Justice Everyday
By Chip Berlet
There is tragic irony in the Christian Right’s Justice Sunday extravaganza occurring the week before the national celebration of the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Justice was a theme King returned to time and time again.
In April of 1968, the day before he was assassinated, King spoke at a rally in support of striking sanitation workers at a black evangelical church in Memphis, Tennessee that had been the center of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s. The speech became known by King’s declaration that he had “Been to the Mountaintop“. King was delighted to see so many other preachers present at the rally. “It’s a marvelous picture. Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and say, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream’ “.
The cite to Amos is from the Bible’s Old Testament, Amos 5:24, a text sacred to Christians, Jews, and Muslims–the “people of the book”. Now Amos was a prophet, as was King, and we know from another reliable source in the New Testament that prophets are often honored except in their own country and community.
In the year before his assassination, King published a prophetic book: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? The theme was justice for all, but there was a warning that unless we all worked together to ensure justice for all, then we beckon chaos rather than building community. King often spoke of the beloved community. He sought to unite rather than to divide.
Division, discord, and demonization are the themes from the Christian Right, which has tried to drive a wedge between black people and gay people, and to stigmatize women who favor reproductive rights. A government role in crafting economic justice is decried by Christian Right ideologues as coddling the poor who they suggest just need a broom and a Bible. Peace and tolerance are denounced as giving succor to evil enemies. Justice primarily consists of handing out stiff jail terms.
King read the same Bible as the ideologues of the Christian right, but drew different lessons from the text. Another human rights advocate, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, wrote of this dilemma in his book Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love. Spong notes that there are many different ways to read sacred text. Peter J. Gomes, a preacher at Harvard University, agrees with Spong. Gomes wrote: The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart.
It was this theme of open-hearted forgiveness and genuine love of humanity that nourished the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. for a non-violent solution to the struggle for civil rights in the face of oppression and bigotry against black people.
King expanded his vision of justice to include working people, union members, and even striking sanitation workers. King saw economic justice and world peace as part of the same struggle. He spoke out in support of women rights and reproductive rights. In 1966 King won the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award, and he wrote that “there is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts.”
There is no record of King speaking publicly about gay rights — though homophobia and sexism are listed as “evils” by the King Center — but for many years he worked closely with an openly gay man, Bayard Rustin, a radical organizer who pulled together the 1963 civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. King considered Rustin a friend as well as a colleague, and when some urged King to distance himself from Rustin, King brushed aside the suggestion saying he was not going to conduct a witchhunt. At least one aide to the King family has said that in private conversations King spoke of supporting gay rights.
Chaos or community? Demonization or acceptance? Division or unity?
There are those who preach about their narrow definition of justice on Sunday; and those who teach about liberty and justice for all, not just on Sunday, but every day of the week.
Read the text of famous speeches by King, and listen to audio excerpts here.
“Justice Sunday” is about anything but justice; just look at the people who are involved in the planning.
I agree, but alas, most people don’t know the background of the folks behind it.
It is a questionable issue that your article quotes MLK, who is a preacher who spoke from many pulpits the same message. His message is acceptable evidently and yet you want to abolish the right of a conservative preacher to voice his message. This is very, very inconsistant.
I really do not understand why it is questionable to quote Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Why do you think that King had a conservative message? His record is clearly progresive. He was for non-violence and harmony. But he spoke out against racism, poverty, and war. This is a matter of public record. I just don’t understand why you think I am trying to silence conservative preachers. In fact, I do just the opposite. I argue that conservative preachers have a right to express their views, and people–especially liberals and progressives–need to respect the right of anyone in the Christian Right to freely express their beliefs.
Mr. Berlet,
In your view, is it of any consequence that MLK Jr. plagiarized his doctoral thesis, an easily researchable and confirmable fact? Does this alter or taint, at least in your mind, his various “contributions” to American society?How about his well known affiliations with members of the communist party? Any significance there?
Thank you for your time. Pete
The significance is clearly that I see his contributions to peace and social justice as more important than the troubling controversy over his thesis. As for the McCarthyite smears attempting to claim King was a stooge for the communists, they were discredited as guilt by association decades ago. You should be ashamed to bring them here.
Not so fast
On Labor Day, 1957, a special meeting was attended by Martin Luther King and four others at a strange institution called the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The Highlander Folk School was a Communist front, having been founded by Myles Horton (Communist Party organizer for Tennessee) and Don West (Communist Party organizer for North Carolina). The leaders of this meeting with King were the aforementioned Horton and West, along with Abner Berry and James Dumbrowski, all open and acknowledged members of the Communist Party, USA. The agenda of the meeting was a plan to tour the Southern states to initiate demonstrations and riots.
From 1955 to 1960, Martin Luther King’s associate, advisor, and personal secretary was one Bayard Rustin. In 1936 Rustin joined the Young Communist League at New York City College. Convicted of draft-dodging, he went to prison for two years in 1944. On January 23, 1953 the “Los Angeles Times” reported his conviction and sentencing to jail for 60 days for lewd vagrancy and homosexual perversion. Rustin attended the 16th Convention of the Communist Party, USA in February, 1957. One month later, he and King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC for short. The president of the SCLC was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The vice-president of the SCLC was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who was also the president of an identified Communist front known as the Southern Conference Educational Fund, an organization whose field director, a Mr. Carl Braden, was simultaneously a national sponsor of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which you may have heard. The program director of the SCLC was the Reverend Andrew Young, in more recent years Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the UN and mayor of Atlanta. Young, by the way, was trained at the Highlander Folk School, previously mentioned.
Soon after returning from a trip to Moscow in 1958, Rustin organized the first of King’s famous marches on Washington. The official organ of the Communist Party, “The Worker,- - openly declared the march to be a Communist project. Although he left King’s employ as secretary in 1961, Rustin was called upon by King to be second in command of the much larger march on Washington which took place on August 28, 1963.
Bayard Rustin’s replacement in 1961 as secretary and advisor to King was Jack O’Dell, also known as Hunter Pitts O’Dell. According to official records, in 1962 Jack O’Dell was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA. He had been listed as a Communist Party member as early as 1956. O’Dell was also given the job of acting executive director for SCLC activities for the entire Southeast, according to the St. Louis “Globe-Democrat - -of October 26, 1962. At that time, there were still some patriots in the press corps, and word of O’Dell’s party membership became known.
What did King do? Shortly after the negative news reports, King fired O’Dell with much fanfare. And he then, without the fanfare, “immediately hired him again- - as director of the New York office of the SCLC, as confirmed by the “Richmond News-Leader - -of September 27, 1963. In 1963 a Black man from Monroe, North Carolina named Robert Williams made a trip to Peking, China. Exactly 20 days before King’s 1963 march on Washington, Williams successfully urged Mao Tse-Tung to speak out on behalf of King’s movement. Mr. Williams was also around this time maintaining his primary residence in Cuba, from which he made regular broadcasts to the southern US, three times a week, from high-power AM transmitters in Havana under the title “Radio Free Dixie.” In these broadcasts, he urged violent attacks by Blacks against White Americans.
During this period, Williams wrote a book entitled “Negroes With Guns.” The writer of the foreword for this book? None other than Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also interesting to note that the editors and publishers of this book were to a man all supporters of the infamous Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
According to King’s biographer and sympathizer David J. Garrow, “King privately described himself as a Marxist.” In his 1981 book, “The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.”, Garrow quotes King as saying in SCLC staff meetings, “…we have moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…. The whole structure of American life must be changed…. We are engaged in the class struggle. Jewish Communist Stanley Levison can best be described as King’s behind-the-scenes “handler.” Levison, who had for years been in charge of the secret funnelling of Soviet funds to the Communist Party, USA, was King’s mentor and was actually the brains behind many of King’s more successful ploys. It was Levison who edited King’s book, “Stride Toward Freedom.” It was Levison who arranged for a publisher. Levison even prepared King’s income tax returns! It was Levison who really controlled the fund-raising and agitation activities of the SCLC. Levison wrote many of King’s speeches. King described Levison as one of his “closest friends.” All of the above has been discredited? Surely you jest.
[…] While this sentiment is a more friendly variety of premillennial dispensationalism, it does not seem to be the dominant. As Chip Berlet has pointed out, Martin Luther King also shared this concept of peace and love being the precursor to the second coming. However today this theology is more connected to destruction and death, with many of its leading proponents agreeing with Tim LaHaye that “God will destroy this earth that is so marred and cursed by Satan’s evil,” leaving modern adherents to believe that the earth must be fully defiled before it can be renewed. […]
My question is have all the other social workers been paid? I keep looking for my check and it never seems to arrive. One can little teach long on the paltry salary of a professional pundit. Sure, it’s an easy job but writing this tripe on a daily basis soon becomes tiresome. Why don’t we try some real education and move out of the classroom into the light of common day?
Spanky