The King We Left Behind
By Charles Johnson

Reprinted from CommonQuest, Fall 1996, Vol 1, No. 2. Copyright © 1996 Charles Johnson.

It was said he could recite passages from Plato whole cloth from his head. His learning ranged over the cultures of both the East and West. He was 25-years-old, and by all accounts he was a remarkably driven young man. At 5-feet, 7-inches tall, he dressed so meticulously during his undergraduate days that his college friends nicknamed him "Tweed."

Yes, he cut a striking, handsome -- and scholarly -- figure from the pulpit of Detroit's Second Baptist Church on February 28, 1954, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermon that day, "Rediscovering Lost Values," brimmed with emotion and erudition. He retold the story of Jesus' disappearance in Luke 2:41-52. Joseph and Mary had traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. After it was done, they started back home to Nazareth, but discovered their son was missing. They paused. They searched among their kinfolk, then hied back to Jerusalem, where they found Jesus in the Temple with the doctors of the law.

"That," said King, "is the thing that has happened in America. That we have unconsciously left God behind.... It wasn't a conscious process. You see, we didn't grow up and say, 'Now, good-bye God, we're going to leave you now....' We just became so involved in getting our big bank accounts that we unconsciously forgot about God -- we didn't mean to do it."

Ironically, some 40 years later we are guilty of the same forgetfulness with Martin Luther King, Jr. Without our consciously rejecting him, he has been left behind. In a way, images of King have never been more ubiquitous, but his vision suffers from the curse of canonization. Across America his photograph is on display in elementary and secondary schools. It's difficult to visit a major American city and not find a street or a public building named after him. Most of our states honor the national holiday established in his name. Six-inch plastic King dolls, along with plastic podiums, can be purchased in toy stores, and his family has recently approved the manufacture of small, kitschy statues in his likeness, arguing that if anyone should profit from his commercialization, let it be them. Come every January 15, the airwaves carry his "I Have A Dream" speech, digitally compressed to fit into one-minute time slots. And at depressingly earnest ceremonies from coast to coast,fourth-graders (9-year-olds)are encouraged to honor this nation's most pre-eminent moral philosopher by talking about their personal "dreams."

Can anyone doubt that this hagiographic presence is hollow? That it diminishes the pith and power of King's message to us during his 14-year public ministry? More importantly, does his vision of America -- one of peace and brotherhood -- still instruct us when liberals and conservatives alike, Democrats and Republicans, Louis Farrakhan and even pro-gun advocates in Washington state, cite his words to support their vastly differing political agendas?

Almost 30 years after King's death the tragedy of his absence is acutely felt in every fiber of our public and personal lives. For black America, this could well be called a crisis. A dialogue that is adrift. In the vacuum left by King no spokesman has emerged to electrify us with the tough-minded message that segregation and separatism, whether they arise from black or white communities, cripple our potential as social beings. Or that the methods we use to achieve justice must be quite as moral -- as clean -- as our goals. Or that the eventual goal itself cannot simply be the pursuit of power, or worship of Mammon, if our hope is to transcend the failed attempts at social and racial evolution in the past.

No objective could have a greater practical urgency than King's compelling belief in a "beloved community" when almost weekly we are bombarded by news articles detailing public incivility, new depths of vulgarity in popular culture, worsening poverty in the inner cities, and the new status of young black men as "an endangered species." With each new terrible statistic, each new normalization of enmity in civic life, King's impassioned warnings -- "If you sow the seeds of violence in your struggle, unborn generations will reap the whirlwind of social disintegration" -- echo ever more strongly in our ears like the admonitions of a wise yet demanding elder who upset and angered us during his life -- "Hate scars and distorts the personality" -- and whose prophetic vision and clear voice return to haunt us late at night when we confront the ethnically balkanized character of our times.

But the descent -- the degeneration -- from King's belief in universal brotherhood to the tribal notion of my brother as someone who physically "looks like me," as Louis Farrakhan puts it, was not the work of a day but of three racially tempestuous decades. In the late-1960s, after summer riots in more than one hundred cities and the inflammatory, anti-white rhetoric of H. "Rap" Brown, an entire generation frustrated by the intractability of racism began to slip -- politically and culturally -- away from King's belief in "a power as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth and as modern as the techniques of Mahatma Gandhi" toward a smorgasbord of oppositional agendas. Other "leaders" came along with more militant voices. Times had changed, some said. Gandhi-esque nonviolence died at the Lorraine Motel(where King was assassinated, in Memphis, Tennessee).

The stage vacated by King on April 4, 1968, was promptly filled by gun-wielding Black Panthers waving Chairman Mao's "little red book," and fiery cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka and Ron Karenga of US (who later invented the rituals of "Kwaanza"). Older leaders, among them men like Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and King, were dismissed by younger activists (Poet Larry Neal called them "the New Breed") as Uncle Toms, or derided for being hopelessly assimilationist, old-fangled and bourgeois. Gradually, our preferred black spokesmen -- the "authentic" black voices we listened to -- became streetwise, ex-rapists like Eldridge Cleaver, or Huey Newton (who died in a drug deal that turned sour), or severe critics of the entire Eurocentric enterprise of Judeo-Christian civilization such as Malcolm X, of whom King said, "I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice": These are the true spiritual fathers of today's Crips and Bloods.

It was only a short step indeed from Karenga's cultural nationalism in the 1960s to Professor Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New York describing Europeans as cold, individualistic "ice people" (in contrast to the warm, communalistic "sun people" of Africa), and teaching in his CCNY courses that "rich Jews" financed the slave trade. Gradually over a period of twenty years, the profoundest aspects of King's vision, satyagraha ("truth force"), and his admonition that "We must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle," faded before the Afrocentrists and separatists, whose strident voices and viewpoints came to dominate virtually every aspect of our discourse on race, especially in education. Just consider this conversation from Lola Franklin's third-grade class at J.S. Chick Elementary School in Kansas City, reported in Time magazine's April 29, 1996, cover story on "The End of Integration."

"Who can name an African-American comedian?" inquires Franklin.
"Eddie Murphy!" "Bill Cosby!"
"And some American comedians?"
"Whoopi Goldberg!"
"No, an American comedian," she corrects them.
"Roseanne!" a boy calls out.
"Good," says Franklin.

In this equation, American equals white, despite the fundamental role blacks have played since the time of the colonists in shaping this country's politics and culture. Toward the end of his life, King feared this situation might arise; he grasped instantly that the goal of the separatists was to divorce black people from a nation of their own creation.

And now we have the scandal of Afrocentrists -- specifically Nation of Islam spokesmen -- who have injected anti-Semitism into public discourse, most notably Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad, who told a Howard University audience that his hero was Colin Ferguson, the black gunman who emptied his weapon on whites and Asians on a Long Island train. His mentor, Farrakhan, draws stadium-sized crowds to hear him deliver a separatist doctrine fashioned by Elijah Muhammad in the 1930s, one that explains the origin of the white race with the fantastic myth of Yacub, a black scientist who created a "beast" destined to become the first European.

Contrast that to King being so convinced our goal was empathy he could say, "Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be." From this desire to share each other's fate, the alliance of blacks and Jews of goodwill was formed, producing 30 years ago this country's finest (yet fragile) attempt at brotherhood, one that some of our present "leaders" have fractured by singling out Jews as their adversaries.

The popularity of race-baiting anti-Semites in black American communities is not new, though it can be perplexing until, remembering King, we realize that hatred, anger and racial mythology are easy. They reveal a frame of mind best known by its astonishing mediocrity. And for its betrayal of the great humanity that inspirited the civil rights movement. No moral, intellectual, or spiritual work is involved. And that, of course, may be the problem with Americans across the board in the 1990s. A reluctance to be challenged, to change one's prejudices, or to live nobly. The inability to see, as King saw, that the rallying cry of "Black Power" was born with a frightening blemish that might grow uglier with age. "I think it would be very dangerous and even tragic," he said, "if the struggle in the United States for civil rights degenerated to a racial struggle of blacks against whites."

Yet each and every one of us is an apostate. We are all responsible for this sea change in race relations, and the substitution of the "beloved community" with "identity politics." In my case, I cannot say I rejected King, but as a young man I knew his philosophy only by its reflections and refractions. My parents, a quietly pious Methodist couple, kept a portrait of him displayed in our home, so I was respectful of the racial battles he fought and the personal courage he demonstrated again and again from Montgomery to Mississippi. In fact, I was a child of integration. It was an ideal I took for granted all throughout high school and college. But like other baby boomers, I came of age in the years when King's greatest triumphs -- the Nobel Peace Prize and Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- were behind him, his leadership was being challenged, and the Zeitgeist among young blacks shifted from focusing on the 99 percent of our lives that we all share in common to the 1 percent of differences that divide us.

On July 2, 1964, when King stood behind Lyndon Johnson as he signed the Civil Rights Act, I was 14, living not in the South but in a Chicago suburb where many young black men viewed non-violence as unmanly and listened with greater interest to the speeches of Malcolm X than to the apostle of forgiveness who said, "Nonviolence ... does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding." During a Mississippi march in the summer of 1966, Stokely Carmichael proclaimed, "What we need is Black Power!" and his words rang deeper with my black friends and me than King's plea that "Our destinies are tied together; none of us can make it alone .... There is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not have to intersect with white roots."

So yes, I thought of him less often and less clearly throughout the '70s. Then, during the Reagan years and early '90s, I watched my son and daughter growing up in a social minefield, one seeded -- by whites and blacks alike -- with dangers unknown to my friends and me in the 1950s or, for that matter, by my parents and their predecessors. Something had gone terribly wrong since my 20s. As an author, I discovered when I visited bookstores, or sat on panels with other writers, that the term "brotherhood" had become passe and love -- with its bottomless duties and demands -- was a positively antediluvian idea. Yet their omission was obvious everywhere. Recently visiting a Seattle lock-up facility for youths under 18 awaiting trial, I stood nearly speechless before an audience of boys and girls no older than my own children, dressed in differently colored jailhouse jumpsuits, their faces emptied of hope for their futures, their eyes filled with years of betrayal. In Chicago last year my first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, was adapted for the stage by City Lit Theatre and the Chicago Theatre Company. I saw a morning performance, one attended by 78 pregnant teen-age girls all under the age of 18. To be honest, I watched them more closely than I did the play itself. They were herded in by their counselors. They were told how to "behave" in a theater, which they did until the point in the story when its protagonist, a young woman their age, is raped. The girls howled. Some urged the rapist on. At that instant I understood what had taken place among the black children who reportedly laughed when a Jewish woman is shot in Schindler's List.

After the play, I spoke with the young black actors whose energy brought this novel to life. Whenever they performed the rape scene for teenagers, they said, the reaction was the same, and they were troubled by it. I asked who has gotten these girls pregnant? Their mothers' boyfriends, I was told. Or older men in the southside buildings where they lived.

During that trip to Chicago I discovered how many black communities (including the one in my own hometown) have fallen into a condition my old friends and I now find as heartbreaking as the residual effects of racism. By now we all know the egregious news stories about black crime, drugs and illegitimacy, but I wondered: How did we allow this to happen? Between my generation and that of so many of the children I've seen, there has been no transmission of the triumphs, personal and political, that strengthened black Americans for centuries, allowing our predecessors to overcome staggering obstacles in the pre-civil rights era and raise strong, resourceful sons and daughters -- like King and countless others before him.

More and more, I found myself revisiting King to discern the genesis of our present dilemmas. I have made him my meditation for five years, studying his sermons, history, speeches, even his college papers in order to capture something of his life in an in-progress novel, but more importantly to understand -- as I believe Congressman John Lewis does -- the essences of the elder we left behind.

"If King could speak to us today," Lewis said in 1994, "he would say, in addition to doing something about guns, he would say there needs to be a revolution of values, a revolution of ideas in the black community. He would say we need to accept nonviolence not simply as a technique or as a means to bring about social and political change, but we need to make it a way of life, a way of living."

I came to see that for King what we should do was inexorably linked to what we hope to be. He was insistent that "The great problem facing modern man is that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live." Underpinning his belief in love's primacy was the sense that our lives constitute an "inescapable network of mutuality" that binds all people in a single "garment of destiny." The separatist's goal is illusory for King, a failure of sight. The segregationist, steeped in dualisms racial, sexual and otherwise, is blind to the fact that if he traced back his genes to A.D. 700, he would discover he shared a common ancestor with everyone on earth. None of us can be less closely related than 50th cousins. The sponge "Bull" Conner bathed with came from the Pacific Islands, his towel was spun in Turkey, his coffee traveled all the way from South America, his tea from China, his cocoa from West Africa. Every time he wrote his name he used ink evolved from India, an alphabet inherited from Romans who derived it from the Greeks after they'd borrowed it from Phoenicians who received their symbols from Semites living on the Sinai Peninsula between Egypt and Palestine. Whether we like it or not, our lives are intertwined and, as King observed, "We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools."

This is the root of King's revolutionary fervor. He agreed with the Marxist critique of capital, yes; but he could not forgive Marx for his atheism, because King believed that "Racial justice... will come neither by our frail and often misguided efforts nor by God imposing his will on wayward men, but when enough people open their lives to God to allow him to pour his triumphant, divine energy into their souls." Thus effective social change requires effort on two "fronts," one directed externally to eliminate injustice in the political reality, the other directed inwardly toward refining our character and cultural values. "We must set out to do a good job, irrespective of race," he said, "and do it so well that nobody can do it better."

As if peering into a crystal ball disclosing the dilemma of black life at century's end, King stated, "We must work on two fronts. On the one hand, we must continually resist the system of segregation -- the system which is the basic cause of our lagging standards; on the other hand, we must work constructively to improve the lagging standards which are the effects of segregation. There must be a rhythm of alteration between attacking the cause and healing the effects.... We are often too loud and boisterous, and spend too much on alcoholic beverages. These are some of the shortcomings we can improve here and now... Even the most poverty stricken among us can be clean, even the most uneducated among us can have high morals. By improving these standards, we will go a long way in breaking down some of the arguments of the segregationists."

If we had heeded King's warnings in the late 1950s, especially when he declared, "We shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect," perhaps today we would not be struggling to close the widening racial divide in American society, or to repair the dialogue between blacks and Jews. All these matters King broached long ago. If he were with us now, standing in the pulpit before a forest of black microphones, I believe he would take his sermons in the '90s from Proverbs 29:18, gently yet emphatically reminding us that brotherhood was our goal, love our method, generosity and forgiveness our rule, peace our way of life, and, finally, that where there is no vision, the people perish.

Charles Johnson is the author of Middle Passage, winner of the 1990 National Book Award. He is co-editor, with John McCluskey Jr., of Black Men Speaking (1997).

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