UUs and the Civil Rights Movement

A Sermon by Bernest Cain

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday June 25, 2006

I have struggled to bring you a sermon today that would be from my heart and soul.  I decided to just search out again some of the connections many feel helped Martin Luther King develop the ideas that helped him lead one of the most important liberating movements in world history.  I hope some of my studies will be as helpful to you as they have been to me.

Dr. Martin Luther King came to the leadership of the Civil Rights movement through several major twists of fate.  From all accounts, he never had a vision or idea that he would fall into the leadership of the Civil rights movement.  He was a young highly educated minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama for only a year and a half before he was elected to head the Montgomery Improvement Association.  Some say he was elected to lead the response, because some of the other more senior and established pastors in Montgomery were jealous of each other.  It happened quickly, and Dr. King was certainly caught off guard.  The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat to a white man.  After the success of the bus boycott in Montgomery, King was thrust into the leadership of the national Civil Rights Movement. 

 He had not planned to be a national leader, but he had spent many years of study preparing his heart and mind.  When his time came to lead, he was ready.  He always felt that Blacks in the south were ready for a change and would have torn off the bondage of racism even if he were not there. 

 I wonder if the changes would have been less bloody if anyone else had led the movement.  If Dr. King had not been educated in the doctrines of nonviolent struggle, I wonder how long it would have taken to see things change in the South and across this country.  No matter how angry some of the black people and those whites who stood with them got at the brutality and ignorance of southern racism, King always demanded strict allegiance to the principles of nonviolent protest.  He felt the power of nonviolent resistance evidentially gave the power to the oppressed and took the moral power from the oppressor.  By holding to these principles, he was holding to a long history of moral and civil disobedience against unjust laws.

 In his book, Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story he talks about the influences on his life and philosophy.  Like most of us, he credits his strong family life, his religious upbringing, his personal experiences, and his education for many of his views.  His father was the long-term minister of the prominent Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia where he was later the co-pastor with his dad while he served as the Chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  His father, who had been the President of the Atlanta NAACP, wielded great influence in the black and also the white community.  His father and mother talked to him about the terrible injustices of segregation, and instilled in him a sense of self-respect.  His mother always told him he should feel a sense of “somebodiness” but that on the other hand he had to go out and face a system that stared him in the face every day saying you are “less than,” you are “not equal to.” She reminded him daily: “You are as good as anyone.”

 As a young man in high school, it was clear that he had a real ability to speak.  He won a major oratorical contest with a speech entitled “The Negro and the Constitution.”  After the joy of winning, he and his teacher were forced by a cursing bus driver to stand 90 miles on a bus because white passengers who got on after they did by law could have the seats.  Even though he had been raised in the better part of the black community and was protected some ways, he experienced numerous blatant acts of brutality and injustices against blacks in Atlanta.  During a summer job in Connecticut, he had taught a Sunday school class in an all-white church, had been free to eat in any restaurants and go anywhere he wanted.  He never forgot that he rode on an integrated train back from New York to Washington D. C., only to be forced to change to a Jim Crow car to continue the trip to Atlanta.  He experienced racism first-hand almost every day he lived in the South.

 He attended mostly public schools, but he also got to attend a special school called the Atlanta University Laboratory High School and was a top student in his class.  By the time he finished the eleventh grade, Morehouse College, where three generations of Kings had attended college, was open to some students who had not finished high school.  He entered Morehouse College at the age of fifteen, mainly because he had skipped one grade and his last year of high school.  He remembers having to work extra hard, because he was not prepared to read at college level.  He majored in sociology, had an active social life, was a B- to C+ student, and he lived at home as a college student.

 Like many of us, he began to question his fundamentalist religion upbringing and could not square his religion with that belief.  While at Morehouse College, he began studying the writings of Henry David Thoreau and his view of social change in a history of philosophy class.  He was especially impressed with Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience,” and he felt an inner urge calling him to serve society.

 Influence of Thoreau and his Concept of Civil Disobedience

Thoreau was educated at Harvard and became an early powerful American intellectual.  He was a close friend and follower of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his movement of ministers called Unitarians.  William Ellery Channing, the chief apostle of New England Unitarianism, was only a child when in 1785 when King’s chapel in Boston eliminated the doctrine of the Trinity.  For the next fifty years the movement went on, separating the Congregation churches in New England into Trinitarian and Unitarian.

Emerson and Thoreau became the fathers, through their writings, of the Transcendentalist movement in the early Unitarian religion.  Opposed to the rationalists’ Unitarian religion of his day, Emerson in his book Nature developed the idea of mysticism.  Thoreau sums up Emerson’s mysticism with this statement: “Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,-all egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eye-ball.  I am nothing.  I see all.  The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”

Like Emerson, Thoreau studied the Bhagavad-Gita and other great Hindu works to help him understand the mystical contemplation of the Hindu yogi.  He felt that at times, he was almost a Hindu yogi.  In his classic book, Walden, he almost seems like he is reaching the mystical contemplation of the Hindu yogi.  He wrote that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”  He spent a small part of his time making lead-pencils, carpentering, and surveying, to meet his basic needs-he spent the rest of his year observing nature, thinking, and writing. 

Although he was mystic who never married, never joined a church, refused to pay his taxes to a corrupt government, and was a solitary naturalist, he was also a man of passion and he put his passionate views into social actions.  He helped free or run away slaves and lectured against a country who would allow a man to be a slave because of the color of his skin.  The conflict over slavery drew him from his mystic solitary to become a leading voice before the Civil War against slavery. 

Thoreau was passionately against slavery and the manufactured war against Mexico.  Some writers felt he was against the Mexican War partly because he felt it would be yet another slave state.  He refused to pay his local poll tax and was finally put in jail.  From this experience, he wrote the essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which calls on honorable men to resist a government that allows unjust laws.  He wrote, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”  Thoreau readily accepted punishment-a jail sentence-for his disobedience. 

Thoreau’s essay inspired young Mahatma Gandhi to lead a plan of noncooperation and later civil disobedience for the “coolies” in South Africa and to win independence from British rule in India.  Much of what Gandhi did in South Africa and India became the standard for Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights campaign in the United States. 

In spite of King’s concerns with the emotionalism, the shouting and stamping, of much Negro religion, their naive fundamentalism, and their lack of knowledge about modern liberal theology or biblical criticism; as a senior in college he decided to enter the ministry.  At the age of 19 he entered the liberal Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and began a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil.

 Influence of Social Reform Philosophers and the Social Gospel

He studied the great social philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, Lock, and Marx.  He felt he learned from each, but he was especially drawn to learn how Karl Marx’s views had such broad appeal.  He summarizes in his autobiography his evaluation of Marxism and traditional capitalism.  He was critical of Marxism for three main reasons:  1. He rejected their materialistic interpretation of history which did not accept the creative power of God in history; 2. He was never comfortable with the ethical relativism of communism and their rejection of fixed moral principles; and 3. He rejected communism’s political totalitarianism which placed the needs of the state above the individual civil rights of men.  In spite of his rejection of communism, he did feel it made some good points about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty.  Marx, King thought, revealed the danger of traditional capitalism to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.  King felt that the capitalism can lead to a practical materialism that is just as pernicious as the materialism taught by communism.  He felt historical capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise.  He felt the Kingdom of God was a synthesis of the needs of the social and the needs of the individual. 

King like many other major liberal theologians felt any religion that professes concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums and social conditions that strangle them, is morally stagnant.  He saw his job as a minister to be both the changing of the souls of individuals so their societies may be changed, and the changing of societies so that the individual soul will have a change.  He states in his autobiography, “I am a profound advocate of the social gospel.”

Influence of Gandhi and his Tactics of Civil Disobedience

While in Crozer seminary, King heard a sermon on the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the power of love to change the minds of oppressors and society.  He left the meeting and went straight to get anything he could get from books and articles about Gandhi. Up to this time, King says he thought the religious concepts of Jesus to “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies” worked only on an individual basis, but would not work when racial groups or nations were in conflict.  In Gandhi, he found a philosophy of love and nonviolence which fit with his Christian ethics and became a major tool in King’s leadership for civil rights.

Mohandas K. Gandhi came from an important and influential Indian family, although they were never wealthy.  His father served as prime minister in three small states, but it was his deeply religious mother who instilled in him the strong ethics of her religion and the power of love.  He was a shy small boy, but he excelled at school.  As was the custom in India, he entered an arranged marriage at the age of thirteen and had a child a few years after that.  His family was a member of a high caste in India that would not let their members travel abroad, but Gandhi persuaded his mother to allow him to travel to London to study law, even though he became an outcast to his caste. 

In England he bought a Bible from a friend and was especially impressed with the New Testament, not the Old Testament, and the Sermon on the Mount. In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote that the “Sermon on the Mount went straight to my heart.  I compared it with the Gita.  The verses, ‘But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.  And if any man takes away thy coat let him have thy cloke too,’ delighted me beyond measure. . . My young mind tried to unify the teachings of the Gita, The Light of Asia, and the Sermon on the Mount.”

Because he was shy and inexperienced, he had a hard time getting law business when he got back to India.  He again left his wife and two small boys to go to South Africa to represent a group of Indian Muslim merchants who were in a difficult legal conflict.  He left India in 1893 as an urbane lawyer and finally returned to India in 1914 as a changed man who never wore a shirt and tie again for the rest of his life.  He spent 21 years challenging the treatment of Indians and other colors in South Africa.  While in South Africa, he first became interested in the writings of Emerson and later on the writings of Thoreau.  He began printing articles from Thoreau in a newspaper he founded and published when he was not involved with major legal disputes as an attorney.  He quoted Thoreau at length in his speeches and articles to get the Indians to stand against the abuse they were taking from the unjust laws and practices. 

Gandhi was beaten often and ended up in prison many times because he was the leader of most of the demonstrations against the racist laws of South Africa.  He traveled to London several times to put his case directly to the British public who controlled South Africa and the world press.  In 1914 success finally came; the Indian Relief Bill was passed in South Africa, and Gandhi felt it was time to return to India.  He was convinced that his method of peaceful civil disobedience which had worked successful in South Africa could also be successful against the unjust and cruel bonds of the British in India.

Over the next 30 years, he again and again used his method of civil disobedience to fight unjust British laws and oppression.  He was again beaten many times and spent long periods of time in British jails.  But now, he was a leader respected all around the world, and the British hated every time he challenged their unfair laws with demonstrations. That did not stop them from putting him in jail and killing many of his followers.  Every time someone was beaten or killed, the British Empire looked worse in world opinion.  In almost every speech he made or article he wrote he quoted from Thoreau, the Sermon on the Mount, the Koran, or the Gita.  He brought the huge British Empire shame every time he pointed out the cruelty and the unjust rule of the British.  Finally, the British had enough and gave independence to the country of India without any type of armed resistance in 1947.  Only four months later, Gandhi was murdered by an extremist Hindu who did not think Gandhi was favoring the Hindu side in the Indian Civil War enough. 

Dr. King had a large picture of Gandhi both in his office and in his home dining room.  Clearly as Dr. King became more involved in the civil rights movement, he looked more to his spiritual mentor Gandhi.  One of the high points of his life was when he went to India and saw first-hand the poverty Gandhi was fighting against.  He came back to the United States determined to do more for the poor both black and white.

Making Nonviolent Resistance Central to the Civil Rights Movement 

During the first big bus boycott in Montgomery when he was discouraged or questioning his approach of nonviolence, he would read Thoreau and spend hours talking with people who had been in India with Gandhi or who had studied all of his tactics.  Although Dr. King tried to center his powerful civil rights message primary to the Sermon on the Mount to reach his mainly religious audiences, he continued to quote Thoreau and Gandhi liberally.

As the civil rights movement continued, many black leaders, including Malcolm X and The Black Panthers, questioned his methods of nonviolent resistance and felt it was not working fast enough.  Dr. King tried to work with everyone who wanted to end racism or economic oppression, but he held on to his central message of nonviolent resistance and democracy.  Some of his toughest days were when young frustrated angry blacks started riots and broke his pledge of nonviolence.  He felt that they were just playing into the stereotypes of the oppressors and racists.  When riots broke out, as they did on occasions when the marchers were unprepared for the unfair hostility from onlookers and police, Dr. King felt the movement was leaving the moral high ground.  

Just like Gandhi before him who had to deal with marchers who would not hold to the nonviolent or “love your enemies” approach, Dr. King would use his wonderful power of speech to show them a more effective way.  Both Gandhi and Dr. King had to deal with the fact that there were plants among their marchers who were paid to cause trouble and riots.  He like Gandhi felt like you needed to educate and prepare people with the message of nonviolence before you could have an effective march or demonstration.  When that preparation was not well organized and the goals were not clear, problems usually happened.

I really do not know what, if anything, you will get from this short examination of Dr. Martin Luther King and his philosophical roots.  I will leave that to you to make your own conclusions.  I do hope you will again be touched by this great man, the Unitarian influences on his message, and his hope for a better moral society.