CHUBB INSURANCE, WARREN, NJ   

Thank you for that introduction and thank you for the invitation.  Its an honor to be here, not just because you are a client of mine and I am a client of yours.  Martin Luther King shaped and influenced my life in ways I can not fully articulate. 

When I arrived at Morehouse College in 1975, Dr. King had been dead for seven years, but you could still feel his presence on campus.  You could feel the ways in which Morehouse had shaped Dr. King, and in which Dr. King had shaped Morehouse.  Benjamin Mays, our revered president emeritus and Dr. King’s teacher and mentor, was still a visible force on campus.  Our French professor, Dr. Edward Jones, had been around so long that he taught Dr. King’s father.  Dr. King’s son, Marty, was in my class. Dr. King’s other son, Dexter, was a few years behind.  Marty and I were both political science majors, and became good friends.  Particularly around test time, Marty wanted to be my best friend.  On several occasions I visited Marty and his mother at their home at 234 Sunset Avenue in Atlanta.

My life and Dr. King’s come close to intersecting in another way. I will share with you a piece of MLK trivia that almost no one knows.  My grandfather, Charles S. Johnson, was a sociologist and president of Fisk University in the 1940s and 50s. In October 1956 he wrote an article which was published in the New York Times Magazine Section: “A Southern Negro’s View of the South.”  Soon after it was published, Dr. Johnson received a letter (which my father recently found in some old papers in his basement) from a 26-year old Baptist minister, on the letterhead of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL:

This letter is dated October 11, 1956.  Given the mail service then and my grandfather’s travel habits, I don’t know whether he ever actually saw this because he died suddenly and unexpectedly on October 29, 1956.  After my grandfather died the Fisk Board of Trustees reached out to Dr King, fresh from victory in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and sounded him out about the job of President of Fisk University.  My own grandmother invited Dr. King to dinner and encouraged him to take the job.  On behalf of all Americans, I’m happy my grandmother’s charm and grace did not work its usual wonders on Dr. King.

The effort to make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday really took off in Atlanta in the mid/late 1970s.  My best friend Greg Griffin, who lives in Montgomery, Alabama, documented the early stages of this movement in a column he writes for the Historic Montgomery-Tuskegee Times Newspaper.  This story is very embarrassing to me, and Greg is prone to exaggeration in several respects, but here it is:

“Congressman John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, first introduced legislation for a commemorative holiday four days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. After the bill was derailed in Congress, petitions endorsing the holiday containing six million names were submitted to Congress. The bill was reintroduced each year until it passed and was signed into law on November 2, 1983, fifteen years after Dr. King’s assassination.

In 1978, I had a unique opportunity to attend a meeting in Martin Luther King’s home. Martin Luther King III called and invited me to attend a private strategy session for making the holiday a reality. Attending the meeting were several key National Civil Rights Leaders.

After receiving the call from Martin, I immediately called Dr. Rashid Abdul Holloway. Dr. Holloway was my faculty advisor to the Student Government Association.  As President of the Morehouse College student body, I always traveled with an entourage. I called my close friend Jeh Charles Johnson and invited him to come along. Jeh Johnson would later become General Counsel to the United States Air Force. Today, he is one of the wealthiest and most celebrated trial lawyers in New York.

We arrived at Martin Luther King Jr’s home around 1:30 in the afternoon. As we approached the door I realized my close friend Jeh’s deodorant had given out. I turned to Jeh and said ‘I can not believe you have come to Martin Luther King’s house smelling like a billy goat.’ He said ‘don’t worry, I won’t fan around.’ 

Mrs. King answered the door. When I walked into the room I nearly passed out when I saw all of the famous people sitting there. I felt like a mule in the Kentucky Derby.

Mrs. King started the meeting by telling everyone why we had gathered. She then asked for comments about the prospect of Dr. King being honored with a national holiday. I personally thought Mrs. King had lost her mind. Surely America would not honor Dr. King with a holiday.

Dr. Holloway, in political exile from Sierra Leone, West Africa raised his hand. Mrs. King recognized him and he began to speak. ‘Mrs. King: I do not think that your husband’s birthday should be a national holiday. What are people going to do on that day? They will simply barbeque!’ I thought I saw smoke coming out of Mrs. King’s ears. She looked at Dr. Holloway and responded: ‘First of all I do not need a professor to come into my home and lecture me. Second, who invited you?’ At that moment I wanted to crawl under the couch. Martin immediately walked over to his mother and whispered something in her ear. I suspect he told her that Dr. Holloway was his political science professor. She made no further comments and recognized the next person.

Fifteen years later on November 2, 1983 Mrs. King’s dream became a reality. I could not believe it. Mrs. King had faith that the American Government would stand up and do the right thing in this situation. On January 20, 1986 we began to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday.”

For an unedited copy of this article I just read you can log onto www.greggriffin.com.

Thanks to the national holiday each year the name “Martin Luther King Jr.” is now one of the best known in the American vocabulary, alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Almost every major city in America has a street named for him.  Almost every elementary school in America has his picture in a classroom. 

However, we are in danger of forgetting what Martin Luther King actually challenged our nation to do, particularly in the last three years of his life.  Ask many 4th or 5th grade students my kids’ age, born decades after Dr. King died, to identify one thing Dr. King said, and they will all tell you “I Have a Dream.”   Young Americans most often simply associate Dr. King with “a dream.”  What is “a dream”?  What words do you think of when you think of “a dream”?  You think of sleep.  You think of white sheep.  You think of fantasy.  You think of bed pillows.  You think of softness. You think of comfort. 

Over the last 38 years, the legacy of Dr. King has become one with which almost no one can disagree.  In 1983, 15 years after Dr. King was silenced by murder, even the segregationist Strom Thurmond found that he could afford politically to vote in favor of Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday.  Had John Conyers sought Strom Thurmond’s support for the bill when he first proposed it in 1968, we know what Senator Thurmond’s position would have been then.   A legacy can be reshaped in 38 years. 

Though I never met Dr. King I feel as though I know him.  As a student at Morehouse I was taught and inspired by those who taught and inspired him.  I listened to sermons from those who were close to him. I have read or listened to every one of his major speeches, and studied his career.  As a black man generally and  a Morehouse Man specifically, my life has been shaped by Martin Luther King.  This is why in the speeches I give about him, including this one today, I dedicate myself to reminding audiences of the sharp change in direction Dr. King’s life had taken in 1965 to 1968, and the legacy he actually left on April 4, 1968.  

The reality is that Dr. King challenged the status quo. He was divisive.  He pushed people out of their comfort zones. His stated goal was to, through nonviolent action, create crisis in quiet and complacent communities. When he came to Albany, Georgia, Birmingham, Chicago, and Memphis he was not greeted as the national icon he is today.  The leaders in those cities viewed his approach with dread.  The Mayor of Selma referred to him publicly as “Martin Luther Koon.”  To force America to live up to its promises, Dr. King brought about change the hard way.  He was harassed by the FBI.  He was hated and received death threats.  He was murdered for his efforts.  

Many people like to ask “What would Dr. King be doing if he were alive today?”  From the direction of his life in the last three years – which, by the way, is chronicled in a newly released book by Taylor Branch, “At Canaan’s Edge” -- I believe we know the answer with virtual certainty. 

Dr. King’s 12-year career as a civil rights leader can be divided neatly into two chapters.  Pre- and post- Selma. 

From the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56 to the Selma-to- Montgomery March in March 1965, Dr. King focused the nation’s attention on injustices that could be remedied by changes in law.  The Montgomery bus boycott ended after a Supreme Court decision.  Birmingham and the March on Washington led directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The Selma-to-Montgomery march led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Equal access to public accommodations, jobs, and the ballot box. 

Dr. King was a forward-thinking man. After Selma, he recognized that the next great challenges were not ones to be addressed by changes in law.  From 1965 until April 4, 1968, Dr. King devoted himself principally to two very ambitious agendas: peace and poverty -- agendas that encompassed blacks, whites and everybody in between. 

In 1966 Dr. King and his family literally moved to Chicago and rented an apartment there. He took off his preacher’s suit and shoveled garbage, all to demonstrate the need for better housing and living conditions in Chicago.

In the final year of his life Dr. King devoted himself to his grand plan for a Poor People’s March on Washington. On January 15, 1968, his last birthday alive, he presided over a meeting in the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church and talked about a great assembly of blacks, American Indians, organized labor, and Appalachian whites that would converge on Washington later that year, to demand that the richest nation on earth address the poverty in its midst.

In challenging the nation to address poverty, Dr. King knew he was taking on a daunting task.  He said it didn’t cost the nation one penny to desegregate lunch counters, but he was now asking the nation to spend billions to finally address poverty.  The final weekend of his life, at a sermon at Riverside Baptist Church in New York City, Dr. King reminded us that every American “is endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among those the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  But if a man does not have a job or an income, he has neither life, liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”  Dr. King said then “We have the resources to eliminate poverty. The only question is do we have the will.”

In the final week of his life Dr. King went to Memphis, Tennessee to support a garbage strike.  His final march was not a civil rights march; it was a march in support of better wages. 

Dr. King’s final speech, on the final night of his life in Memphis – the speech where Dr. King predicted his own death, commonly referred to as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop Address” -- was largely a fiery address about the virtue of economic power, and the effectiveness of economic withdrawal.  Prodded by the young black militants who had increasing influence on his thinking, Dr. King called for an economic boycott.  He said a boycott is painful, and that it was time to redistribute the pain of the sanitation workers.  Dr. King called for a boycott of the local Coca-Cola distributorship, Wonder bread, Sealtest Milk. He called for blacks to withdraw their money from white banks and, yes, white insurance companies in downtown Memphis, until those companies altered their hiring practices. 

That night Dr. King recalled Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan on the road to Jericho.  Challenging the people of Memphis that day, Dr. King applied the story to Memphis 1968 and said “the question is not, if I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to me or my job?  The question is, if I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them? That’s the question.” Dr. King saw that the “whole Jericho road must be transformed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that nations that produce beggars need restructuring.”

But, by far the most controversial and difficult stand Dr. King took the final year of his life was against the war in Vietnam. Other, more traditional civil rights leaders urged him to remain silent; not to alienate the president who had been their best friend and most powerful ally in the movement. Even Senator Edward Brooke, the lone black senator, criticized Dr. King for taking a stand against the Vietnam War.

In the face of that opposition, Dr. King said “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war,” but “there comes a time when silence is betrayal” and “my conscience leaves me no other choice.” 

Beginning in April 1967, Dr. King gave three eloquent and impassioned arguments against the war: 

First, the war was an enemy of the poor … a “destructive suction tube,” devastating the hopes of the poor at home in the War Against Poverty, and sending their sons, fathers and brothers off to fight and die in a distant land at a disproportionately high rate.  Dr. King noted the cruel irony of sending a young black man off to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that he could not find in Southwest Georgia, and sending blacks and whites off to kill and die together for a nation unable to seat them in the same schools together. 

Second, Dr. King said he could not credibly counsel angry young militants at home against Molotov cocktails and rifles as the answer to their problems, and face the response: what about Vietnam?  Quoting the words spoken five years before by John F. Kennedy (and written by JFK’s speechwriter, my law partner Ted Sorensen) King said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Third, Dr. King spoke eloquently that our nation had fallen victim to a deadly Western arrogance.  He said: a “Western arrogance that it has everything to teach and nothing to learn from others is not just.” To his congregation in Atlanta one Sunday in 1967, Dr. King said the United States had become too arrogant with its power, and he reminded us that God did not appoint us policeman of the whole world.

Dr. King reminded us that the very assumptions underlying war are irrational: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral.  Returning violence with violence only multiples violence, adding to a deeper darkness are already devoid of stars.”  “An eye for an eye does nothing but leave everybody blind.”

The great irony of Monday is that Mrs. King’s dream of a national holiday has become reality; Dr. King’s dream of a society at peace with itself has not. 

If you want to do more than barbeque on Monday; if you want to really honor Dr. King on Monday, now more than ever, remember that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Teach your children about more than dreams. Teach your children about Dr. King’s calls to action.  Listen to his speeches as if they were given this day.  Listen to his sermons as if they were given this Sunday. 

Over these last few minutes I hope I have told you some things big and small about Dr. King that you did not know. The consistent cry by Dr. King and other civil rights leaders in both parts one and two of his life as I have defined them is a plea to America to live up to its own promises and values.  “I speak as one who loves America” he said.  “All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper,” he said.  The motto of the civil rights movement at its birth was “to save the soul of America.”  Equality, peace and prosperity are American values. 

On Monday, as you reflect on Dr. King’s life, remember his favorite words from the poet Langston Hughes:  “Oh yes. I say it plain. America never was America to me. And yet I swear this oath: America it will be.”  

In the words of my dad, “If you don’t have money at least have class!”

Greg Griffin is a free lance writer. You can read his previous articles by visiting his web page at www.greggriffin.com