His Voice Lit My Path: A Tribute to Martin Luther King

It was the summer of 1964.  I led, holding the cross high.  I had no plan except to start singing, which we did as soon as we rounded the corner and saw the mob.  It seemed like an apparition:  roughly one hundred people stood in the street, a human arc in front of the house.  Many were women in curlers holding the hands of their children.  Three or four policemen sat calmly on their horses.  A car, presumably the new owners’, sat blackened in the street sitting on cinder blocks.  All the windows had been broken.  Sills and window casings were splintered. Stones littered the yard.  “Niggers, go home” was the mildest of the shouts we heard. 

What did we have?  Nothing.  Our bodies.  Presence. Witness. What to do? Sing. I don’t remember the first song, but it was probably “This Little Light of Mine.” 

Martin Luther King Jr.’s witness and courage had turned my life upside down, snaring me in 1962, my last year in college.  Before new policies, new programs, before the Great Society and the War on Poverty, the faith community led the struggle.  I joined that struggle, attending seminary, primarily because it was the locus of political action trying to spark political and community change.  My beliefs, then emerging, held that the God I celebrate is mud-spattered, engaged, bruised and forgiving –angry at our neglect and injustice, but always hopeful, a God who doesn’t promise a painless life, a relaxed, uneventful existence, one offering joy – One who says, “Don’t worry about heaven.  Worry about your neighbor.  He needs you now.  Get moving.  You’re human, and you’re going to mess up.  But you’ve got a spark of Me in you. Move.” 

King’s was a passionate, joyful, muscular faith, not the bland, polite brand of religion I had tasted growing up. As I saw it, King aimed to change law and hearts, his language embracing civic change and sacrifice, reconciliation, and life after pain.  It aimed to change law and create loving communities.

A second-year seminarian, I worked that summer as the director of an urban camp out of the Church of the Advocate, located at 18^thand Diamond Streets, smack in the heart of one of Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent areas.  We seemed always to be in the middle of the action, both personal and political.  For the kids, there were street games, a six-block hike to the municipal pool, church school lessons, and work with their families.  In the evening, the camp staff and volunteers attended or hosted meetings of SNVCC  (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).  We often picketed the then-segregated Girard College.  The kids, political action, song, and worship were woven together in a rich, joyous, often tumultuous, and exhausting whole.

One hot summer night we received an emergency call from the American Friends Service Committee. A young black couple, she a nurse, we later found out, and he a lab technician, had just bought a house in Folsom, a suburb south of Philadelphia, in an effort to integrate an all-white neighborhood. The caller was hysterical, shouting over the phone that the couple was huddled in the basement of their new house with a Friends Service Committee staffer, crouching behind an overturned hot water heater.  “Their lawn and car have been soaked with gasoline and torched,” the caller shouted.  “Every window has been shattered by stones. You have to help us now!  The family and one of our workers are in terrible danger.” 

What could we do?  What did we have?  Not much.  Ourselves.  Our bodies.  A little madness.  The certainty that we had to respond.  Hardly thinking, I grabbed the large cross and a handful of choir robes and yelled for volunteers.  As I recall, there were about seven of us, maybe eight.  A pretty motley bunch we were, most in our early twenties, and a few young assistant counselors still in high school.

We sped to Folsom, parking a few blocks from the address.  We could hear muffled yelling.  The ebb and flow of shouting sounded like a football crowd.  We donned our red robes and white cassocks in the steaming mid-Atlantic summer heat.  One of the counselors, Garland Dempsey, our wheelman, refused to march even though he was hopelessly in love with one of the marchers.  “You’re crazy.  You’re going to get killed.”  Civil rights workers had been slain.  “I’m going to get help!” As it turned out, Garland wasn’t the coward he seemed.  He saved our necks.

We started to sing.  The feeling of unreality suddenly became mutual.  The crowd stopped shouting and gaped at this rag-tag bunch that looked as if descended from outer space. The crowd, initially bewildered, parted so we could get through.  We sang our way up a small hill over the lawn.  It grew so quiet that I remembered hearing the crunch of the charred grass under our feet.

We stopped in front of the house and kept singing.  What to do?  Eventually, we were going to run out of songs, “This Little Light of Mine,”  “We Shall Overcome,” “Oh, Freedom…”

It didn’t take long for the crowd to realize what we represented, and that they weren’t exactly facing a juggernaut.  The silence broke with a shout: “Nigger lovers, go home.”  That’s when someone had the bright idea of throwing stones not at us, but over us on the roof, where the stones rolled down, hitting our heads and shoulders.  We moved a few feet away from the eaves and kept singing.  We were clear of the rocks, but, unfortunately, closer to the crowd. The situation shifted abruptly when someone started throwing stones hard against the house, stones ricocheting onto our backs.

Strange, I don’t recall being scared.  I was consumed by another worry.  I have two junior counselors in this march.  They were probably no more than sixteen.  If they get hurt, or worse…I feared their parents’ wrath more than the mob.  Something had to give.  And it did.

The sudden piercing wail of police sirens drowned out both our singing and the mob’s shouting.  With lights flashing, three or four state police cruisers roared in breaking up the stalemate. Garland had come through.  He had gotten a prominent DJ at a local radio station to sound the alarm, an alarm that somehow alerted both the governor’s office and the state police.

I visited the young couple the next day.  We stood together amidst broken glass and splintered wood on the windowless second story, staring at the blackened, rock-strewn lawn and the remains of their car.  I’ll never forget what the man said: “It is hate,” he whispered.  “But the hate hurts them.  They throw rocks at themselves.  It makes me sad for them.”  Implicit forgiveness.  Sadness for them!

Nevertheless, I soon learned that they had left the neighborhood for good.  But that summer and King’s witness changed me.  I finished my Masters in Divinity degree but declined ordination, rather choosing to join the fledgling poverty programs just starting up in Boston.

Policy and implementing programs, running agencies small and large became my life’s work –the manifest part of my work.  But underneath was King, the bedrock whose voice said, “You are loved by God, and so you are commissioned to love your neighbor, especially those most in need; and whatever you risk, you will be sustained.” His voice lit my path, a lifelong path, and I am forever grateful.