January 2009

The Kingdom of Greatness

BY JOHN PARKER MANWELL, CO-MINISTER, FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Note: Rev. Manwell is currently serving as interim minister at the Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church in Adelphi, MD.

When we think of Martin Luther King, Jr., we think first of the Montgomery bus boycott. We think of Selma and we think of Birmingham, and the terrible struggle for the right to vote. And Dr. King did lead his people through all of that.

But when he died, he was in Memphis, supporting the city’s sanitation workers. They had jobs. But the pay was not enough to live on, and the city would not recognize their union. Their struggle was for decent pay. But it was for more than that. It was for dignity. And they had asked him to help.

A few weeks before, when their struggle was getting under way, a trash compactor truck was driving with its five-man crew when they ran into torrential rains. They were forbidden to park their truck and seek shelter, thanks to residents’ complaints about Black garbage collectors’ supposed “picnics” in their White neighborhoods. So on this day, those who could not squeeze into the cab had let go of their handholds and footrests on the outside of the truck and climbed into the inside, with the trash. Somehow, a freak accident started the compactor, and two of them were crushed to death and dismembered.

Now, sanitation workers had no insurance and no death benefits. They were at the bottom of the city’s job ladder. So the city made an exception and granted the two widows each $500.

Against this backdrop, a preacher among the striking workers suggested a slogan for their organizing efforts: I AM A MAN. The mayor, a highly regarded White liberal, refused to bargain with them, and they decided to strike. “This was a strike that we called,” a long-time trash collector would remember later. “Labor didn’t call it. We called it.” The mayor hired strikebreakers, but couldn’t find enough, and the strike dragged on.

Many among Dr. King’s supporters had urged him not to get involved. It would be a no win situation. It would distract attention from civil rights. It would cost him support among his liberal but all too comfortable White allies.

But King insisted. He saw that the right to vote is not enough if a person can’t get a decent job or place to live. Already, against such protests, he had insisted on opposing the war in Vietnam. He saw the war as diverting enormous sums that could otherwise have been used to fight poverty. He pointed out that it meant drafting and killing thousands of poor young Black men, who did not have middle class deferments as college students. Now, just as he had opposed the war, he insisted on standing up for these sanitation workers. Yes, they had jobs. But they could not support their families. And they did not have dignity. In the public eye, they were invisible. He insisted. And it cost him his life.

In his sermon at the cathedral, Dr. King spoke of Rip van Winkle. We all know that Rip slept for twenty years. But the real point, King said, is that when he had climbed the mountain where he went to sleep, he had passed a sign with a picture of King George III of England. As he climbed back down, this same sign bore the strange new likeness of George Washington. Rip had slept through a great revolution.

You and I, King warned, risk doing the same. Those of us comfortable in our segregated enclaves and middle class lives, we are in danger of sleeping through a great revolution, a revolution of perspective, in which the world has become “geographically one.” What we risk sleeping through is the realization that now we are all in this life together. One world. One people. As Dr. King famously said in that sermon:

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

For several months, against vociferous opposition among his supporters, Black and White, he had been planning a poor people’s march on Washington. The march would bring together all the poor and oppressed of our nation, including Native Americans, Appalachian Whites, and the urban poor, whatever their color and ethnicity. If they would pledge non-violence, he invited them to come to Washington, led by mule-drawn caravans from places like Marks, Mississippi, the poorest county in the country, to insist on their oneness as a human family, and their dignity as human beings. To insist we are all in this life together and no one must be
invisible.

Today, this may seem a platitude. But how many of us really think it’s possible to end poverty? Didn’t Jesus once say that “you always have the poor with you”? (Mk.14:7) Wasn’t the “war on poverty” a failure? But Jesus was not suggesting that we should give up on the poor. His whole ministry was about justice for the poor in every sense of the word. Poverty begins with having less than others. But it’s also about oppression. It’s about being looked down on. It’s about lack of respect. It’s about not being allowed to live out one’s full humanity.

That’s a hard thing for those of us who can take for granted a roof over our heads and food on the table and middle class respect. Yes, we’re ready to stand up for the right to vote, and for non-discrimination in the workplace. We’re ready to stand up for civil marriage. It doesn’t cost us anything, and we can be proud we did the right thing.

But standing up for the poor is not so easy. We know that if we’re going to help, it will cost us. There are all those appeals that come to our mailboxes. There’s no end to them. Do we really want to pay more taxes so the government can help them? We’ve seen what a mess government can make of helping people. And it’s all so complicated. People aren’t just poor. They’re illiterate. They’re addicted. They don’t even have good work habits. They keep on having babies, and the cycle continues. Let’s be honest: who wants them living in our neighborhoods? Can you tell me these thoughts don’t float through the heads of even the most well-intentioned of those of us who are the “haves”?

Standing up for the poor is not so easy. But freedom is indivisible, and Dr. King knew it. And he insisted. At the National Cathedral, he recalled what people had said about his similar insistence on opposing the war in Vietnam:

One day a newsman came to me and said, “Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? … It has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you.”

I looked at him and I had to say, “Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll.” Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus….

There comes a time when [we] must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but [we] must do it because conscience tells [us] it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “We ain’t goin’ to study war no more.”

This was King’s position in standing against the war, and it was his position in standing against poverty. He had looked out from that mountaintop, and seen the Promised Land. He knew that in the Promised Land, there is no oppression, and there is no war, and there is no poverty. He knew that in the Promised Land, no one is invisible, and all of us are sisters and brothers and children of God.

There is nothing new about poverty, Dr. King said. What is new is that we now have the ability to get rid of it. The real question, he said, is whether we have the will. And that’s the question facing you and me, these forty years later. We may never quite reach the Promised Land. But will we even lift our eyes to look out and see it? Will we understand what the kingdom of greatness demands of us? Will we work for it, keep standing up for it, so that we can get a little closer in our time?

Let us build that land. Let us pick up the work which Dr. King left unfinished.