His Word Still Burns the Center of the Sun

Monday – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

When I was 17, my father took me to Charleston to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. The year was 1967, the summer before King died (July 30), and Esau Jenkins, a successful Black businessman and key civil rights figure in his own right, was sponsoring a workshop on John’s Island. We arrived the day before, spent the night at Jenkins’s school, and the morning discussing issues that the activists in attendance were experiencing, and then went into the city that afternoon for King’s speech/sermon.

A lot of the details are hazy. At the workshop, I remember someone talking about using the non-violent tactics of Saul Alinsky to pressure banks to invest in minority communities. I remember singing freedom songs. Someone was recording the affair and I would love to get my hands on the cassettes. As it was, I was too young to really know what was going on.

I remember King’s speech, however. Charleston County Hall was surrounded by national guardsmen. Local officials were sure there would be violence, seeing no difference between King and the rioters who had burned Newark and Detroit a few weeks before. But there was not even a hint of anything amiss. In fact, it was a pretty tame crowd. Many people had come straight from church as most of the women wore hats, white gloves and white dresses and the men coats and ties.

In fact, the words I remember most from King were his pushback against those activists to his left. Using the call and response style, which I’d never encountered before, he pointed out that the Black communities were the real victims of the riots, not Whites. He noted that he was against violence, whether in America or in Vietnam. The moment I remember most is when he said, “Therefore I say to you, not Burn, Baby, Burn, but Build, Baby, Build.” As slogans go, it wasn’t the catchiest. It revealed that he felt himself outflanked by Black radicals. They saw a difference between him and them, even if white segregationists didn’t.

I witnessed the segregationist mentality the following spring after King was shot. I remember walking into my American history class at the Sewanee Military Academy, taught by an ardent segregationist, who said, “He lived by the sword and he died by the sword.” I didn’t get up and walk out, as maybe I should have. I just pretended that I hadn’t heard him.

Anyway, today we remember a man who gave his life to make our country better. King saw the best in us, even when we couldn’t see the best in ourselves. As he said at one point in the talk I heard, “Ye shall know the truth,” to which the audience came back with, “and the truth shall make you free.” Gwendolyn Brooks understands all this in the poem she wrote about him:

Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Gwendolyn Brooks

A man went forth with gifts.

He was a prose poem.
He was a tragic grace.
He was a warm music.

He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes.
His ashes are
     reading the world.

His Dream still wishes to anoint
     the barricades of faith and of control.

His word still burns the center of the sun
     above the thousands and the
     hundred thousands.

The word was Justice. It was spoken.

So it shall be spoken.
So it shall be done.