I was barely 13 at the time. I can still picture my room, the radio by my bed turned on, listening to the news out of Memphis. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated. They played his old speeches, especially the one from the March on Washington. I'd been too young back in '63 to follow any of that or much of the rest of his life. But his death, sudden and violent as it was, left an indelible impression on me.
There were other tragedies in that year of violence - the war playing out in Vietnam, the urban ghettoes burning as white and black alike spurned King's message of peace and reconciliation, Bobby Kennedy's assassination, and the whole cultural convulsion sifting our nation. But of all those events, it is King's death with which I most connected.
Looking back I'm still not sure why. I wasn't black. I was poor, though not without resources of which to avail myself. But I had already developed a sense that while life isn't fair, it doesn't mean that we can't and shouldn't fight its unfairness.
My high school had its token race riot three or so years later, but other than an African-American family or two in my church, mine was a white world. Even so, as a student of history and culture, I was becoming increasingly sensitized to the huge shadow of racism which had for far too long lain across our land. And I was becoming increasingly agitated at the passivity with which that racism had been chronically, officially and popularly greeted by people who supposedly took literally the words of the Apostle Paul that there is to be "neither Jew nor Greek" in the body of Christ. I was coming to see that the Gospel was comprehensive and universal in its appeal, that no one should be left out of hearing or experiencing the Good News, and that this good news required both the declaration and the demonstration of God's love.
Somehow that youthful passion for justice, that all people everywhere deserve to be set free by God's grace and power, grew into a decade-long study of racism in my own Pentecostal heritage through both my master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation, and into a doctoral degree in Theological Ethics, ever pursuing what it means to live out what I believe. Evangelicals, among whom Pentecostals had finally come home to roost after an uneasy birth out of Fundamentalism, were good about knowing what they believed. They were far less certain about how that belief system was supposed to transform their "living out".
I moved to Waco, Texas, at the impressionable and idealistic age of 21, as that part of the South was still sorting out the Federally-imposed civil rights advances of the '50s and '60s. Waco at the time was as yet brutally ugly in its racism, and the church, my church, was no exception. Even as late as the '90s, one of "my" local congregations was changing its name out of fear that it would attract certain unnamed undesirables (the church having originally been named after the street on which it was located, a street that bore witness to Texas' Hispanic heritage).
Among the many diamonds I discovered in Waco was Toliver's Chapel Missionary Baptist Church and its pastor and my classmate, the Reverend Dr. Cleophus J. LaRue, now a professor of homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary. Cleo and I became Sunday and classroom friends. While his traditional Black church world was a cross-cultural experience for me, it was no less so than Texas itself was.
I moved on, continually seeking ways in which the Gospel could speak prophetically and pastorally to a deeply fallen world. My path took me far from racism in America to the injustice of people groups around the world remaining out of reach of the Gospel and to the systemic poverty of Northwest China's rural and ethnic masses.
And now I find myself back in the USA, this time in a new hometown in America's Northwest, once again challenging society's injustices and calling the Church to proclaim God's justice to all peoples. Oppression, whether spiritual, physical, emotional, or social, is that which hinders people from worshipping their Maker. Which is why their Maker has always said that we who have been freed are to be about His business of setting His people free, so that, as with the Israelites liberated from Egyptian bondage, we all might freely worship Him.
Today Martin Luther King is referenced in all kinds of causes, from anti-abortion to anti-government, by people who a generation ago might well have linked King with forces destroying our so-called American way of life and who remain awkwardly uneasy with his long shadow. As human as the rest of us, yet more energized than most, King did and continues to embody in his legacy the fight for justice in the name of Jesus, a cause I firmly believe with all my heart is worth fighting for.
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