Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. A life that was taken too soon, that is clear. What is also clear is that people like me have not done their jobs. Now, you might ask, what do you mean “people like me”? I am a professor at a historically black college. It is my job and people like me, to raise up a new Dr. King. We have not done so. We have not captured our students’ minds enough to instill in them the deep need to do what is right.
Dr. King was not just a civil rights leader. He was deeply spiritual and a minister. He studied more than his Bible, he also understood and respected Gandhi. He was open to other forms of spirituality, especially ones that went beyond the walls of the local churches. He was not loved by all of his own African American community. It has been said that those other ministers helped to plot the assassination. That is quite likely true. The power of the human ego to ignore human need is powerful.
Today is a day of great sadness because we are fifty years later and the ugly head of racism, segregation, discrimination and just pure hate has raised itself again. Now, more than ever, we need another Dr. King. And here is why I write this today: if we claim the title Christian, then how can we allow these things to happen? Why is it that each of us as Christians can turn our heads and ignore what is going on?
Being a Christian is hard work. We must give up our ego, our picture of who we think we are and who we think we should be and take on the image of Christ. It is not easy to give up those ideas of who we think we are supposed to be. Some of them given to us by our parents and some, sadly, given to us by our religion. Churches have become great places to learn “shouldhood” but not to discover our True Self. It is time for each of us to be who we are called to be: the Living image of a Loving God. Let us all be Dr. Kings in our world and put an end to what we know is wrong!
TMM