AMERICAN DREAM
by Forrest Church
January 19, 2003
The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday could not have come at a more propitious moment this year. With equal opportunity — which must take into account past discrimination–at stake again in the suit against The University of Michigan, we are reminded of how quickly the clock can be turned back. Someone should remind the president that had a similar program not been in place at Yale forty years ago, the nation might well today be deprived the service of Colin Powell; perhaps the most distinguished public servant to serve my administration for years. This morning, therefore, going back to the roots of this holiday and Dr. King’s message, I shall revisit the moral impurities implicit in The American Dream.
On April 12, 1968, eight days after Dr. King was assassinated, Representative John Conyers of Michigan submitted legislation to establish his birthday as a national holiday. Two years later California had established a state holiday in King’s name. Other states soon followed. But thirteen years went by before Congress passed Conyer’s bill and President Reagan signed it into law. On January 20, 1986, Martin Luther King’s birthday was finally celebrated nationwide, as it has been on the third Monday of January ever since. Given what it celebrates, the most recent of our national holidays is as true an American holiday as any that came before.
With Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays now celebrated together on Presidents’ Day, King and Christopher Columbus are the only individuals to be honored with named American holidays. Martin Luther King Day is an emblematic American festival, hearkening back to the aspirations of our nation’s founders. It permits us no easy celebrations, no mindless, instantly forgotten rituals, because the moment we pay attention, it reminds us of just how far we must still journey to fulfill the American dream.
Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, in the household of a prominent Baptist minister, King conducted his brief life with prophetic urgency. As founder and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (whose mission he advanced from the 1950’s until his assassination in 1968), he was in the front line of almost every battle for Negro equality. Inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and Jesus, he articulated a gospel of nonviolent resistance to evil, thereby both elevating and strengthening the power of his cause. From Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 to Selma and Birmingham nearly a decade later, King spearheaded a second American Revolution that, without his leadership, might easily have become a second Civil War. For his efforts, in 1964 he became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
At the time King’s intrusion of religion into politics was rejected by some on the Christian right as anti-American and unbiblical. A young, prepoliticized Jerry Falwell condemned the ministers who marched with King in Selma in 1965. "Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners," Falwell said. "Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. The gospel does not clean up the outside but rather regenerates the inside." On the left, African American spiritual leaders from Malcolm X to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., lambasted King for everything from his dedication to nonviolence to his embrace of white colleagues to help shape the civil rights agenda. Resisting pressure from both sides, King marched onward with his "bi-racial army"---nonviolent, politically engaged, and spiritually charged–to redeem America.
I was one of several hundred thousand American citizens present outside the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, when King invoked a medley of American scripture to proclaim his dream. The entire occasion was charged with hope. King’s March on Washington was the only mass protest ever to be covered live on national television, with his sermon simulcast on all three major networks. People thronged the mall, extending from the reflecting pool and Washington Monument to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. Joan Baez, Odetta, and Bob Dylan sang. King’s disciple and SCLC colleague John Lewis preached for the struggle to continue "until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete." King too turned the lectern into a pulpit. He opened by echoing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation." By Lincoln one major step had been taken toward the fulfillment of the nation’s creed. The march continues, King proclaimed.
His most famous words, the ringing "I have a dream" peroration, were not in the written text. Moved by the spirit, he quoted several Hebrew prophets and then–looking forward to the day "when this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed"---King recited the words of a beloved American anthem. "This will be the day when all God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." His most famous words every American should know by heart.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!"
At the turn of the twentieth century, the civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois–whose death in Ghana was announced to the crowd on the day King delivered his address in Washington–described the experience of African Americans as a divided one, a "double-consciousness" caused by the denial of full freedom in the land of the free.
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world–a world that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
The substitution of tolerance for contempt and pity does not lighten the burden sufficiently to make the American dream accessible to African American and other minority citizens. In this respect, to follow the letter of new laws alone is insufficient for the realization of King’s dream. Yet the dream is a simple one. It is the dream of all the world’s religions, as expressed in each by a version of the Golden Rule. And it is the American Dream. This dream is predicated on the proposition that all are created equal, children of one God. Put the two dreams together and you come up with something even more precious, the Platinum Rule perhaps. Not simply "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" but "Do unto others as God does unto you." Proffer them the same inalienable rights, the same equal standing, the same liberty that God has bestowed as your birthright. As expressed in the civil rights movement --- and reprised in the campaigns for equal rights for women and homosexuals —when followed to its logical conclusion, such is the moral consequence of the American Dream.
King taught that the most promising path toward adjudicating human differences leads us to draw from common springs. In America, by tapping our nation’s religious heritage, we draft healing inspiration from a universal source. This practice has international implications as well. Today the enforced reality of multiculturalism sponsors an unprecedented interfaith and interethnic dialogue. When multiculturalism is elevated into pluralism, its most persuasive participants almost effortlessly speak a common, if yet imperfectly spoken, language. The models here are many, including (together with King) those offered by some of the most universally respected leaders of the last century, each of whom brought or brings moral and religious intent to the resolution of political conflict. From Mahatma Gandhi to the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pope John Paul II, and the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, the language of world peace and mutual kinship has been refashioned for a new age.
Each of these prophets offers a critique of the valueless nature of secular materialism while condemning the barbarism fostered by religious fanaticism. Each weds religion and politics while respecting the separation of church and state. And each condemns the purblind literalism that would yoke believers to the most incendiary texts in their respective traditions by invoking the saving and uniting spirit that distinguishes their own traditions’ most luminous touchstones. "The greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all your heart, and the second is like unto it, to love your neighbors as yourself," Jesus taught. The Torah holds that "he who turns away from a stranger might as well turn away from the most high God." And the Qur’an echoes, "Allah put different peoples on this earth not that they might despise one another, but that they might come to know one another and cherish one another." More redemptively than global economics (which can divide the very people it interlinks) these universal religious teachings offer, in the language of the heart, a set of ideals that enjoins neighborliness and may therefore help to save us not only from our enemies but also from ourselves.
Diversity is a fact in American life, but pluralism is the ideal toward which we strive as a people. To put pluralism into practice requires more than mere tolerance. At one level to tolerate means "to bear with repugnance." Jesus doesn’t ask us "to tolerate our neighbor as ourselves." He commands us to love our neighbor by the same token. The true American Dream doesn’t promote diversity; it inspires pluralism, which endows both freedom and diversity with moral content. "Whatever the name, some extra human Force labors to create a harmony out of the discords of the universe," Dr. King wrote. "There is a creative power that works to pull down mountains of evil and level hilltops of injustice. God still works through history His wonders to perform." More than any other twentieth-century American, Martin Luther King, Jr., praying that our nation might one day rise up and live out the meaning of its creed embodied the spirit of the American Dream.
Before I close, One final word about this new holiday. Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, has called on all Americans to treat tomorrow as a day on, not a day off. In the spirit of our own church’s Journey Toward Wholeness campaign, following in the footsteps of 25 of our members who have devoted this past weekend to recommit their lives and our institution to the healing work of anti-racism, we could each do no better than to recommit our lives through tiny savings deeds to the proposition that all are created equal–and therefore equally entitled to liberty and full justice. Every conscious act against the persistent stain of racism helps insure that one day the American Dream will come true.