans through hundreds of years of genocide, enslavement, and oppression. To be born and raised in the southern United States -- Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina -- Blacks and whites living in harmony, goodwill, and fellowship with one another, was a nearly unthinkable reality. It required an act of faith to believe such a place could exist. From their earliest experience in America, Blacks survived enslavement, beatings, and lynchings. Emancipation after the Civil War brought a generation of respite, but by the 1880s a new system of segregation called Jim Crow formed from the remnants of slavery.
As King grew and developed he moved beyond the narrow confines of race into his care for all, bringing this message of reconciliation to not only his fellow Black Americans who had suffered centuries of brutality, but also to the whites who inflicted the pain, hurt, and trauma. As we continue to live out our tendency towards “violent annihilation,” Dr. King’s message of reconciliation and his vision of the Beloved Community is perhaps his most important.
The scope of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life is vast, and despite the many milestones he accomplished, he is remembered for few. He accomplished more in his twelve years of public ministry than most do in their lifetime. As a Christian minister, his sermons and theological thought, as well as his organization with other Black churches, brought a message of hope and possibility to a reality of despair. In his social and political work, he partnered with leaders such as Bayard Rustin and Harry Belafonte to organize national tours and events, including 1963’s March on Washington, which helped the passage of transformative legislation and executive action. As a theologian, he combined intellectual analysis and critical thought with the active life force of “a heart full of grace” and a “soul generated by love.”
As we look back more than five decades since his death, King stands as a spiritual leader to this nation and the world, whose voice of reason, passion, and truth still rings in his words, like his Letter from Birmingham Jail, I Have a Dream speech and the recognition that came with receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet these most well-known works precede the full radicalization of King, when his attention turned toward the violence and inequality in society-at-large, making dangerous connections between inner-city poverty and global capitalism, the need for unions and a radical shift in consumption habits of the American people, and his fear of the spiritual demise of a country he loved with a vision of a “world house,” a Beloved Community in which society is re-structured, abiding by the universal principles of freedom, love, and peace.
