Monday, January 20, is MLK Day. People will post Martin Luther King Jr.’s sayings on social media, gather in commemorative meetings and church services, volunteer to serve, or do acts of justice. I choose to reflect on one of King’s most important writings and remember the night a decade ago when my friend, Jelani Greenidge, read aloud King’s famous prison letter.
I sat in Jim and Annette’s tiny apartment on a Wednesday evening in 2014 listening to Jelani read aloud the entire text of Letter from Birmingham Jail. The eight of us, black and white, sat silent and still – except for the reader – for nearly an hour.
Here we were, a half century after King wrote those words in the margins of a newspaper smuggled into his solitary confinement cell. Jelani read from a cell phone sitting in the comfort and safety of a friend’s home.
Yet the more he read, the more uneasy I grew at how relevant King’s thoughts were for our present situation. Save a few particulars, the words could have been penned this week.
As a white boy in South Jersey turning eight, I doubt I was even aware of King or what was happening in that Alabama jail cell in April 1963. The first TV I remember watching is President Kennedy’s funeral later that same year.
But I was very attentive and deeply distressed listening to the radio, just 5 years after, when King was gunned down in Memphis. It would be another decade before I read Letter among the multitude of research I was plowing through, attempting to understand the disconnect between the gospel and the presence of sin in our American evangelical/Pentecostal churches.
In 1976, I moved south to Baylor University in pursuit of graduate degrees. I was ill-prepared for the ghostly shadow of Jim Crow that still smothered the community of Waco like the choking smoke of a forest fire. I wasn’t as shocked at the attitudes of rank sinners as I was of those of believers, particularly church leaders – my church elders, who tutored me for ministerial ordination.
One day I sat in the office of one of those elders, just outside the sprawling range of Fort Hood, now renamed Fort Cavazos. I must have felt comfortable enough with this relatively moderate pastor to unburden my heart about the brazen racism I was discovering in our ranks. How they had banned people of color from entering their churches. How they spoke of Black brothers and sisters in such awful terms.
But my pastor friend had few words of comfort for this young preacher, telling me only that I was “too sensitive.” Which only made me all the more sensitive. All my theological training and multigenerationally faith-centered upbringing could not help me comprehend what he was saying.
Now fifty years on, sitting in Jim and Annette’s apartment, I found myself once more caught off guard.
To be totally honest, I felt reluctant to get back into the race conversation.
Not because I am not passionate about it, for I have often been told I am too passionate about it, but because I prefer not to engage people who won’t stay around for the whole conversation. But when I say nothing, I discover that people make assumptions about my silence. Assumptions way off base. And I am troubled by my own silence.
Dr. Edith Blumhofer, a professor at Evangel University in the late 80s, invited me to speak to one of her classes on my research into race relations in the Pentecostal movement and particularly the Assemblies of God. To this day I am haunted by the question of one of her students and by my own startled response.
“But what are you doing about it?” he asked.
“I am researching and writing,” I replied. But I knew he was not impressed with the idea that getting a troubled history out in the open was enough.
Soon after, I went overseas for a long, long time, immersing myself in the challenges of the marginalized in other places, expecting the home country to move on well enough without my input. Returning in the mid-00s, I discovered progress had been made.
But I also discovered how little had changed. Particularly how insensitive many white people who share my faith remained. Again, I was more bothered by the sins of the faithful than I was by unrepentant sinners.
And now in this tiny apartment I was being confronted by Jelani channeling MLK even as I was overwhelmed by the cascading events and rhetoric of the previous few months. Racial tensions had once again erupted, this time in the Midwest. I say “erupted”, not as if everything had been peaceful before, but the tensions had somehow been kept under wraps, leading white people to assume things were cool.
And, as Jelani read on, I wondered. All over again. The very questions I had been asking in the late 70s were with us once more. Or did they ever leave?
I asked myself after that evening, Do I risk saying something by saying nothing? Or do I speak out, in which case I risk being misunderstood or, worse, being no longer listened to because I don’t fit the preferred politically correct mode?
I prefer to process my reactions, sort out all the issues, all the angles, thoroughly and in private, so that when I do speak, I actually have something to say that is of value and of relevance. Meanwhile as I ponder, perhaps Rome burns, no?
I have been processing, sorting things out for a lifetime – enough for more than one lifetime. So, I throw out a thought, write a blog post, and – bam! – there I am in the middle again. This aging white guy talking about race once more.
After posting just such a statement back in 2014, I was invited by Jim to this small gathering of white and black evangelicals who spent one evening a month processing black-white relationships in our city and nation. I went, albeit reluctantly.
I went because I cared. I was reluctant because, although I care, I was busy, or so I told myself. But I kept going because I was tired of the rhetoric in the larger world – mostly people talking without listening. So I went to listen, mostly, and talk when invited.
And I went because I was disturbed that after so many decades, the sensitivities – or insensitivities – among far too many believers hadn’t changed like I’d hoped they had.
After Jelani finished reading the text, a heavy silence lingered as we all took it in. Like a casserole that continues to cook even after the microwave has stopped.
Then the responses began, slowly – women and men, black and white, young and old, all sharing in turn. How surprisingly up-to-date King’s assessments are, we said. How disappointed we were in so many of the responses of our fellow believers, we said. How pained our black brothers and sisters are by the current state of affairs, we said.
Several suggestions were made about next steps before we prepared to depart. I’ll share a few conclusions from that evening’s conversation, conclusions that in the rereading seem applicable to today.
- Let the Black communities guide us in response. I say “communities” because there is no more singularity of thought among Black Americans than there was in King’s day. While no one of these voices speaks for the whole community, it behooves us to listen and follow as much as we can.
The practice of following the leadership of those who are pained by the actions of the privileged is rooted in the New Testament Church. When ethnic conflict arose over a minority getting mistreated, the Church selected an all-minority team to resolve it.
The tension was between Hebraic believers and Greek believers in how widows in the church were being treated. Widows of Greek ethnicity were being short-changed. The solution was to appoint 7 church leaders, all Greek, to look after the distribution of provisions for Hebrew and Greek widows alike.
When the marginalized are being, well, marginalized, put the marginalized in charge of sorting it all out. I hear people saying our present ethnic tensions are not the same and I wonder at their logic. You can check it out for yourself in Acts 6:1-7.
- Be careful how we label people. King himself was negatively branded by the nation. Even moderate white pastors called him an extremist, which is why he wrote his Letter. Only now with lots of water under the bridge do whites quote King, albeit often selectively.
“But can’t you see they are destroying their own properties,” they said in 2014? (The context was Ferguson, Missouri.) No, I can’t, because your “they” and “their” are not nuanced enough to give me an accurate picture upon which to make a judgment.
I do know this much. I lived 2,000 miles from that scene on the edge of St. Louis. I had friends who were among the protesters in Ferguson and elsewhere. I heard the same voices that made my black friends angry – and they angered me, too.
Where people, black or white, break the law in unjust ways (and there are just ways to break the law), they should be brought to justice. However, we must be careful about drawing attention to certain evils as a means of avoiding fighting other evils. When we make straw men of these protesters, we perpetuate injustice.
- Take time to listen – and listen deeply. Our group called for more small-group gatherings where people from different backgrounds could really listen to each other. Engagement can increase sensitivity.
Over time I have learned that being sensitive is a gift, however I came by it and regardless of why that pastor in central Texas brushed it away. Sensitivity is a gateway through which listening flows and listening leads to understanding.
I have sat in meetings, even mundane office meetings, and found myself processing the reactions and subtle, even nonverbal, responses of people around me more than the content itself. I don’t dismiss the content, but I have discovered that the message, the messenger and the medium (the way in which the message is conveyed) are all tied up together. Hearing all three is vitally important for understanding the message itself.
I can’t say I am thrilled that we are having such conversations about race so far into the 21st century. I wish they were artifacts of history. But being a part of that Wednesday evening’s gathering made me grateful that the conversation continues.
I have friends that keep fussing about those who keep bringing up race. My response is that if I have learned anything in this life, it is that bad things don’t go away because we stop talking about them.
Racial conflict is an issue whether we bring up race or not. I sense it regularly with people all around me and I am deeply troubled that it still hinders the forward motion of the gospel as it did back in ’63 when “polite” Christians didn’t talk about race while living sinful lives of racism.
The patterns of racist behavior have changed some since then. But the call to be guided by those who are marginalized, to be slow to draw conclusions about those who cry out in pain, and to be quick to listen, is with us now as ever before. The way to end racism is to deal with it honestly and with all the sensitivity of the Spirit.
In writing this post, I drew on a post I had written shortly after that meeting in Jim and Annette’s apartment. I am struck how relevant my reflections from a decade ago remain.
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Public Domain photos: Martin Luther King Jr, the cell, and a copy of his prison letter
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