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Recent Posts by Amy L. Dalton

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• > A Multi-Issue Labor Day In Philly
• > Lockheed Martin & The Profits of War: Crucifixion Today
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• > The King Who Paid Attention: a relational remembrance

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Transcript:

You look good to me! And I am very very glad to be here — in a place where I spent four marvelous years... there is something very beautiful about being able to come back to one's alma mater. Something especially beautiful about coming back and finding that it is not simply trying to carry on its old traditions, but that it is trying [...] to create new possibilities for this very old and honored place. And I've come back here with a sense of excitement and pleasure about having an opportunity to engage you in conversation about things that are important to us. And I mean that. I am a deep believer in the teachings of our strange and wonderful teacher Hannah Arendt, who said, 'It is when we are in dialogue that we are the most human.' I want to be human with you. I want you to be human with me. [...]

Whenever I speak about King anywhere, I always carry with me the words of someone who lived not far from here at all. And so I feel a special joy about being close to the streets that my brother Abraham Joshua Heschel walked. Because I want to suggest tonight that he recognized -- at least as much as anyone else in this country -- Heschel recognized the significance of King. And I bring him as witness -- especially in the midst of younger women and men who are trying to grasp a sense of the meaning of their own lives and what their lives are for -- other than having a list of letters after their name. I come because brother Heschel opens up for us a way of understanding Dr. King that might help us to understand ourselves, and who we are, and what we are for... and WHO we are for.

As my brother Jean reminded us, there is something terribly easy about consigning King to the great civil rights leader, the great American orator, blah blah blah blah, and not letting him get close to who he was... and not letting him get close to us. But Heschel does not allow that.

And I want to take off on my journey now with you and with King and his meaning for now and the future by remembering 10 days before Martin was assassinated. And by the way, in an old curmudgeonly style, I choose always to refuse to simply say "King died." Everybody dies. But King was assassinated. And that makes a difference -- in who he was, and in what this country was and is, and in what our tasks are.

Ten days before Martin was assassinated, as a result of the fact that he was being criticized all over the liberal north, Abraham Joshua Heschel was in a gathering with many of his Jewish co-religionists. And had invited Martin to speak to them about what he was doing in the North... especially with poor people! Who didn't have sheriffs running after them! And Heschel said this:

"Martin Luther King Jr. is a voice, a vision, and a way. I call upon every Jew to harken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow in his way."

And then he added what for me is the most important statement of all:

"The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King."

Heschel knew what he was talking about. Partly because he had narrowly escaped the deadly clutches of a totalitarian regime that destroyed so many of his family and his people in order to get here, to this country. And unlike so many other people who come to this country, Heschel felt that it was his deep responsibility to understand what Black people in America were about. And he found himself connecting up with Martin King -- again and again and again. His first major time with King was as a part of that magnificent procession from Selma to Montgomery. Heschel walked with King for awhile. Heschel walked, and when he was finished his time of walking, he wrote in his notebook: "I felt as if my knees were praying."

Heschel walked -- and understood what was going on. He saw King allowing his life to focus the great energy, courage, and longing of the people. He walked with King and the people -- and he understood that King with the people and the people with King had brought about a great victory for the expansion of democracy in America. He understood that this was not just a matter of "Negro rights" ... of "voting rights for colored folks." As he marched he saw that America was being challenged, in Langston Hugh's old words, America was being challenged to BE America. And King was at the heart of that. And Heschel understood that, and understood that the heart was very deeply a part of what Martin meant for the nation.

And winning the vote, Heschel saw -- as perhaps Sister Hillary did not see -- Heschel saw that the president of the United States was quite convinced before the people marched that he could not get a bill passed through Congress. And when the people marched; and when they sang, and when they carried King, and when King carried them, the president almost sang "we shall overcome" in the house of Congress. Because it was neither he nor King, but King and the people, who lifted up a new possibility for the nation. And Heschel saw that, and Heschel understood that, and understood that the winning of the vote -- the winning of the rights to representative democracy -- was something that must be deeply gathered in to our understanding of what King was about.

Heschel saw King and that is why he could speak the way he did about him. Heschel saw King breathing in the hope and courage of the people, and then sending out his own best possibilities. Heschel saw King return to Montgomery in victory -- saw Martin move back to that little city where he had had his beginning. Heschel saw King really being able to be kind of a conquering hero at that point; to sit on his laurels and to proclaim how "bad" he was! But what Heschel saw was a man who would not sit on his laurels. What Heschel saw was a man who instead of that moved out of his comfort zone; moved out of his sweet nice southern Black situation, and determined to hear the cries of the folks who were burning down Watts.

And he went out there. And it should be very very clear that when Martin went out, responding to the cries of Watts -- leaving the victory in Montgomery and going out to California, of all places... he didn't know what he was gonna do! He didn't have a plan for the people! He wasn't ready to organize a new movement. He just knew that people were deeply in pain, and he ought to be there. He wanted to be there. He had to be there.

And when he got out there, he met these bodacious young men. Who didn't even know who this cat was in the blue suit, who was driving, coming out of the car, and looking around at everything burning. And they started talking to him about what they were doing, and he asked them what had they accomplished, and they said, well! we won!

And he said, you won? and he looked at the smoke still going up, and he said, you won?

And they said, "Yeah we won. At least we got people to pay attention to us."

And Heschel saw Martin paying attention. Paying attention to the broken young men, to the desperate young men, to the frightened young men, to the angry young men.

King not knowing what to do much of the time, but knowing that he could pay attention.

And in paying attention, Heschel realized that King was deepening his own life. Because when king left watts, came back south decided that what he really ought to do was to decide to try to establish himself in Chicago. And, understand this! Martin had won his victory in Alabama at the end of the spring! the wonderful summer in Alabama was opening up for him! And what Heschel saw was that this madman next found himself in Chicago, in the winter.

Now you know [laughs] something is strangely wonderful there and wonderfully strange -- to leave Alabama to go to Chicago in the winter... to pay attention. To pay attention. Not to solve the problems, but to pay attention.

Heschel recognized that King was moving. That this was the King he meant when he said, the whole future of America will depend on the impact of THIS king -- the king who pays attention.

Pays attention to the broken, pays attention to the betrayed, pay attention to the unheard, pay attention to the ignored.

And of course Heschel knew that THIS king had a PhD, from a wonderful university... and therefore, Heschel knew that he should be -- this King with that kind of degree -- constantly seeking to be upwardly mobile! But what Heschel saw instead was a PhD with no ambitions for upward mobility, with ambitions only to go down deeper -- into the heart of the world of the underprivileged, and pay attention.

I don't know if that means anything at the City University of New York. But I'm saying it.

This is the king upon whom the whole future of America depends. The king with the PhD and the smart blue suits and the middle class background -- determining that his life is meant to pay attention.

Heschel heard him. Heschel heard King there in Chicago speaking about these strange things again. Listen now: PhD, Black accomplished man -- and what does he say as he goes into the south side of Chicago, the west side of Chicago, and pays attention? This is what comes out. Not a "King Marshal Plan", but this is what comes out:

"I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life to those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. This is the way I'm going. If it means suffering a little bit, I'm going that way. If it means sacrificing, I'm going that way. If it means dying for them, I'm going that way. Because I heard a voice saying, 'do something for others.'"

I didn't know if that voice means anything at the City University of New York. But I thought I would just remind us that King said things other than "I have a dream."

And Heschel saw King.
Really saw King.
Paid attention to King.

Heschel saw the powerful international implications of King's determination to pay attention to the poor. So he wasn't surprised when King recognized the Vietnamese peasants and our own poorest young soldiers as equally victims of our nation's war against the Vietnamese.

And he was not surprised when King want to Riverside -- down the street -- and said some things that my brother began to share with you and I would like to remind you about some other things that he said there, April 4, 1967:

"As I have walked among the desperate rejected and angry young men..."

-- In the first place he was reminding us of where he tried to hang out sometimes! This is the king on whom the whole future of American will depend.

"As I have walked among the desperaate rejected and angry young men, I haven't cursed them for their anger; I haven't run away from them; I haven't hidden out from them; I haven't tried to middle class-ize them... I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion. I have told them that molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems."

Remember, this is when we were exploding everywhere in America that we were... and King walked among them. And did not condemn them.

"I've tried to offer them my deepest compassion, while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam, baby?! They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive does of violence to solves its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home and i knew that I could never again raise my voice against their violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

Heschel understood the deepest meaning of King's words. He understood what the prophet was saying. The prophet who loved the nation, but was deeply concerned about where the nation was going. And as brother [Rev. Dr. Eugene Callender] just shared with you -- King said, and Heschel heard -- because he was right there --

"A nation that contineus year after year to spend more money on military defense that programs of social uplift, is approching spirtual death."

 
This talk was given last spring at Harding's alma mater, the City University of New York in Harlem. It was a part of the New York Life Endowment for Emerging African-American Issues. Rev. Dr. Eugene Callender, the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies Leader in Residence and longtime community activist, introduced Dr. Harding. This audio and text is reproduced with the permission of the CUNY staff. The picture is by Peter Waldvogel.

More on Dr. Harding:

Dr. Harding, professor emeritus at the Illif School of Theology at the University of Denver, was a close associate and friend of Dr. King's and is the author of numerous books, including Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, and There is a River, a chronicle of Black resistance to slavery. Dr. Harding was also the senior academic advisor to the PBS series Eyes on the Prize.

Dr. Harding is an African-American Mennonite minister and historian who was a central figure in the Civil Rights movement. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and taught at Spellman College in Atlanta in the 1960s. He is also one of the founders of the movement to establish Black Studies programs in U.S. universities and has been a touchstone leader for social activists. Dr. Harding is the founder and current chairman of the Veterans of Hope Project, an educational initiative that has chronicled the experiences of the "veterans" of the Civil Rights movement.