The respite is quick. Doc is back in America, back to the grind.
There are a number of speaking engagements, but the most meaningful one is on December 10 in Montgomery. He is invited to deliver a Sunday sermon at the ninetieth anniversary of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, his original pastorate. The trip to Alabama is awash in nostalgia. This is, after all, where it all began.
Driving through the city on his way to the sanctuary, Doc is startled to see hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan assembled in front of the state capitol. They are preparing a Sunday morning rally. Doc can only sigh.
Everything has changed, yet nothing has changed.
He thinks back a dozen years to his arrival in Alabama. The Montgomery Improvement Association was struggling to find a leader among the city’s black clergy for its impending citywide bus boycott. Many of the older preachers were reluctant to take on the task. Others lacked the skill. Because Doc, at twenty-six, was a fresh face unsullied by hardball city politics, he was viewed as a prime candidate to lead the charge. At first he declined, just as he had similarly withdrawn his name for presidency of the local NAACP. Coretta had recently given birth to Yolanda, their first child. Doc wanted to relish the role of fatherhood and dedicate himself to the spiritual needs of his congregation.
Yet in spite of his initial instinct to tell the boycott organizers no, his conscience compelled him to say yes. That “yes” changed his life and led to a seemingly endless series of brutal challenges that both tested and bolstered his character. The boycott met with not only fierce opposition but imprisonment and threats to his life. When he realized the enormity of the task he had undertaken—and the dangers that it posed to his wife and baby daughter—he wanted to give up. He later rejoiced that he hadn’t, and after a year the Montgomery movement succeeded in integrating the citywide bus system.
But that was then. This is now.
Now he drives past the Klan and, only a few blocks later, arrives at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where he is warmly greeted. He takes his seat in the pulpit beside the elders and, waiting to deliver his sermon, smiles at the memory of the moment when it all turned around—when, back in the days of the boycott, his “no” turned to “yes” and resignation transformed into resolution.
Those were crazy, frightening times. Events surrounding the boycott had turned chaotic. He fought for clarity and composure but found himself overwhelmed by uncertainty. He couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop worrying.
On one such restless evening he was at home in bed with Coretta when the phone rang. Who was calling at midnight?
“Nigger,” said the caller, “we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
Doc’s heart beat wildly. It was more than fear; it was terror. He couldn’t get to sleep. He went into the kitchen to get some coffee. What he really wanted to do was run into the arms of his father and mother, but they were back in Atlanta. He wanted to run back to the university in Boston, where the world seemed more tolerant. He wanted out. He wanted safety. Like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, he wanted anything but to walk this dark and dangerous path before him.
So he did what Jesus did: he prayed.
“Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right; I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now; I’m faltering; I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”
Then the miracle.
The Holy Spirit spoke to his soul and said, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”
Those words are the strength that has sustained him for these twelve tumultuous years. Yet even as Doc prepares to come to the podium to speak love, the Klansmen, led by Grand Dragon James Spears, eviscerate opponents of the Vietnam War and advocates of gun control while mocking the name of “Martin Lucifer King,” just a few blocks away.
Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.
Twelve years ago when he arrived in Alabama, the civil rights movement was an unrealized dream. Segregation was ironclad. Now legal segregation is gone. Discriminatory voting restrictions are gone. But the cost has been huge. Lives have been lost—Medgar Evers, freedom riders, innocent children. The honors have been unexpected: Doc’s picture on the cover of Time magazine, being named the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, gaining unprecedented access to presidents and prime ministers, recognition as an international figure.
The timing of the Klan rally is recognition of another truth: hatred has not gone into hiding. The vicious racist past is alive—right here and now.
When it finally comes time to address the congregation, Doc stays focused on the doubts that plagued him when he first came to Montgomery. In the presence of sinners and saints, he works through his doubts. He speaks to the congregation, even as he speaks to himself.
Our nation is sick with racism. Sick with militarism. Sick with a system that perpetuates poverty. Some fifty million people are poverty-stricken.
How to find hope in the darkness?
He points to First Corinthians and what he calls Paul’s “magnificent trilogy of durability”: faith, hope, and love.
Today hope is his concern—what does it mean and how is it maintained?
He draws a distinction between “magic hope” and “realistic hope.” “Magic hope is sheer optimism” that somehow things automatically improve. “Realistic hope is based on a willingness to face the risk of failure, and embrace an ‘in spite of’ quality.”
He equates the loss of hope with death. “If you lose hope absolutely you die,” he contends. “A hopeless individual is a dead individual.… When you lose hope you lose creativity, you lose rationality.… I was saying to some of my nationalist friends the other day—we were arguing about violence versus non-violence—that the problem is you’ve lost hope.… He who loses hope makes the ugly beautiful and the beautiful ugly. He who loses hope makes the true false and the false true.… Hope is animated and undergirded by faith and love.”
Doc speaks of how hope got black folks through the hell of American history. “More than seventy-five million black people were lost, murdered and died in the midst of that two hundred and some years of slave trading.… Don’t ever romanticize slavery. It’s one of the darkest and most evil periods in the history of the world. But the Negro is still going and he’s going because he never had the disease of ‘giveupitis.’ He knew somehow that there was an agreement with an eternal power and he’d look out and say, ‘You ain’t no nigger. You ain’t no slave, but you’re God’s children.’ ”
Doc turns inward and reflects on his despondency. “Around in Alabama and Mississippi and up in Cleveland and Chicago every now and then I feel discouraged. Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged… feel my work is in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. ‘There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.’ And this is the faith. It’s the faith that will carry us through the dark days ahead.”
Doc has given his final sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and the days ahead are darker than Doc can even imagine. Forces rip apart the country, demons divide his own people, discord gnaws on his own organization—rancor is on the rise.
Rancor resides in the minds of the Klansmen who, as Doc prays for hope, call for violence. That call is echoed by enraged and embittered groups the world over. As 1967 comes to an end, with America raining bombs on North Vietnam, violence is in the air.
In the face of a culture that has less and less interest in his core values, Doc has invoked the God who, as he says, “can make a way out of no way. I know about Him. I know that He can lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roar. I’ve felt sin breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul, but I heard the voice of Jesus saying, ‘Fight on.’ ”
Yet he cannot pretend that in this festive season all is calm, all is bright. He cannot call the impending New Year happy. As never before, the odds are stacked against him. But the odds don’t matter. All that matters is fighting on.
“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” he reads in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Scrutinizing the sociopolitical situation, he realizes that in this coming year the battle will worsen. His enemies will be emboldened. He will make grave personal and professional mistakes. He will break down more than once.
He realizes that he will not survive the battle with human strength alone. And that in reaching for divine sustenance, he will experience fear.
Yet he will keep praying, keep planning. He will keep reaching.