Humainologie dialogue Good and Evil with Zoom link for tonight and a related book synopsis

Here is the Zoom link for our dialogue tonight, Wednesday August 19, starting at 6:30 PM, as provided by Greg:

Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84555114910?pwd=VVhKQlhIOFRPYWZGUGI3MmtpazdHQT09 Meeting ID: 845 5511 4910 Passcode: 801293

Martin Luther King Jr. has long been an inspiration in my life. His statement, that we must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools, became the opener for my book on global citizenship. His speech August 28, 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4iY1TtS3s at the People’s March on Washington gives but a glimpse of his charisma. Even as he struggled against the evil of racist violence, he struggled also with those internal forces that Solzhenitsyn referred to. I have appended below this message a synopsis of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. It is entirely in the words of MLK, though he never wrote an autobiography as such. Coretta Scott King asked historian Clayborne Carson to edit the papers of her late husband, and that process led to this book.

I hope to see you at the Zoom meeting tonight.

Arthur

Book: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Edited by Clayborne Carson, 1998)

Born in Atlanta, Georgia January 15, 1929, King experienced the racism of the American South, but was fortunate in that his parents showed him how to deal with it. His family home was in a middle class (segregated) neighborhood and was a place where love ruled; he does not recall ever hearing his parents argue. His mother was warm and supportive, his father physically strong and firm in the face of racist insults. He did not suffer poverty; his parents provided for his needs.

He was precocious, entering Morehouse College at the age of fifteen. Henry David Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience” had already influenced him: Evil must be resisted; injustice cannot be accepted. In 1948, he entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. It was then that he began “a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil.” He studied social and ethical theories of the major philosophers. He learned about Gandhi’s approach and concluded that when evil is resisted steadfastly without hating the perpetrators, it becomes a very powerful force. At Crozer for at least an hour a day he went to the edge of the campus to experience the natural world, restorative for him as he saw and heard in the birds, the trees, the stars, a direct expression of God. He decided to give his life “to something eternal and absolute” and learned that “truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.” He entered Boston University’s School of Theology in September 1951 and received his doctorate in 1955. He had met Coretta Scott, an attractive singer, in Boston in 1952 and married her in 1953. He describes her as like-minded, gentle and strong, and unfailingly supportive. Martin’s father, a pastor, performed the wedding ceremony.

In 1954, Martin was invited to become the pastor for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He accepted. He became active with the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). In August 1955, Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery chapter, informed Martin that he had been elected to the executive committee. In November his first child, a daughter, was born. Less than a month later Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. Within days, a protest group, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed. Martin was elected as leader.

The first four seats on a bus in Montgomery were reserved for white passengers; Negroes were not allowed to sit in those seats even if no white persons were on the bus. (MLK uses the words “Negro” and “Negroes” throughout the book.) If the reserved section was filled by whites and more whites boarded the bus, Negroes sitting in the “unreserved section” were required to give up their seats and were arrested if they refused. The arrest of Rosa Parks led to a bus boycott in Montgomery, and MLK describes step by step the history of that boycott, which moved past every obstacle the segregationists in Montgomery threw against it. Negro taxi drivers and private carpools were created overnight to support the bus boycott. However, walking itself became a symbolic act of resistance. On one occasion an elderly woman, walking with difficulty, heard a carpool driver invite her to jump in his car. “You don’t need to walk,” he said. “She waved him on. ‘I’m not walking for myself,’ she explained. ‘I’m walking for my children and grandchildren.’”

As the spokesperson for the boycott, Martin was targeted. On January 30, 1956, his home was bombed while he was speaking before a mass meeting. Martin again emphasized: “Don’t get your weapons. ...I want you to love our enemies. …Love them and let them know you love them.” Had the movement lapsed into violence, it would have failed. Surprisingly, Martin felt less afraid after getting rid of the one gun he had in his home. “When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it.”

In a last-ditch effort to stop desegregation, a Montgomery grand jury indicted King and others associated with the MIA for violating an antiboycott law. He was found guilty, sentenced; the case was appealed; and on November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court declared bus segregation laws unconstitutional. The struggle expanded. In February 1957, King became head of the Southern Leaders Conference (later the SCLC). Later that year, Eisenhower ordered federal troops to ensure order during the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In March 1957, MLK attended a ceremony marking the independence of a new nation in Africa, Ghana, and met with its leader Kwame Nkrumah. In September 1958, in Harlem, there was near-fatal attempt on his life. In 1959, he and Coretta visited India and he wrote of a transformative movement “almost unknown in America. At its center was the campaign for land reform known as Bhoodan,” which had already achieved impressive results. Gandhi’s life and work had long inspired MLK. “Here was a man who achieved in his lifetime this bridging of the gulf between the ego and the id. Gandhi had the amazing capacity for self-criticism.” Returning to the United States, at a youth march for integrated schools in April 1959, he had made this suggestion: “Whatever career you may choose for yourself – doctor, lawyer, teacher – let me propose an avocation to be pursued along with it. Become a dedicated fighter for civil rights. Make it a central part of your life. It will make you a better doctor, a better lawyer, a better teacher. It will enrich your spirit as nothing else possibly can…Make a career of humanity. …You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.”

In February 1960, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia with his family, bidding farewell to the church and the organizations he had served in Montgomery, Alabama. That same month, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the lunch counter sit-in movement began. In April, he spoke at the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Increasingly he was involved in the national political scene. “I fear that there is a dearth of vision in our government, a lack of a sense of history and genuine morality.” He had known and liked Nixon, but in 1960 with John Kennedy’s apparently greater support for his work and Nixon’s distancing, he moved toward Kennedy. Robert Kennedy had intervened to arrange King’s release from jail in October 1960. In November John Kennedy won a close presidential election, with strong support from black voters. Martin noticed a change in John Kennedy that emerged in 1963, a tendency for Kennedy to “throw off political considerations and see the real moral issues.”

Birmingham, Alabama was a backwater of racist policies. Arrested in Birmingham, he received a plea from white Christian ministers to call off the demonstrations he had inspired. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he noted that the Church had often failed to support the civil rights movement. In April 1963, he was released on bond. Violence directed at him in May was followed by the arrival of Federal troops in Birmingham the same month. On August 28, 1963, he delivered his “I have a dream” speech to the massive “March on Washington.” When a dynamite blast killed four young black girls in September, King delivered a eulogy. “Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.” On November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated. In 1964, the civil rights movement gained momentum and suffered losses, including three civil rights activists murdered following their arrest. In December 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Then came Selma. The right to vote had been part of constitutional law since the 19th century, but obstructions to voting, typically using tricky voter registration policies, had persisted. In 1965, the focus of the civil rights movement turned to voting rights. On March, a Selma-to-Montgomery march concluded with a speech by MLK. There was a surge in racist violence. In August 1965, he was invited to Los Angeles because of racial riots there.

On April 4, 1967, King delivered an antiwar speech at Riverside Church in New York. In December the Poor People’s Campaign was launched, aimed at redistribution of wealth. On March 28, 1968, he led a march in Memphis, Tennessee that was disrupted by violence. On April 4, he was assassinated at the motel where he was staying in Memphis. That night, Robert Kennedy’s announcement of Martin’s death raised cries of grief from those in the audience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoKzCff8Zbs Martin Luther King Jr Day is an American federal holiday on the third Monday of January each year. His life changed my life.