Jim Pace

What would I have done?

January 17, 2011 | 2 Comments

Like almost everyone that has heard it, the I Have A Dream speech given by Martin Luther King Jr is one of the most powerful speeches I have ever heard. Part of the reason that I write and speak so much is that I have seen the impact of amazing words delivered well.

But my favorite quote from MLK Jr. would be the very simply titled, Letter From Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963.) You can read it in its entirety here. In it, King is responding to Birmingham pastors who were claiming he was, an outsider coming in to stir up trouble. That he should be patient and allow negotiation and discussion to prevail. My favorite excerpt, that I can almost never fully read without tearing up, is this…

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

I have thought a lot about those Birmingham pastors. And myself.

Would I have been one of them?

Let’s discount the ones that had been deeply influenced by the rampant racism of the day. Let’s just focus on the men who were trying to do the right thing — but were deeply wrong. My question for them would be, how did you get it so wrong? And the one following it immediately after would be, how can I make sure that I don’t?

I have heard many say that their lives were just more of the church being on the wrong side of social issues. As King said, “The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace.” That the church is often the last to get the memo and then judges everyone else for reading it first. And in this instance, it is hard to argue that.

But is that actually the way it was? Was the church’s mistake that it was trying to slow down a clearly God-ordained process of seeing that all men are created equal? Or was the mistake that the church just allowed the prevailing racist social perspective of that time and that area to infiltrate it?

To put it another way, did racism come from the church or from the culture of that time in that area?

What do you think?

Categories: Church, Culture, Mission