"The Journey to Justice: Race"

Isaiah 49:1-7

A Sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

January 16, 2005

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both prophets who spoke in the tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and yes even Jesus. They spoke words that would unsettle, unnerve, unseat and undermine those who had taken dignity away from people for too long. You and I are recipients of the victories which their struggles wrought. Many of us remain victims of an increasingly racist society. Oh, we don’t like to admit it, but racism has become in vogue again. We don’t call it racism. We call it homeland security or tax reform or talk radio. We celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday, which ought to give us some credit. But it can only give us credit if we choose not to ignore the complexity and the power of his message.

Think of the evidence of racism today. Prince Harry wore a swastika to a costume party. His great-grandfather convinced Britain to fight the Nazi’s and he thinks a racist emblem is an okay thing to wear at a costume party.

Somalis are being deported, including activists. When they arrive in Somalia, they disappear, never to be heard from again. We deport many who are of another race out of suspicion based upon race.

We imprison people based upon their nationality. We abuse prisoners. We degrade people because of the way they look and the way they talk.

Affirmative Action is passe, say even those who have benefited from the program.

I find myself wondering what Martin would say. But I also find myself wondering what Malcolm would say. We need to hear from both of them on Martin Luther King day, for you cannot understand one without the other. How are we doing on our journey to racial justice?

Much of the materiel for this sermon is derived from an excellent book written by a former professor of mine at Union Seminary named James Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1991)

I must admit that I have always been a lot more comfortable with the words and teachings of Martin Luther King than with Malcolm X.

I have been quite familiar with Martin Luther King for as long as I can remember. My knowledge of Malcolm X until recently was limited. What I did hear was reported by whites and was almost always negative. Thank God for Spike Lee and James Cone.

They have helped make me a better student of history and religion. I have a deep respect for Malcolm X and his integrity, his focus on justice and his incredible faith. His analysis of urban reality hurts so much because it is so true.

Martin and Malcolm were both Baptist preachers’ kids, but they grew up on different sides of the tracks.

Martin Luther King grew up in the south in a middle-class family who went to the same church every Sunday. His family was strong and that support urged him to get the best education possible. He entered Moorehouse, the "Harvard" of black colleges at age 15. From there he went to Crozier Theological Seminary, now affiliated with Colgate Rochester, which was steeped in the white liberal tradition of the north.

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, NE, the last of 7 children. His mother was from Grenada and was raped by his biological, white father. Malcolm’s other father, Earl Little was an itinerant preacher. The Littles were followers of Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. The Ku Klux Klan firebombed their house. His parents beat him. His father was eventually killed. His mother lost control of her emotional state after this and Malcolm and the other children were shipped off to foster homes. Malcolm would later write in his autobiography, "I truly believe that if ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours. We wanted and tried to stay together…But the welfare, the courts and their doctor, gave us the one-two-three punch…we were state children, court wards, the judge had the full say-so over us."

James Cone speaks of this part of Malcolm’s life this way: "With no parental love to affirm his personhood and to instill in him the self-confidence that he was as good as anybody else, he, though gifted and popular, did not have the emotional strength to cope with a white society that refused to recognize his humanity."(45)

Martin Luther King could hardly remember his parents arguing, unlike Malcolm’s parents. Malcolm’s call for a strict and powerful family was one of his legacies as he got older.

Although Malcolm excelled in his all-white schools, his teachers did not encourage his desires to be a lawyer. They steered him toward carpentry because blacks just weren't lawyers. By fifteen, Martin Luther King was already attending Moorehouse and Malcolm had dropped out of school and lived in inner-city squalor. Soon he would be in prison, not unlike many young men of African descent today.

In many ways, Martin Luther King was born to dream. He was the exception to the rule and proved that a black man could do the best he could, get a good education and succeed in the American dream of prosperity. All of this led to Martin Luther King dreaming of the day that all people could live together in harmony and that if we could put away violence and hatred, a new day would be upon us.

Malcolm X, on the other hand, was born to see a nightmare. In the inner city, the problems of poverty were so deep and so cyclical, there seemed to be no better metaphor than a nightmare. Many inner-city blacks resisted Martin Luther King’s integrationaist dreams. James Cone wrote: "…since the masses in then ghettos saw no evidence of political order that recognized their humanity or any moral conscience among white people, an appeal to integration and nonviolence sounded like a trick to delude and disarm poor black so whites would not have to worry about a revengeful response to their brutality." (54)

Malcolm X found his meaning in life through his prison conversion to the Black Muslim faith as espoused by Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm educated himself in prison.

In the 50’s Martin took to the streets throughout the south to fight segregation and to advocate for voting rights.

Malcolm preached to the northern inner-city African Americans. He told them that they were culturally dead and alienated from their past and from each other. Freedom, unity, love and knowledge, Malcolm insisted, were bound together as interdependent elements in black people’s struggle to make a creative future for themselves. (p.105)

It was during this time that both Martin and Malcolm perfected their rhetoric. Both had large followings and both were victimized by the white press which told the rest of the world what to think about them.

When Martin received the Nobel Peace Prized in 1964, Malcolm said of King, "At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a communist. Then the black Muslims came alone and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King."

What we tend to remember most about Martin Luther King was his "I Have a Dream" speech and his call for nonviolence. What we tend to remember about Malcolm X was his call to arms and his biting critique of Martin Luther King’s dream in the midst of the American nightmare. What we tend not to know, however, is that both Martin and Malcolm had a great deal of respect for each other.

And by the time they were both cut down by assassin’s bullets, Malcolm in 1965 and Martin in 1968, they were in the process of moving toward each other.

A real turning point for Malcolm was his pilgrimage to Mecca, the most holy site for all followers of Islam. The annual Hajj will take place this coming week and millions of Muslims of all nationalities and races will converge at Abraham’s ancient temple. There he came to understand the difference between true Islam and the brand he had taught coming from the messenger, Elijah Muhammad. He also traveled to Africa and sought to align himself with the struggles of all of humanity, he saw the link between poor African Americans and the poor throughout the world. Malcolm totally rethought his anti-white theology and sought to align himself with the suffering of the entire world. Malcolm began to attend civil rights events, something he had strongly criticized before, to the joy of some but to the suspicion of most civil rights leaders. Malcolm tried to meet with Martin, but Martin avoided him, so as not to confuse his followers about his position on nonviolence.

By the time he was killed in 1965, Malcolm X began to dream of a new existence for all people, not just black people. He was in the process of revising his worldview and he was becoming much more convinced of the need to struggle together to bring justice in this world. Who knows where he might have led us had he lived longer.

For Martin Luther King, the high points in his ideological and practical ministry happened in 1964. Throughout years of nonviolent effort, he was able to get the Civil Rights bill and the Voting Rights bills to pass which ended lunch counter and bus segregation primarily in the south and finally got voting rights for southern blacks. For his efforts, and partly for his opposition to Malcolm X, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

But then, as Malcolm X predicted, the chickens came home to roost. The Watts riots erupted leaving 34 dead in 1965 followed by urban violence though many major cities. The pressure cooker of poverty and powerlessness exploded leaving many of our cities in ruins.

Martin Luther King went to Watts and was amazed to find out that many young people had never heard of him. He had been working so hard on the civil rights and voting rights bills, that he had ignored, despite Malcolm’s pleadings, the economic problems of the inner cities. King’s successes did not mean a hill of beans in Watts.

Martin Luther King realized, perhaps for the first time that economic justice, not racial justice was the focus of northern blacks. Martin Luther King had always seen a link between the two, but his southern upbringing simply did not prepare him for northern urban reality. After Watts, Martin concluded that without economic justice, the right to a job or income, talk about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was nothing but a figment of one’s political imagination (Cone 223)

Martin started to talk like Malcolm. He declared the ghetto a system of internal colonization. "The purpose of the slum," he said in a speech at the Chicago Freedom Festival, "is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness...the slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn."

Martin started talking about black power, piggy-backing the black pride which Malcolm had worked so hard to instill among his people. And just as whites could not stand Malcolm, the same white liberals who marched with Martin began to distance themselves because the pressure cooker was building more and more.

Is it any wonder, then, that when we think of Martin Luther King, our revisionist history has given us the historic "I have a dream" speech and not his later critique of this land of ours in a nightmare?

So I want to lift up to you two people, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Both have vital words to say to us as we look at today’s world. Both follow the tradition of the prophets. And a prophet, although inspired by God, is nothing more than a faithful servant of God. People in dominant positions like to point out flaws in Malcolm and Martin. People in dominant positions like to point out flaws in prophets in order to shift the focus from their prophetic message. We need to remember the message of these prophetic people.

We need to remember what happened to them and we need to create a future consistent with God’s dreams for us, taking into account the nightmares which are alive and well today.

May we have the courage to speak with the strength and conviction and analysis of Martin and Malcolm, for we remember what the prophet Isaiah said, "YWHW called me from the womb, from the body of my mother God named me. God made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of thy hand was I hid."

Martin and Malcolm leave us with a legacy of reaching beyond the limits that society had previously put upon each and every one of us.

They both advocated unity. By the end of their lives, they both advocated a vision of all people working toward economic justice, which is interconnected with racial and sexual justice.

As Christians, we celebrate the one who came that we might have life and have it abundantly. But that we is a universal we and not a personal we. The abundance is the stuff of justice. We can’t truly dream until we have acknowledged the nightmare. That same Christ is the one who also said that when one part of the body hurts, we all hurt.

That same Christ is the one who dreams of something better for all of us. We can dream of that day, too, as long as we never, never settle for the nightmare which is still very much alive and well here today.

So let our analysis be astute.

Let us find ways to work together across the divides of culture to preserve the God-given rights of all people. Let us look at our world and ask what Martin and Malcolm would say. And then let us ask what they would have us do.

With all of us working together, the day may come when all of God’s children would join hands and sing in the words of the spiritual, "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last."