Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam. The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace. —Coretta King This article is part of a series on human rights forebears.  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived a life beyond the ordinary and writing about him is challenging.  His life made the world that came after him better.  This article will not do justice to his contribution.  Nonetheless, as with previous articles, the aim is to learn what Martin Luther King teaches us for the human rights issues of today.  The focus of this article will be on Martin Luther King’s thought, mainly as expressed in his recorded speeches, rather than on the civil rights movement as a whole. In popular media, Martin Luther King is projected almost solely as a leader of the civil rights movement.  This of course he was, and it was central to his work.  But the picture is incomplete.  Other aspects of his thought include the spiritual reservoir from which he drew; his advocacy of nonviolent methods; his profound belief in the interconnectedness of all human beings and his advocacy of peace. He is a figure who stands at the birth of the world in which we now live.  His life and work marked a watershed.  In our world, racism is a condemned ideology.  We are so used to this reality that we may unconsciously project our realities back to the world as it was in his time.  Over and over we hear Martin Luther King’s words echoed in our popular media: “I have a dream“.  We enjoy the benefits of the translation of Martin Luther King’s dream into reality.  As a civil rights leader, he worked for, and gave his life to end racial segregation and racism in the United States.  His work was part of a global trend which has rejected the ideology of racism.  While racism still exists in the world, while it is still virulent and hateful, it is an ideology of the past, not the future. Martin Luther King’s human rights work was deeply motivated by what he drew from his personal history and commitment as a Christian leader.  This source can be seen in how he conceived of the struggle to contribute to a more just world, and as a spiritual reservoir which gave strength and resilience to his work.  His adoption of the methods of nonviolence to pursue civil rights goals is an important aspect of what he did.  A further aspect of his life that attracts less attention than it ought, is his advocacy of peace.  This is one of the main pieces of unfinished work which he left us.  While we may be tempted to think of these dimensions as separate, it is likely that for him, they were part of one integral whole.  All of these aspects belong together.  For example, his advocacy for peace built on his advocacy for human rights, and he explained it, as a necessary extension of the work he did in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King lived from 1928 until his assassination on 4 April 1968.  His death, along with the killings of John and Robert Kennedy in the space of a few years brought to an end an era of visionary progressive leadership in the United States. Before looking further at his life and thought, a review of the changes associated with the Civil Rights Movement, give a sense of the scope of the transformation to which Martin Luther King contributed.  The following are pieces of legislation designed to address the injustices that were among the fruits of the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, colour or national origin in employment and public accommodation.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 protected the right of all citizens to vote.  The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 opened immigration to the United States to non-Europeans and the Fair Housing Act of 1965 banned discrimination in the sale and rental of private housing. Each item of legislation addressed a real and deep field of injustice, most that were particularly experienced by African Americans.  Martin Luther King’s words capture some of these profound denials, in ways that such a list can never capture. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. The oppression the civil rights movement addressed was as pervasive and profound as any in human history. As a civil rights leader, Martin Luther’s achievement is of course captured in his “I have a dream” speech of 28 August 1968.  It is so well-known that it hardly needs repetition.  As a speaker he was masterful, but that mastery was not only in respect of words, it was in respect of ideas.  He framed the civil rights movement as a universal movement for the fulfilment of the accepted but unrealised values of the society to which he belonged.  In doing so he enabled those around him to see and conceive of the civil rights movement not as an African-American movement solely concerned with African-American rights – but rather a universal movement concerned with the realisation of deeply shared human values and aspirations.  In its fullest sense his vision of justice included all human beings. Martin Luther King Jr. – What role did Christianity play in his civil rights advocacy? Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta Georgia, the second son of Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. Martin Luther King Jr. was by vocation a Baptist minister.  He was in the fourth generation of his family to take up this vocation.  It is impossible to fully appreciate Martin Luther King’s work without understanding the role that Christian thought and inspiration played in his advocacy of human rights. Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham prison to fellow Christian clergymen gives insight to the role his religious commitment played in generating and sustaining his commitment to work for justice. Further, the people from whom he came, the African Americans who struggled against centuries of slavery and racism, drew from deep spiritual and human reservoirs in the long and bitter journey from slavery, through oppression and segregation, before the civil rights reforms were won. In setting out why he was in Birmingham he explicitly drew on a ‘prophetic role’. “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eight century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns … so I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my home town.” In explaining the nonviolent methods he practised, criticism of which he was responding to, he wrote: “We have waited more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.” He drew on biblical precedents for civil disobedience to the law, “on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake“.  Human rights, as he conceived them, do not depend on the decision of any human agency.  As a consequence, they can never be overridden by any human decision.  It is a perspective which in the final analysis places human rights beyond the reach of any tyrant, no matter how powerful, and beyond the reach of any rationalisation offered by the powerful that claims a justification for the oppression of human beings. In thinking about Martin Luther King’s Christianity, we would again miss something significant to his human rights advocacy if we didn’t consider how his spiritual practice was engaged in that work.  The role that prayer played in Martin Luther King’s work, is captured in a recollection from his wife Coretta King. Prayer was a wellspring of strength and inspiration during the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout the movement, we prayed for greater human understanding. We prayed for the safety of our compatriots in the freedom struggle. We prayed for victory in our nonviolent protests, for brotherhood and sisterhood among people of all races, for reconciliation and the fulfillment of the Beloved Community. For my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. prayer was a daily source of courage and strength that gave him the ability to carry on in even the darkest hours of our struggle. I remember one very difficult day when he came home bone-weary from the stress that came with his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In the middle of that night, he was awakened by a threatening and abusive phone call, one of many we received throughout the movement. On this particular occasion, however, Martin had had enough. After the call, he got up from bed and made himself some coffee. He began to worry about his family, and all of the burdens that came with our movement weighed heavily on his soul. With his head in his hands, Martin bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud to God: “Lord, I am taking a stand for what I believe is right. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I have nothing left. I have come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” Later he told me, “At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear a voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth; and God will be at our side forever.’” When Martin stood up from the table, he was imbued with a new sense of confidence, and he was ready to face anything.  (Coretta King – Standing in the Need of Prayer) If one happens not to share Martin Luther King’s faith, what meaning can be drawn from what … Continue reading Martin Luther King Jr – Civil Rights Leader and Peace Advocate