In a political landscape populated by pygmies, I look back to a giant of a man —- Martin Luther King Jr. — whose life we celebrate on Monday. In him I find one of the most powerful witnesses for Christ that I have ever known.
As it happened, I was working as a cub reporter the day he was killed, April 4th, 1968. It was early evening, I recall, with just a handful of staff left in the newsroom. The managing editor immediately stopped the press and, as fate would have it, handed me the AP copy to edit. With tears in my eyes and a horrible sense of dread, I put the story together and wrote the headline. It was my first-ever story to make the front page, and also the saddest piece I’ve ever written. I cannot recall, even through the horrors of Vietnam, stock market crashes and various other calamities, a more anguishing moment as a journalist.
With that memory in mind, I took some time this morning to reread Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham jail, written in 1963. It is so full of courage, grace and prophecy that it yet brings tears to my eyes. Here is a short excerpt from his letter. I’ll follow up on Monday with a second excerpt.
April, 1963
From the Birmingham jail
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
BONUS THOUGHT: The song “Abraham, Martin and John,” released three months after King’s death, was my favorite song that year. If you’d like to travel back in time and give it a listen, you can find it on YouTube. The original version, by Dion, is the best.
