Dr. King and the Second American Revolution: My 1999 presentation at Temple Emanuel

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., SERVICE TEMPLE EMANUEL
February 12, 1999
David Fishback

On this Shabbat Evening, we commemorate the birth, and celebrate the life, of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a 20th Century American prophet, who called our nation to its highest ideals.

In reflecting on Dr. King and his legacy, the first thing that usually comes to mind is that Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement forced America to examine itself closely: To confront the simple fact that the principles upon which we believed our country was founded were being ignored with respect to citizens of African-American descent.

The American Jewish Community was particularly receptive to this message, not just because it evoked our ancient stories of slavery and freedom, but because Jews in the Old World were made to feel as outsiders, just as blacks were in America. Our ancestors came to these shores so that they and their children and grandchildren would never again have to be outsiders, oppressed by undemocratic governments and hostile "host" cultures. For in America -- a "nation of immigrants", a "nation of nations" — the Dream was that all peoples could belong, that no one need be an outsider.

The Dream, of course, was imperfect, but the American Jewish experience taught us that, with each succeeding generation, the reality came closer to the theory. As we became comfortable in American, the glaring exception to the American Dream finally was confronted.

It is important to understand that the confrontation was far more than a secular issue. It is easy, but mistaken, to view Martin Luther King as essentially a secular figure, using the church simply as an organizing base. But an examination of his life and work reveals that the religious basis of his vision was deep and profound.

Religion for Dr. King was not merely an organizing tool. Rather, it was the well-spring of public morality that King saw as rooted in, and emerging from, the best Judeo-Christian traditions. He spoke with a religious voice, harkening to the words of the Hebrew prophets: "Let justice well up as waters," he quoted from Amos (5:24), "and righteousness as a mighty stream." Dr. King expressed not a religion of the rulers, but a religion of the masses: Speaking truth to power, condemning injustice, calling on an entire society to live up to the beliefs it held, but did not practice.

It was this prophetic vision that led Dr. King to a deep friendship and alliance with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose yahrzeit commemorate at the season of Dr. King's birthday. Rabbi Heschel was a refugee from pre-Holocaust Europe and a renowned biblical scholar. In January 1963, "an unprecedented ecumenical gathering of nearly 1000 delegates including established leaders of nearly every religious body in America" (Branch 21) met at the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. This Conference, according to Taylor Branch in Pillar of Fire, was intended to deal with the widely-differing responses (and non-responses) of Christian churches to segregation in America.

But, as Branch relates, "Far from positioning Jews safely as helpful bystanders to an essentially Christian conflict, Heschel declared that the soul of Judaism was at stake and had been so ever since Moses contended with Pharoah at the "first" summit meeting on religion and race. 'The exodus began,' said Heschel, 'but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.'" (24)

What set both King and Heschel apart at the Chicago Conference was their insistence on the prophetic vision and approach to the crisis. "Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue", wrote Heschel. "The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression." And in the months and years that followed, Rabbi Heschel became one of Dr. King's staunchest allies in the struggle. The large picture along the stairway to the Religious School classes shows them together at Selma. And it was at Selma March that Rabbi Heschel reported, "It felt as though my feet were praying."

It is fitting that the annual American celebration of Dr. King take place in houses of worship, as well as in the secular realm.  First and foremost, Dr. King was a preacher, a man of religion.  But he wove a vital synthesis of religious conviction and a belief in American democratic principles.  In 1961, he observed that America

is essentially a dream, a dream as yet unfulfilled. It is a dream where [people] of all races, of all nationalities and of all creeds can live together as brothers [and sisters] . . . . Ever since the Founding Fathers of our nation dreamed this noble dream, America has been something of a schizophrenic society, tragically divided against herself. On the one hand we have proudly professed the principles of democracy, and on the other hand we have sadly practiced the very antithesis of those principles.

Across the American South, and across our entire nation, Martin Luther King was both the spiritual and the action-oriented leader of the Civil Rights Movement. And he understood that the struggle was not just to bring down the barriers of American Apartheid, but also to bring to reality an America of economic, as well as social, justice; to create an environment in which all of our children would have the opportunity to live happy and healthy lives.

Dr. King saw into the Promised Land, although he did not live to fully experience it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were only beginning to bear fruit when he was gunned down just before Passover in 1968. It has been nearly a quarter-century since that terrible spring, beginning with the assassination of Martin Luther King and ending with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Although progress has been slow, and we have, at times, had reversals since those days, we must remember how far we, as a nation, have come from what was, in the lifetimes of the adults here this evening, an apartheid structure in much of our own country.

Dr. King had known it would be a long process. In 1965, he said that

it is the keystone of my faith in the future that we will someday achieve a thoroughly integrated society. I believe that before the turn of the century, . . . we will have moved a long way toward such a society.

Well, we are approaching that turn. And we have, in the last 1/3 of a century, moved a long way. But, as Dr. King knew would be the case, there is still a long way to go.

The wisdom of celebrating Dr. King lies not just in his call for justice and democracy, but in the means by which he achieved it: the doctrine of militant non- violent direct action. The success of that approach enabled us to undergo what was truly a revolution with very little bloodshed. We had our martyrs, black and white, Christian and Jewish. But they died in circumstances which strengthened the Movement, and which caused a rotten system to shrivel up in a few short years. This was, in fact, the Second American Revolution. An important part of its significance was that it dealt with the exercise of power in a revolutionary context in a completely new way. Dr. King explained it thusly:

Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense, power is not only desirable, but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. What is needed is a realization that power without love in reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

The Second American Revolution was not only a revolution in the change it brought about, but in the way it brought about change.

The Second American Revolution -- of which Dr. King was the most visible leader -- may well turn out to be as important, or even more important, in its world-wide impact as in its impact within our borders.

To understand the impact of this Second American Revolution, we must remember the impact of the First American Revolution. In the 18th Century, the fledgling democracy of the colonial experience expelled, by force of arms, monarchical control. What emerged was the first real democracy on a significant scale in the history of the human race. Even though it was flawed by the genocide of the Native American population and the existence of African slavery in the South, the message which went out to the rest of the world was that governments could, to quote Jefferson, be based upon "the consent of the governed."

That message led to a century and a half of upheavals, which ended in the establishment of freedom and democracy in Western Europe and Japan. That message also led to the Gandhian Movement in India, which led to another expulsion of colonial rule and the creation of democracy in the most trying of circumstances. Gandhi added a new element to the formula: militant, mass non- violent direct action. And although the Indian Independence Movement was often overcome by terrible violence, particularly during the partition, it was instructive to a young minister in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

By 1956, Dr. King was involved in intense discussions with American disciples of Gandhi (Rustin and Wofford). In 1959, he traveled to India to learn more of Gandhi's impact: how his ideas were followed and how they were not. By the early 1960s, the strategy of militant non-violent resistance to injustice and oppression was being refined by Dr. King and his associates, bringing about the Second American Revolution: the turbulent, but relatively peaceful, end of American apartheid. While the First American Revolution was, of necessity, based on the exercise of military power, the Second American Revolution was based on the exercise of spiritual power -- the militant appeal to conscience and love. And its successful implementation brought about the turbulent, but relatively peaceful, end of American Apartheid.

So the ideas that began in the First American Revolution swung to Europe and Asia, where they were refined, and were sent back to America, where they sparked the Second American Revolution. The strategy of the Second American Revolution, in turn, spread back to the Eastern Hemisphere, as the historic events of the last decade have demonstrated.

The success of King's adaptation led, in large part, to its adoption by the freedom movements of Eastern Europe and the Far East. The victorious non-violent massing of people opposing dictatorship and making it impossible for dictatorship to continue, was seen in Manila, Prague, East Berlin, and, finally, even in Moscow. The success of non-violence, I believe, gave heart to those in South Africa who recognized that apartheid was untenable and that a transition to freedom and democracy was not only essential, but possible. Mandela and DeKlerk, for all their courage and vision, stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King. Of course, the work is not finished — the Tieneman Square Movement, for example, was crushed. But, as Dr. King reminded us, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Just as, at the Seder, we, as Jews, are required to retell to our children the story of the Exodus from Egypt, I believe that, at the King Holiday, we, as Americans, must retell to our children the story of our nation's internal Exodus from apartheid to equal rights. Both are stories of movement to freedom. While the first required flight from an oppressive society -- flight which we as Jews have been familiar with over the centuries -- the second tells perhaps an even more astounding story: a transformation of the oppressive society.

In the Exodus from Egypt, as this evening's Torah portion relates, Pharoah's "heart was hardened" after each plague. In the Exodus within America, Pharoah was the entire white society, and ultimately its heart was softened and its soul was changed by the non-violent demonstrations, the civil disobedience which forced the 20th Century Pharoah to itself be transformed. In many ways, we have gone from the Georgia of Lester Maddox to the Georgia of Jimmy Carter, from the Arkansas of Orval Faubus to the Arkansas of Bill Clinton.

It would be wonderful if the American Exodus had already led to a Messianic Age. But it has not, just as the Egyptian Exodus did not. It took the Hebrew people 40 years in the desert to recover from slavery. It will take American society a long time to recover from slavery and apartheid. But this should not be cause for despair; that is the lesson we must learn from Dr. King. Again, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." If we work for progress, we can achieve progress. If we work for a Messianic Age, we can continually improve our world, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.