Segregation

If anyone was community-minded in our nation’s history, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. He rightly sought the correction of the many injustices inflicted upon African-Americans. But his vision was larger than that. He wanted a better community for everyone. As he said, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of George the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood” (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 260). He called this vision the “beloved community.”

His concern for justice was not limited to African-Americans alone. He understood that injustice degrades not only those who suffer from it but also those who perpetrate it. As he wrote, “We do not seek to remove this unjust system for ourselves alone but for our white brothers as well. The festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro” (ibid. 145). If that was the goal, what was required to reach it? He needed a lot of practical wisdom both to counteract injustice and to bring people together.

The Need for Wisdom
Anyone who sincerely seeks the good of the community quickly discovers that good intentions are not enough. We need practical wisdom—wisdom to see both the goal and the right means to achieve it.

That is precisely what the Apostle Paul prayed for the church in Philippi. He knew they had love, a genuine affection for the community. What they needed was wisdom to direct that love well. He wrote:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God (Phil. 1:9–11).

Let’s take this apart. First, Paul wanted them to bear good fruit. That means he wanted them to do and experience genuine good—for themselves, for others, and ultimately for the glory of God. Continue reading “The Cardinal Virtues for the Christian Life, Part 3: Practical Wisdom”

Our nation was formed with the idea that all people were created equal. However, from its inception, there was a glaring contradiction to that principle in the enslavement of African-Americans. We fought a war to bring an end to this contradiction, but even after the war, justice and equality were denied to African-Americans throughout the nation and particularly in the South. For prosperous Americans, it was too easy to ignore this injustice. Thanks be to God that He raised up Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others to compel this nation to pay attention to this injustice and seek to right it. Here are 9 quotes from Dr. King that powerfully describe the conditions African-Americans faced, the method he would use to confront those conditions, and the vision of new conditions that he wanted to bring about.

All of these quotes are taken from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. compiled and edited by Clayborne Carson. I highly recommend it.

The Problem

1. “My mother confronted the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child. She taught me that I should feel a sense of ‘somebodiness’ but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are ‘less than,’ you are ‘not equal to'” (3).

2. “A man who lived under the torment of knowledge of the rape of his grandmother and murder of his father under the conditions of the present social order, does not readily accept that social order or seek to integrate into it” (268).

3. “The throbbing pain of segregation could be felt but not seen. It scarred Negroes in every experience of their lives. . . . This Freedom Ride movement came into being to reveal the indiginities and the injustices which Negro people faced as they attempted to do the simple thing of traveling through the South as interstate passengers” (153).

The Method

4. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community” (134). Continue reading “9 Powerful Quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

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