Peace Be Still: A tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Originally published in The Caribbean Express, a magazine that is no longer in business.

This month America celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the courageous and charismatic leader who did more to lift the burdens of racism from African Americans than any other person of the 20th Century. The outlines of his story are by now well-known to any informed American but they will always bear repeating

Martin Luther King, Jr. was the son of a pastor father and a schoolteacher mother. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. As a child, his friendship with two white children was cut off by their prejudiced parents. At eleven, a white woman used the N-word on the young lad. When the boy and his father, “Daddy King,” went to a shoe store, the clerk tried to shoo them to the back of the shop, telling Daddy King that “We don’t serve colored in the front of the store.” The elder King replied, “If you don’t serve colored in the front of the store, then you don’t serve these colored at all!” Father and son immediately left the place. When Martin was fourteen years old, a teacher of his took him to a speech competition where he won first prize. When the teenager and his teacher boarded the bus back to Atlanta, the bus driver made them give up their seats to white passengers. Later Martin recalled his feelings about this incident: “That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”

Although he didn’t yet know how or when he would do it, the young King made up his mind to fight racism.

He also decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a minister. King was of unusually high intelligence so he was admitted to Morehouse College before even graduating from high school. While there, he learned about Mahatma Gandhi, the man whose peaceful protests won freedom for India; King decided that this was a good model for African Americans to follow. He also met Coretta Scott, the woman who would become his wife and stand by his side through both persecution and glory.

In 1954, King and his new bride went to Montgomery, Alabama where Rev. King became the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Brown v. The Board of Education case that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional.

On December 1, 1955, a seemingly minor incident occurred that would propel the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to fame and permanently change American society for the better. An African American woman named Rosa Parks was sitting at the front of a Montgomery bus. She was very tired after a long day at work. A white man came on board the bus and the bus driver told her to give up her seat to him.

Rosa Parks refused.

The police were called and they arrested her. Parks contacted the NAACP. One of their officials, E. D. Nixon, discussed the matter with Martin Luther King, Jr. The Women’s Political Council helped Nixon and King organize the Montgomery bus boycott.

Despite the fact that most African Americans at the time did not own cars, they did boycott the buses, walking and car-pooling to get around. The boycott lasted for over a year during which Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as the leader of the boycott. His family received many threatening phone calls and their house was bombed (luckily, no one was hurt).

Finally, the US Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery’s policy of bus segregation was unconstitutional. Time magazine put Martin Luther King, Jr. on its cover.

It was during this history-making Montgomery bus boycott that King met Bayard Rustin, a man who would become a close and influential associate. Rustin’s life had been scarred, not only by the oppression inflicted upon African Americans by their white countrymen and women but by the tensions between African Americans and black immigrants from the West Indies.

Bayard Rustin had been born in 1910 into a family of professional caterers and had grown up in a mansion in Pennsylvania. Raised as a devout Quaker, Rustin was an extremely bright boy who received a terrible shock when he was eleven years old. He discovered that his family had, with the best of intentions, lied to him about his origins. He was not the youngest of nine children; rather a woman he had known as an older sister was his mother, the man and woman he had known as Mom and Dad were his grandparents and those he thought brothers and sisters were actually aunts and uncles. Rustin had been born out of wedlock and his family had hoped to spare him the stigma of “illegitimacy.”

The boy also learned that his absent biological father was a West Indian — as was his mother’s boyfriend at the time of these traumatic discoveries. Young Bayard tried to pattern himself after Mom’s boyfriend and in the process picked up the man’s West Indian accent, an accent he would keep for the rest of his life. He also found to his dismay that many African Americans disliked West Indians, finding their accented English funny-sounding and thinking the Caribbean immigrants arrogant.

As a youth growing up in the Great Depression, Rustin was attracted to the Communist Party by that group’s strict policy against racism and joined the Young Communist League. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Party ordered all its members to stop working against segregation because that would divert attention away from the all-important battle with Germany. Rustin could not put any cause above that of the fight against racism and resigned from the party. Then he began working for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). He also became a student of the Gandhian philosophy of social and political change through nonviolent resistance to oppression.

Like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, Rustin lived a life of extraordinary courage. Rustin’s conscience would not permit him to serve in WWII but it also would not allow him to plead his Quaker background and serve out the war in work duty at a hospital. Thus, he went to prison instead.

When he got out, Rustin went back to working against racial discrimination, serving time in jail and getting a vicious beating that knocked out some of his teeth for the cause.

Bayard Rustin was not all politics and seriousness, however. He had a wonderful sense of humor and enjoyed singing and having a drink with his buddies. There is evidence that he was gay during a period when homosexuality had very few public defenders (much less supporters). After being convicted of a same-sex “morals offense,” Rustin resigned from FOR.

He was at a very low point when he heard about the Montgomery bus boycott but he determined to be a part of this vital action and left for Alabama to join it. The dedicated Rustin soon found his way into King’s inner circle. With equal swiftness, Rustin was in hot water with the white authorities. For one thing, he fit the profile of the “outside agitator” that white supremacists loved to blame for African American discontent. For another, he had had an unfortunate encounter with a police officer in which he fibbed — his West Indian accent must have come in handy for once — that he was a reporter working for the French and British newspapers Le Figaro and the Manchester Guardian. Rustin made a quick exit from Montgomery.

Dr. King himself soon left Montgomery for Birmingham, Alabama. There he led African Americans in demonstrations against segregation. King was arrested and jailed but led another march as soon as he was released. This one included many children.

The Birmingham police chief had the peculiarly fitting nickname “Bull” Connor. “Bull” was determined to stop the civil rights movement so he ordered his police officers to set dogs loose on the demonstrators. The cops were joined by firefighters spraying firehoses full blast at the protesters.

Bull Connor’s tactics backfired. Pictures of young people being set upon with firehoses and vicious dogs caused a great wave of sympathy for the African American cause and led President John F. Kennedy to announce that he would propose a law banning segregation in public places.

In the meantime, Bayard Rustin was soon back at King’s side, planning strategy and giving advice. Rustin played an important role in planning the famous March on Washington. On August 28, 1963, many non-blacks joined with African Americans to protest racism. Approximately 250,000 people in all went to the US capitol to demand an end to segregation.

They gathered around the Memorial which had a huge statue of Abraham Lincoln. This site was historically appropriate for two reasons: the descendants of the slaves freed by Lincoln were massed to demand full equality and King was about to deliver a speech that would, along with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, become one of the best-known American speeches of all time.

“I have a dream,” King said, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. . . . I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Despite King’s eloquently described dream of racial harmony and equality, forces of racism and hatred were still strong in the country. Just a few weeks after the March on Washington, an African American church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed and four little girls were murdered in the explosion. A mere three months after King’s stirring speech, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

However, positive things were also on the way. A watershed event occurred in 1964 when, with King present, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. That same year, Dr. King was named Time magazine Man of the Year and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

King continued to lead the civil rights movement. He also spoke out against the war in Vietnam despite the advice of people who felt he should give undivided attention to specifically racial problems and/or believed that doing so was a betrayal of the President who helped enact the Civil Rights Act. In 1968, King was in Memphis, Tennessee supporting a strike by sanitation workers. There he was assassinated on the balcony of the hotel at which he was staying.

A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was apprehended in the murder. Ray confessed and pled guilty. He took back his confession only three days after the guilty plea but was denied a new trial, although he made continuing efforts to get one up until his own death in prison in 1998.

The story of Martin Luther King, Jr. did not end with his death. Many observers believed that a conspiracy, in which Ray may or may not have been involved, was behind his murder.

Some even speculated that high officials of the United States government were involved in King’s assassination. This troubling possibility is supported by some sobering information that has come to light about how American officials persecuted the civil rights leader during his lifetime.

Dr. King was not a plaster saint but a flesh-and-blood human being. He was not ahead of his time in his treatment of women as a group. When Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison proposed Ella Baker as ad hoc staff commander for the Crusade for Citizenship, King balked at the suggestion because he was not sure a woman would be as effective as a man in a leadership position. However, Rustin and Levison persuaded him that Baker was the best person for the post.

Moreover, King’s personal life included some unsavory elements in his relationships with females. The FBI invaded Dr. King’s privacy and threatened to expose his sexual promiscuity to the public in the belief that humiliating him would stop the movement for justice that he represented.

The King family has steadfastly maintained that a conspiracy of one sort or another was behind the assassination. Their view was recently vindicated when, for the first time, the evidence in the King case was heard by a jury. King’s family filed a lawsuit against Loyd Jowers, a man who confessed to having acted as a go-between for people who wanted Dr. King murdered and a hit man (who was not Ray). The family asked only $100 from the elderly and sick Jowers because their interest was in airing out the case. The jury found that there was a conspiracy and returned a judgment against Jowers.

In the decades since King’s assassination, his stature has grown. In 1986, the US Congress set aside the third Monday of every January as a national holiday in his honor.

Although only the American territories celebrate his birthday as a national holiday, Dr. King is revered throughout the Caribbean. According to John Kozyn, consultant at the Embassy of Haiti in Washington, DC, “There’s a street in the capital Port-au-Prince that is named Avenue Martin Luther King, Jr.”

O’Neil Hamilton, Director of Public Affairs for the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, DC, says, “King is made reference to in Jamaica quite a lot given the fact that his work impacted on a section of the African Diaspora which is the African American community in the US and Jamaicans have a historical and natural affinity with African Americans. When we talk about liberty, freedom and enfranchisement in the Americas, we will certainly mention the life of Martin Luther King. We recognize him and others like Malcolm X for their work in civil rights. Jamaicans often honor King for encouraging people around the world to fight and struggle nonviolently for their rights.”

The chief danger in assessing the life of the great Martin Luther King, Jr. is that we may mistake him for a “moderate” because of his rejection of violence and of any kind of racial antagonism as when he said “I will never teach any of you to hate white people” and insisted that the civil rights movement was a struggle between “justice and injustice” rather than between white and black people. However, when others counseled patience, King responded with Why We Can’t Wait, a book demanding immediate racial equality. If we consider the changes that have occurred in America because of the movement King led, as well as the changes he helped inspire throughout the world, we must conclude that this peaceful man was one of the most revolutionary leaders to ever walk the earth.