1958
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Martin Luther King Jr. was nervous. It was 1954 and this twenty-five year old was preaching a trial sermon in his bid to become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The previous night he wrestled with uncertainty: "Should I attempt to interest [the congregation] with a display of scholarship? Or should I preach just as I had always done, depending finally on the inspiration of the spirit of God? I decided to follow the latter course. I said to myself over and over again. 'Keep Martin Luther King in the background and God in the foreground and everything will be all right. Remember you are a channel of the gospel and not the source.'"
He got the job.
King could have taken a teaching job in the North, but together he and his wife, Coretta, chose this pastorate in the segregated South. "I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in the little gods that can be destroyed in an atomic age," he preached the following month, "but in the God wdio has been our help in ages past, and our hope for years to come, and our shelter in the time of storm, and our eternal home. That's the God that I'm putting my ultimate faith in."
He was in his new church barely a month when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a Birmingham bus. Three days later he was surprised to be elected head of the newly formed protest movement. At first he wasn't sure that a boycott was a Christian action to take, but remembering Henry Thoreau's comments on civil disobedience, he finally decided that a boycott was simply saying, "We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system."
At a mass meeting of the protesters, he urged, ״ We must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christian in all of our actions. ... It is not enough for us to talk about love. Love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith, [but! standing beside love is always justice and we are only using the tools of justice."
In his autobiography King comments. "It was the Sermon on the Mount.... It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.״ Later King saw how to use "the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence." The next month King was jailed for driving thirty miles an hour in a 25 mph zone. Threatening phone calls increased to twenty or thirty a day, and then his house was bombed.
, ,, Stride toward Freedom is mostly the story of the bus boycott,
! naturally autobiographical in part, and the rest an argument for nonviolence and racial change. King felt that leadership was thrust on him by God and he dare not refuse the mantle. Thus he became the voice and symbol of the nonviolent civil rights movement.
The events in Birmingham and the publication of Stride toward Freedom catapulted this young black pastor into the worldwide spotlight. The nation was a powder keg in those days, but King's commitment to nonviolence kept cooling the situation, even as his commitment to justice kept turning up the heat on the authorities. As this book makes clear, he wasn't making this up. It was the way of Jesus.
In the last chapter, "Where Do We Go from Here?" he calls on the church to change its racial policies. He found it appalling that "the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing, ׳In Christ There Is No East or West.״׳
King will always be remembered for his "I Have a Dream" speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial That's appropriate. While he did not shy away from pointing out the problems of society, he tempered his criticism with a vision of justice, the way life could be if we ran our civilization on godly principles. In 1968, when he was thirty-eight, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.