“Observations”©

by: Donald S. Conkey

 

Date:  January 10, 2008 - # 8802 - Martin Luther King and Lincoln (811)

 

Monday will be another national holiday; a day the nation has set aside to remember the birth and life of Martin Luther King, a life that changed America. His assassination 40 years ago January 15 stirred a nation as it had not been stirred since the Civil War, a war to preserve a nation, but ended by striking a massive blow to slavery worldwide.  Slavery had had an ugly culture all its own until America was born. Breaking slavery’s back required wise men, compromise, a new constitution, a Civil War, and the descendants of slaves to rise up and challenge America’s direction. That debate lingers on. Ignorance of God’s “perfect laws of liberty” is a heavy taskmaster.

 I remember the day King was assassinated. I worked in downtown Atlanta. Deadly riots had erupted in cities all across America. Fears that such rampages could and would happen in Atlanta were real. Atlanta held its breath.

Atlanta then became the focal point of King’s memorial. I stood at my office window overlooking Washington Street, the street King’s cortege followed to the state capitol, and watched as Bobby Kennedy and other well known personalities follow King’s mule drawn casket. Atlanta feared. Atlanta was traumatized.

Looking back on this event 40 years ago allows one to see how this event brought focus to the lingering thorn still dividing America — slavery. To pull this festering thorn of slavery from the flesh of America, necessary for America to heal, required the blood of someone of King’s stature. King had had his dream, a dream of equality and justice for all, regardless of the color of one’s skin, or the belief in one’s heart. He said he had been to the “mountain top and had seen the Promised Land.” King had led his people to the “River Jordan,” but like Moses, he was not allowed to cross that river of injustice into the promised land of justice and equality.

Recently I read a historical account of John Taylor who believed in a “wrong religion,” or so he was told. About to speak about his “wrong religion” a mob gathered prepared to tar and feather him if he dared to “speak, in their town about his “wrong religion.”  This 1838 event is a reminder that unfettered hatred and ignorance can strip man of his dignity, destroy nations, and shackle mankind in bondage to ignorance and hatred.

Facing the mob Taylor said: “Gentlemen, I now stand among men whose fathers fought for and obtained one of the greatest blessing ever conferred upon the human family — the right to think, to speak, to write; the right to say who shall govern them, and the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience — all of them sacred, human rights, and now guaranteed by the American Constitution.” He continued with “I see around me the sons of those noble sires, who, rather than bow to the behests of a tyrant, pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honors to burst those fetters, enjoy freedom themselves, bequeath it to their posterity, or die in the attempt.” Taylor, like Martin Luther King, was willing to die for the principles of freedom embedded in America’s great documents of freedom, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No one moved. Taylor completed his sermon and left – un-tarred and un-feathered.

Of all the issues the founders debated while drafting the constitution slavery was one of only two that were not fully resolved. The convention compromised in order to keep Georgia and the two Carolinas in the new union. The compromise’s intent, to end slavery, failed. That would come later with Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation.

 In a manuscript written in 1832 one writer wrote, referring to America’s Constitution, “anything more or less than this is of evil.” Later this writer, alluding to God’s intent, wrote, “Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another. And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood.”