Bystanders later described a scene of utter chaos: white onlookers smashed cameras and shot out street lights, while police officers brutally attacked black men and women, some of whom were kneeling and praying on the steps of their church. Jimmie’s crime was to tackle a state trooper who was mercilessly beating his mother. His punishment: to be shot in the stomach and clubbed over the head until almost dead. Denied admission at the local hospital, he was taken to Selma, where he was able to tell his story to reporters. He died several days later. At the news of Jimmie’s death, we drove to Selma immediately. The viewing, at Brown Chapel, was open-casket, and although the mortician had done his best to cover his injuries, the wounds on Jimmie’s head could not be hidden: three murderous blows, each an inch wide and three inches long, ran above his ear, at the base of his skull, and on the top of his head. Deeply shaken, we attended a memorial service there. The room was packed with about three thousand people (many more stood outside), and we sat on a window sill at the back. Amazingly, there was not one note of anger or revenge to be heard in the service. Instead, an atmosphere of courage and peace radiated from the congregation. And when everyone rose to sing the old slave song, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round,” the spirit of triumph was so powerful that an onlooker never would have guessed why we had gathered. At a second service we attended in Marion, the atmosphere was decidedly more subdued. Lining the veranda of the county court house across the street stood a long row of state troopers, hands on their nightsticks, looking straight at us. These were the same men who had attacked Marion’s blacks only days before. As we left the service for the burial, we passed first them, and then a crowd of hecklers that had gathered at nearby City Hall. The police, who were armed with binoculars and cameras as well as guns, scanned and photographed each one of us; the hecklers, though unarmed, followed us with insults and jeers.
Probably no admonition of Jesus
has been more difficult to follow than the command to love our enemies…Far
from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command
to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival.
Love even for our enemies is the key to the solution of the problems
of our world… King’s commitment to love
as a political weapon grew out of his faith, but there was a good
streak of pragmatism in his thinking as well. He knew that he and
other African-Americans involved in the civil rights movement would
have to live for decades to come with the same people they were
now confronting. If they let their treatment embitter them, it would
soon lead to violence, which would only lead to new cycles of repression
and embitterment. Rather than breaking down the walls of racial
hatred, it would build them higher. Only by forgiving their oppressors,
King said, could African-Americans end the “descending spiral
of destruction.” Only forgiveness could bring about lasting
change. One day we shall win our freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” Many in the Civil Rights Movement felt King was far too cautious and ineffectual, and disdained his belief in the power of Gandhian nonviolence. King refused to espouse their less peaceful methods of working for change, but neither did he condemn their tactics outright: “If the oppressed are denied the right to carry out revolution peacefully, how can they be condemned when they turn to violent revolution?” As I wrote in my recent book, Be Not Afraid, our greatest enemy is fear, and specifically the fear of death. If only we could overcome this fear, terrorists would hold no power over us. If anyone had a reason to fear death, it was King. Immensely charismatic and unabashedly outspoken, he put his life on the line for the cause of racial equality time and again. In the end, as we know, he paid the ultimate price. Like anyone else, he must have been afraid of dying, yet the few times I met him or heard him speak, he radiated a deep calm and peace. Here was a man with no doubts as to his mission, and no crippling fears about the cost of carrying it out. “No man is free if he
fears death,” he told the crowd at a civil rights rally in
1963. “But the minute you conquer the fear of death, at that
moment you are free.” Friends urged him to take fewer risks,
but he shrugged them off. “I cannot worry about my safety,”
he told them. “I cannot live in fear. I have to function.
If there is one fear I have conquered, it is the fear of death…I
submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something that
he will die for, he isn’t fit to live!” Like anybody, I would like to
live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned
about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s
allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over.
And I’ve seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with
you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get
to the Promised Land! So I’m happy tonight. I’m not
worried about anything. I am not fearing any man. Mine eyes have
seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! |
