King's leadership

When he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was a member of the National Council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Long-time FOR member Pamela Blockey-O'Brien told me that during a phone conversation last week. After her call I was inspired to revisit King's essay, "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," printed in Peace is the Way, the Fellowship magazine anthology edited by Walter Wink. I was taken aback by the passionate ferment of King's intellectual journey. Lazy me wants to believe that a great leader like him was so innately special that he just couldn't help being what he became. But King, in his essay, details how he wrestled indefatigably with giants like Hegel, Marx, Gandhi, Niebuhr, and others, until he could claim as his own -- in heart, soul, and mind -- nonviolence, as a central way of life. He did not have to make up a philosophy on the spot when he was called upon to be the spokesman for the bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama. He was ready.

As King makes clear, he was not the instigator of that movement. There were Rosa Parks and others before him who stood up (yes, by sitting down, and then by walking instead of riding). It's helpful to remember this when we have presidential candidates debating whether it was King or President Johnson who was the critical person in the civil rights movement. It's all of us. This includes Pamela Blockey-O'Brien, who now relies on an oxygen tank to breathe, but who who breathed life into the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign forty years ago, and who continues to breathe energy into FOR, with the challenge: "Re-energize!" The Campaign, she says, bequeathed to us the peace sign, and a lot of Martin Luther King-like energy still waiting and needing to be tapped into.