Edward Gilbreath - Birmingham Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr.s Epic Challenge to the Church

Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.
M ARTIN L UTHER

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.
M ARTIN L UTHER K ING J R .

Martin Luther was on a mission to restore righteousness to the church. On October 31, 1517, when the Catholic monk and scholar hammered his list of ninety-five theological arguments to the front door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany, he helped usher in a new era of Christian activismof speaking truth to power. In Luthers day the medieval churchs papal hierarchy had become so rich, greedy and political that its moral authority sank. Luthers Ninety-Five Theses was a principled stand against hypocrisy and side hustles. He wanted to reform the church from the inside out. Thanks to the Gutenberg presshis eras digital mediaLuthers blistering critique soon went viral, circulating as pamphlets throughout Europe and stirring questions in the minds of others who were disturbed by the Churchs corruption. Luther was a flawed hero whose legacy is debated to this day, but his actions signaled the opening salvo of a revolution.

Four hundred years later, another Martin Luther sparked an equally revolutionary uprising in the United States. Starting in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 and spreading outward, Martin Luther King Jr. upset the Southern social order of racial segregation and white supremacy by boldly reappropriating a simple American idea: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

As an African American kid growing up in the Midwest in the 1970s, I always viewed Martin Luther King Jr. as a fantastical sort of figurean American folk hero who could give a good speech. On the Cool Black Persons Index, he fell somewhere between John Henry and Muhammad Ali. Then I went to high school in the 1980s and learned more about the stuff that came before and after his signature I Have a Dream momentthe buses and bombs, police dogs and fire hoses. In time King became a bit more real to me, like a dead poet or pioneering inventor. In the 1990s I attended a Christian college and went on to work for an evangelical magazine. I soon discovered that racial tension and division were alive and well in American Christianity. In what would become an ongoing quest to understand it all, I returned to King. Among his many works, I read his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Suddenly, King became a prophet.

When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived on the national scene in the late 1950s, America was at a point somewhat similar to where we are today in regard to race: though there had been significant political breakthroughs that signaled racial progress (e.g.,Brown v. the Board of Education then, the election of President Barack Obama today), the reality on the ground was a completely different story. In both cases, people of color risked offending white people if they dared broach the subject of race.

Of course, there are big differences. Back in the day, Negroes were simply expected to know their place in society as the inferior race and to accept it. Today the feeling among many white Americans is that people of color, and particularly African Americans, should be satisfied with the tremendous advances in race relations since the civil rights period, and that to bring up perceived inequalities is to expose oneself as either a whiner or a race baiter.

Race, as both a social construct and a visible reality, is the gigantic elephant in the American living room that some insist will disappear if only we would just ignore it. For African Americans and other people of color, however, it is difficult to ignore a six-ton pachyderm when its sitting on top of you.

In 1910, W. E. B. Du Bois observed how odd the notion of race is in the context of larger human history. The discovery of personal whiteness among the worlds peoples, he said, is a very modern thing. He added that the ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction and that in the Middle Ages skin color would have provoked nothing more than mild curiosity. For the most part, Du Bois was correct. To be sure, early Europeans did recognize differences between their skin color and that of non-Europeans; however, the concept of personal whitenessthe idea that it could be owned as an asset and as a symbol of identitywas yet to come. As late as the seventeenth century, privileged male Europeans did not think of themselves as physically white, and the notion of white as a noun was unheard of. The concept of race grew once white Europeans discovered usefulness in equating their fair complexion with their possession of power. As they learned to exert that power to their advantage, they imposed a stigma of weakness and inferiority on those of a darker complexion.