King’s Last Campaign: Somebodyness and the Dignity of Labor

This week, on April 1st, I ran a great conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, titled MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: THE MAN, THE MESSAGE, THE MOVEMENT. It was co-sponsored by the Memphis Theological Seminary, where I have taught for many years, and the University of Memphis's Department of Communication. The excellent event featured two keynote speeches: one was titled "I'm Happy to Be Here Tonight: King's Final Speech and the Rhetoric of Hope," delivered by Dr. Frank Thomas, pastor of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church; the other was "Remember King in Memphis" by Dr. Maxine Smith. What a privilege to help host this event in the city where King died forty years ago tomorrow.

Today I delivered a paper at another conference in Memphis on Dr. King's life and legacy. Given my close connection and commitment to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (I currently serve on FOR's National Council), and the fact that Dr. King was himself on FOR's Advisory Council at the time of his death four decades ago, I thought FOR members might appreciate this commentary.

“I Am a Man,” Somebodyness and the Dignity of Labor in King’s Last Campaign

Introduction

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used powerful expressions he heard growing up such as “you are a somebody” and “all labor has dignity.” Mobilizing the Poor People’s Campaign and the Memphis Sanitation Strike, King gave fresh import to these slogans along with “I am a Man,” a phrase that resonated with Memphis sanitation workers as they challenged the socio-economic foundations of white, male supremacy, and “world house,” a phrase from his Nobel Prize lecture and the title of the closing chapter of Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community in which Dr. King told of a deceased novelist, whose papers had ideas for future stories. “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” For King, the metaphor communicated a great new problem of humankind. “We have inherited a large house, a great world house in which we must live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who must learn somehow to live with each other in peace. Calling for “true compassion,” “a revolution of values” and “nonviolent coexistence” not violent co-annihilation, Dr. King stressed humanity’s interrelatedness as, not a political, economic or social reality, but a moral imperative in every arena. “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

If you want to imagine what Dr. King would be doing today were he alive, pay attention to this last chapter of his last book. Dr. King’s words mattered. As much as in the 1960s, they matter today. Questions raised by Dr. King continue to call for response. Why, for example, should there be hunger and deprivation in any land, in any city or at any table when we have the resources and know-how to provide everyone with the basic necessities of life? In this article, I want to share concrete ways in which Dr. King’s vision of a world house still shapes my living in present hope and dream of the “beloved community.”

Somebodyness in King

A number of scholars have explored the sources and evolution of Dr. King’s understanding of the somebodyness of every human and the dignity of labor, two themes that marked King’s rhetoric during his public career. The formative influences of family, church and education led Dr. King to turn to the word “somebody” as a particularly apt way of naming the new sense of self-respect that characterized the freedom movement. On December 5, 1955, in his address to the first meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Dr. King recognized wider implications of the bus boycott,

Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written … somebody will have to say, “There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights [a]nd thereby injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.” And we’re going to do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late.

Consistently, Dr. King highlighted the dignity of all human personality. On April 24, 1957, Dr. King accepted the Social Justice Award from the Religion and Labor Foundation in New York and reflected on the state of race relations in the United States. He stressed that African Americans were taking a “new look” at themselves.

The Negro masses began to re-evaluate themselves, and the Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all his children, and that the basic thing about a man is not “his specificity but his fundamentalism.” With this new self-respect and new sense of dignity on the part of the Negro, the second period of race religions in America was gradually passing away.

The theological basis of Dr. King’s assertion of somebodyness rested in his understanding that we are created in the image and likeness of God. Beloved of God, we love because of our fundamental kinship with God and with one another. In a sermon “The American Dream,” delivered at Ebenezer Church in Atlanta on July 4, 1965, Dr. King highlighted, “We are challenged to really believe that everyone is created equal…. There are no gradations in the image of God… God made us to live together as brothers and sisters and to respect the dignity and worth of everyone.”

In a sermon “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool,” delivered at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago IL on August 27, 1967, Dr. King turned to one of his favorite stories, that of Dives, the rich man denied entrance to heaven, and Lazarus. Dives went to hell not because he was rich, but because he passed Lazarus every day and refused to see him or recognize his plight. According to Dr. King, “Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth.” Rather he condemned self-centered greed and lack of concern for others. Dives was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on Lazarus and others. He couldn’t do anything by himself. His wealth was an outcome of people working together within a partnership society.

Maybe you haven’t ever thought about it, but you can’t leave home in the morning without being dependent on most of the world. You get up in the morning, and you go to the bathroom and you reach over for a sponge, and that’s even given to you by a Pacific Islander. You reach over for a towel, and that’s given to you by a Turk. You reach down to pick up your soap, and that’s given to you by a Frenchman. Then after dressing, you rush to the kitchen and you decide this morning that you want to drink a little coffee; that’s poured in your cup by a South American. Or maybe this morning you prefer tea; that’s poured in your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you want cocoa this morning; that’s poured in your cup by a West African. Then you reach over to get your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning you are dependent on more than half of the world.

Recalling that we should never forget those who helped us along the way, Dr. King told of Marian Anderson. As a little girl, she sang in the choir of the Union Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Once, when her career took off, she stood in Carnegie Hall where she ended her concert by singing “Nobody Knows de trouble I Seen.” Looking out in the audience, she could see her mother crying. The person next to her said, “Mrs. Anderson, why are you crying? Your daughter is scoring tonight. The critics tomorrow will be lavishing their praise on her.” Mrs. Anderson replied, “I’m not crying because I’m sad, I’m crying for joy.” She shared her daughter’s response at another, similar moment when the great singer stated that the happiest moment of her life was when she could tell her mother, “you can stop working now.” Marian Anderson realized that she was where she was because somebody helped her to get there.

In the last months of his life, Dr. King repeatedly turned to the parable of Dives and Lazarus. Developing his understanding of the “world house,” Dr. King criticized capitalism for creating a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty. Dr. King condemned the creation of conditions that permit necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few. Like Dives before Lazarus, “small-hearted men become cold and conscienceless, unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity.”

On March 31, 1968, Dr. King challenged a congregation at the National Cathedral in Washington D. C. to recognize human interdependence and to remove every obstacle blocking people from claiming their somebodyness.

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you out to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured….Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

Despite his ascendancy as a world leader in struggles for peace and freedom, recognized when he received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, by the end of the decade Dr. King’s rhetoric seemed increasingly irrelevant to many who faced dislocation, migration, crime and other sources of urban violence. In March 1968, the Kerner Commission report analyzed white racism and compiled grievances that contributed to the frustrations of powerlessness that led some African Americans to turn to violence. King committed himself to mobilize in Washington not with march of August 1963 as a model, but one in October 1966 when five hundred people, mostly welfare-recipients, dramatized the struggles of the working poor.

King decided the phrase “I am a man” captured the essence of his efforts to organize a Poor People’s Campaign. The phrase had come to define the struggle of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. The sanitation workers’ strike marked a turning point in the freedom movement that had achieved the civil and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965. The immediate circumstances of the strike were two events; on January 28, 1968 black workers in the sewers division were sent home without pay during a rainstorm while white drivers and supervisors drew a full day’s pay; two days later a garbage compactor crushed 36-year old Echol Cole and 30-year old Robert Walker to death when they took refuge during a rainstorm. Neither had workers’ compensation or life insurance. 1300 employees of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1733 struck for union recognition through having members’ dues deducted from their salary check. More broadly, the strike reflected and reshaped the surge of African American aspirations by making the demands of workers concrete: equal employment and a living wage that would enable everyone to buy food, shelter and other necessities. On February 22, three weeks after the strike began, hundreds of workers packed city hall for hearings that many hoped would find a way to settle the strike via City Council. When most whites who formed the majority on City Council failed to challenge Mayor Loeb’s “no,” police had to remove the workers from the council chambers by force.

The next day, “I Am a Man” appeared everywhere. The phrase had roots on Beale Street where Blues women sang, “I’m a WOMAN, W-O-M-A-N” and Muddy Waters sang

Everythin', everythin', everythin's gonna be alright this mornin' …
Ooh yeah, whoaw
Now when I was a young boy, at the age of five
My mother said I was, gonna be the greatest man alive
But now I'm a man, way past 21
Want you to believe me baby,
I had lot's of fun
I'm a man, I'm a full grown man.

For one of the workers, Taylor Rogers, the phrase “meant freedom. All we wanted was some decent working conditions, and a decent salary and to be treated like men, not like boys.” The challenge to racial paternalism and submissiveness reverberated throughout the city. One minister stated, “this is no longer 1,300 men fighting, but it’s this whole Negro community fighting. If we lose we’re all lost.” Another said the strike took on the air of a revival and united African Americans. “With Scripture and hymns you felt you were on a mountainside listening to Moses or with the Israelites marching around Jericho’s walls waiting for them to crumble … there is this reawakening sense of person hood. The most phenomenal movement in the world is the passion for person hood. You find it in the church, in teenagers, with all the poor worldwide.”

As the strike dragged on, ministers and congregations supported a “blueprint for action:” boycotts, raising funds for workers, mass meetings and enlisting support from white ministers and congregations. Local organizer James Lawson, King’s friend and pastor of the Centenary Methodist Church, contacted King and briefed him on the situation. A strike-support group called the Community on the Move for Equality (COME), which staged daily marches and other activity, voted to invite King and other national leaders to Memphis to rally local help. Somebody argued, “We wanted to escalate the whole effort. We were still at the point in this city where Martin Luther King could pull out a lot of people.” For King, it was unthinkable not to come. “These are poor folks. If we don’t stop for them, then we don’t need to go to Washington. These are part of the people we’re going there for.”

Speaking on March 18, 1968 at Mason Temple to an enthusiastic crowd of 17,000 people, Dr. King said, “We are tired of our men being emasculated so that our wives and daughters have to go out and work in the white lady’s kitchen.” Dr. King reminded his audience that the person who picks up garbage was as essential to the health of society as the physician.

You have a great movement here in Memphis. You are demonstrating something here that needs to be demonstrated all over the country. You are demonstrating that we can stick together and … that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person suffers, if one black person is down, we are all down…. You are demanding many things here in this struggle [but particularly] that this city will respect the dignity of labor. All labor has dignity. All labor!

Dr. King set the struggle of the Memphis workers in a wider context, that of poor people around the nation and the world who work for wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of economic life. “It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.” He returned to the story of Dives and Lazarus and encouraged his congregation to see and stand with those on strike. He added that the racism and economic injustice African Americans felt at the local level mirrored the insensitivity of the country as a whole. “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too is going to hell!”

In language that resonates with our current political situation, Dr. King summarized themes that ran through his public ministry: that everybody is a somebody; that all labor has dignity; and that we cannot leave social change to God. People themselves have to identify their needs and change their history. By linking race and economics King went beyond civil rights to human rights. To King, poverty was the result not of people’s lack of initiative or of hard work, but rather of powerlessness inflicted by unjust structures of power. With history as his guide, King assured people that they could change this, whether in Montgomery or Selma, Washington or Memphis, Vietnam or Africa.
King resumed his people-to-people campaign in Mississippi and elsewhere, including New York City where Dr. King spoke on behalf of striking hospital workers. “Many of the poor people work in our hospitals. They work fulltime jobs at part-time wages. People are always talking about menial labor. But no labor is menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages.”

King returned to Memphis on March 21 for a strategy session. A blizzard forced postponement of a march scheduled for the next day. King went on to other commitments, including a March 25th appearance at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Association where Rabbi Abraham Heschel introduced him as “a voice, a vision and a way. I call upon every Jew to hearken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow in his way. The whole future of America will depend upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

King participated in the disastrous March 28th march in Memphis. A few days later, on April 3, he delivered his last address, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” at Bishop Charles Mason Temple. He drew on Luke 10: 29-37, the parable of the Good Samaritan who stopped on the dangerous Jericho Road to care for a victim of robbery. Perhaps the priest and the Levite who did not stop were busy organizing a Jericho Road Improvement Association, whatever, said Dr. King, who then. posed a crucial question, “What will happen to this one in need if I do not stop to help him? “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”

In a 1989 interview, Rosa Parks observed, “King made us believe in ourselves. He dreamed a beloved community, and we are now part of it. We have work to do. King made it possible. We honor his legacy by seeking to live the Christian life as he taught it.” To do so, we must ask, if I do not help the harassed, the homeless, the hungry, the hugless, what will happen to them?

Let me suggest several ways in which we can live the ongoing work of building the Beloved Community:

1st, that we must eradicate vestiges of racism and respect the dignity of person no matter how they differ from us. Each of us can do a critical diversity inventory of our own lives. Our lives have value only as we attribute value to others and wax indignant when any other is wronged. What of religious and secular organizations to which we belong? Are they doing all they can to reverse the legacy of white privilege?

2nd, we must identify with the poor—they are our neighbors whether in Memphis or Darfur or anywhere. The phenomenon of creating homelessness has become steadily more complex as predatory capitalism has found endless methods to extort money, life and home from the community of the poor. The $3 to $5 trillion dollar war on terror, waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Colombia as well as against our own citizens here at the very moment the second Bush administration – unlike the first – actually cut taxes as the United States and a few allies went to war is now bearing fruit in such forms as recession, economic injustice and the imprisonment of 1% of the nation’s population. All these undermine our efforts to construct, wherever we live, a world house. We are able to gather here because of our own relative affluence. In 2000 when the late Gilbert Earl Patterson (1937-2007) became Presiding Bishop of the Church of God in Christ, he insisted that every delegate to the annual gathering of saints in Memphis participate in a service ministry and launched vigorous new ministries in such areas as substance abuse, health care and education. Each of us, in our own context, can do the same.

3rd, we can let our voices be heard for different priorities on the part of our governments. Look for ways to dismantle the domination system that bind us and most of the world in chains. Our task is not to save the world. Only God alone can do that. We have the capacity to witness to the God of freedom, whose power over death we just celebrated. Assuming we are able to avoid nuclear annihilation, enough threats to the common good exist: global warming, overpopulation, environmental poisoning and the like.

4th, we must personally and collectively exercise responsible stewardship of earth’s fragile resources. One way is to commit ourselves to address the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to “make poverty history.” In 2005 political leaders from around the world accepted, and Live Eight concerts rallied public support for eight laudable eight goals for 2015, as follows, 1) eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; 2) achieve universal primary-school enrollment; 3) promote ender equality and empower women; 4) reduce child mortality; 5) improve maternal health; 6) combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; 7) ensure environmental sustainability; and 8) develop a global partnership for development. These suggestions are the agenda of “We Are the Beloved Community” by which local groups seek invigorate King’s challenge to address the triple axis of evil (racism, poverty, war).

Students who have prepared to participate in the Oklahoma immersion have been reading the writings of North America’s First Peoples who have known dispossession from lands for which they cared for centuries before the arrival of European peoples. These writers have challenged us to cease to regard nature and some people as having no reason to exist except to serve but a small percentage of people. I see no future for humankind if we fail to live by four laws of ecology summarized from the wisdom of First Peoples,

Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything must go somewhere.
Nature knows best.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Concluding Reflection
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired me as a youth. As University of California student at Berkeley from 1961-1965, I lived at Christian house where Lou Lucky was our cook. One day she invited me to her inner city Missionary Baptist congregation. I attended and started sharing in street preaching and community organizing. From Lou and from her congregation I learned that the economic, political, and social events touching their lives, as well as my life were not separate from religion.

On July 2, 1964 Lou and I were in the basement of the congregation. As President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a solemn, not jubilant mood pervaded the room. A sense of realism tempered temptation to overstate the significance of this legislative gain. A storm cloud, almost palpable, seemed to gather. Would southern states implement provisions for desegregated public accommodation? What would be the impact of the impending candidacy of Barry Goldwater, likely to be crowned the next week in San Francisco as Republican Party nominee for the United States presidency? How would the possibility of increased United States military involvement in Vietnam impact on civil rights gains? Were we any closer to realizing the Beloved Community? “We've crossed a river. There's a mountain ahead. We've got to keep on walking,” summarized Lou.

King’s use of powerful expressions like “I have a dream,” “you are a somebody,” “all labor has dignity,” and “world house” have continued to shape my priorities. The sense that we still have some mountains ahead, that we still need to keep on walking influenced my decision to come to Memphis fourteen years ago. I still want to love and to live like a river flowing, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. How is God calling each of us, individually and collectively?

[Footnotes available upon request.]