Friend Patrick O'Neill's Talk To Celebrate Martin Luther King Day In Garner, NC

Thank you. I am honored to be here today to celebrate the birthday of the greatest American who ever lived: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes in our lives we encounter a transformative moment; a moment that changes us for the better because it allows us to see more clearly, more truthfully. When Pope Francis visited the United States last September he mentioned Dr. King's name and Thomas Merton's name in his address before a joint session of Congress. While Dr. King was a well-known Nobel Peace Prize recipient with a national holiday named for him, Merton was a lesser known Trappist monk and author who shared Martin Luther King's zeal for peace and justice.  

Like King, Merton was a mystic. While most of us believe in God, I expect King and Merton actually experienced God in real time. King foresaw his own martyrdom when on the night before he died in Memphis he delivered his "I've been to the mountaintop" speech. On March 18, 1958, Merton had an incredible revelation on a Louisville, Kentucky street corner, not far from where he lived in the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani.

Merton  wrote about his being: “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people” on that street corner who were “walking around shining like the sun.” 

This vision essentially identified that all these strangers were made in the image and likeness of God - regardless of race, ethnicity or religious faith. That experience inspired Merton's commitment to abolish nuclear weapons and war. It is perhaps fitting that Muhammad Ali Boulevard and Thomas Merton Square traverse each other in today’s Louisville. Muhammad Ali of course was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and Merton was a fierce opponent of racism and war.

As a child, I went on a family trip to Washington D.C. While there -- during the heat of the Civil Rights Movement -- my uncle struck up a conversation with a white police officer who was holding a German shepherd on a leather harness. I did not pay much attention to their conversation, but when the cop said to my uncle, "Watch this." I looked up. He turned to that dog and gave a command: "Martin Luther King!" he yelled, and the dog, which up to this point had been sitting there quietly, started barking viciously and pulling at the harness. The police officer used the name of Dr. King as an order to attack. And we know today who his attacks were likely directed at 50 years ago.

As a journalist I have had the honor of interviewing some of the most prominent Civil Rights activists this nation has ever known. I have met and had the opportunity to interview Coretta Scott King, her daughter, Yolanda and her son, Martin Luther King III. I have also interviewed Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to run for president; Jessie Jackson, several times; Benjamin Hooks, Arthur Ashe and Garner's own -- Helen Phillips. The story I want to tell today is when I interviewed the Rev. Dr. Vincent Harding. 

In his New York Times obituary in May 2014, it said: "For more than half a century, Dr. Harding worked at the nexus of race, religion and social responsibility. Though he was not as high-profile a figure as some of his contemporaries — he preferred to work largely behind the scenes — he was widely considered a central figure in the civil rights movement."

The obituary tells the best known story of Harding, that he was the author of the speech Dr. King delivered at Manhattan's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before Dr. King was murdered. Many Civil Rights historians and others think it was that speech, titled: "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence" -- not his opposition to segregation – that led to King’s martyrdom.

I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Dr. Harding four years ago at the Wild Goose religion festival in Chatham County.  Here's an excerpt from Dr. Harding's amazing story published in The National Catholic Reporter: "Harding said he spent the years following King’s death carrying guilt because his words may have been the reason King was assassinated.

 

In 1958, Harding and four of his male friends – two white and two black – embarked on a car trip from their Chicago Mennonite church to Alabama to see what was happening in the Jim Crow South." Mennonites, along with Quakers and the Church of the Brethren, are the three historical Peace Churches.

 When the mixed-race group arrived in Montgomery, where King was living at the time, they looked up his number in the local phone book. Coretta Scott King answered. She told the men that her husband was recovering from a stab wound from an attack, but Martin Luther King still said he’d meet with the men. When they arrived King greeted them in his pajamas, Harding said, and expressed surprise that they made it to Montgomery alive.

 “We went and had a magnificent couple of hours with Martin,” Harding said. “The Dr. King of 1958 was not the Dr. King of 1963, but he was still a very powerful, compelling figure, full of fun.”

 

 King also invited Harding to make a deeper commitment. “You guys are Mennonites,” Harding said King told them. “You know something about nonviolence. You ought to be down here with us.”

 So began a 10-year relationship between the pair.

“We were able to spend a fair amount of time sharing with each other our hopes and dreams and ideas,” Harding said.

 Because King spent 200 to 300 days a year on the road, he asked Harding for help drafting the Riverside speech, which Harding said King saw as an opportunity “to express his convictions about the wrongness of that war.”

 

”He asked if I would draft that statement for him,” Harding said. “I did that for him, and that is essentially what he shared at Riverside.

“It was clear to me that his assassination was connected to that speech so I was going around with a burden that I shouldn’t have tried to carry.”

 

It wasn’t until he shared his burden with the Rev. James Lawson, the civil rights leader who invited King to come to Memphis in April 1968 to support the striking sanitation workers, that Harding found relief.

 Lawson said he felt no guilt over King’s death. “You know Vincent, I don’t carry that guilt,” Harding said Lawson told him. “I know Martin wanted to come to Memphis.”

 

The words Harding wrote for King to deliver at Riverside “were sentiments that we both shared.”

 

Wearing a “War is Terrorism” button on his shirt, Harding took the time to personally greet people. When he took questions he asked people to give their full names, where they spent their childhoods and their mother’s mother’s name, information he said would tell him a lot about where they had come from.

 

“One need that comes to mind in light of 300 years of slavery; it’s not something to say, ‘Let’s get over it.’ You don’t get over 300 years of that kind of treatment in a nation that was founded saying it believed in liberty and justice for all,” Harding said.

 "How do we make our country true to the dreams of its best people? How can we continue to become more human? How do we become more human in our schools? How do we become more human in our religious communities? How do we become more human in our families?

”The loving creator built the capacity for great hope deep into our lives.”

The Riverside speech, perhaps more than any other, epitomized the reality that King was far more than a Civil Rights leader. Dr. King was an ardent opponent to war; a pacifist, who considered Indian freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus his role models.

That day in New York City, Dr. King denounced the Vietnam War, calling the United States government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." 

 He noted our nation's skewed priorities: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." 

According to an article I read, that "speech prompted President Johnson to revoke Dr. King’s standing invitation to the White House. According to Tavis Smiley, it also earned Dr. King denunciations from 168 major newspapers the next day, including the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper. Dr. King continued in his final year, now an unpopular public figure, to support workers around the country—he was in Memphis, where he was assassinated, in support of striking public sanitation employees. He organized a Poor People’s Campaign, often at odds with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that he helped to create, advocating for a Freedom Budget that sought to use the public treasury to extend genuine economic opportunity and material security to all Americans. After peaking at fourth on the Gallup Poll’s 1964 list of 'Most Admired Men,' Dr. King had disappeared from the list by 1967. He died with disapproval ratings similar to those of George W. Bush upon his exit from office. Yet, in a Gallup Poll conducted in 1999 to determine the most admired Americans of the 20th century, Dr. King is listed second. Unpopular in his time for challenging mainstream opinions of U.S. poverty and militarism, Dr. King is sanitized in our cultural memory, stripped of the radical roots of his values. He is now loved in death by the same economic-political establishment he opposed in life."

Last March, I traveled to Selma, Alabama to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. In 2009, I had taken some of my children to Washington D.C. to celebrate the inauguration of our nation's first African-American President Barack Obama. I have fond memories of being in D.C. with thousands of others to experience the jubilation of President Obama's inauguration, a reality many Americans thought they would never experience. 

I had hoped that my trip to Selma would have a similar feel to the trip to President Obama's inauguration. Riding on theD.C. Metro with hundreds of joyful and smiling African Americans -- all of us -- brown, red, black and white -- celebrating together remains one of my fondest's memories.

 But, Selma was different. 

The memories of the 1965 Bloody Sunday massacre were too raw in Selma. Yes, President Obama and Rep. John Lewis led a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but the reality of the lingering presence of racism in our nation was also omnipresent in Selma. I realized I was standing and marching over hallowed ground where brave martyrs had been beaten and bloodied. The "Black Lives Matter" movement was emerging, and our attention was once again drawn to television images of police killing our unarmed Black brothers and sisters. On the bridge, people carried signs with the words: "Hands up, don't shoot." As a white man, I felt out of place in Selma.

That's when I turned to God and asked for a sign. How, I prayed, could I make this experience more meaningful? That's when God told me to make a sign (literally). I quickly found a piece of cardboard and a piece of cord. I borrowed a marker to write on the sign, draped  the sign around my neck and started to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This was the sign I wore. (At this point I put the sign on to show the audience -- It said: "I'M SORRY"

Not realizing what the impact of this would mean, I was immediately interviewed by an African American reporter with the Los Angeles Times who asked me why I was wearing the sign.

“I thought because I'm a white guy, it might be self-explanatory,” I said. “I stood on the spot where people were beaten, nonviolent people. I said to myself, I'm a white man of privilege in this country, and so much is still the same.

“I feel I need to accept responsibility for my privilege as a white male. I didn't want to make it complicated. Just two words of repentance.”

Soon, groups of people, most of them African Americans, approached me. Elvira Carter of Butler, Alabama, said: “I just want to shake your hand.”

Scores of people asked to have their pictures taken with me and my sign. Two women approached me crying, telling me, "No one ever told me they were sorry." Even young people who approached me with looks of skepticism, asked me about the sign. My response was always the same. "I thought this was the best message an old white guy could bring to this bridge." That answer was always accepted.

Thanks to God's leading I was able to make my experience in Selma meaningful. I don't tell this story to call attention to myself, because I know that if the things I do in this life are inspired by God, then it would fraudulent for me to take any credit. Pride would make my actions insincere and self-serving. I am only here telling this story because I was invited to do so by my friends on the Martin Luther King Birthday Celebration Committee.

 

So, what is our call in this world of endless war, horrific poverty and racism? To feed the hungry. To give drink to the thirsty. To care for the sick. To free the prisoners, liberate the captives. To let the blind see. To welcome the stranger. To love our enemies and do good to those who harm us. And to simply embrace love is our only rational act.

In conclusion I would like to refer again to Dr. King's 1967 speech in which he denounced the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism," which continue to plague our society and world preventing us from becoming the "beloved community" Dr. King envisioned. As Dr. King said: "The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence." I pray that our world can turn away from violence, war and social injustice, so humankind can live together in peace.