Dr. King in Montgomery: Our God is marching on

One of the e-newsletters which hits my inbox every day is called The Morning Dispatch.  It is published each morning from The Dispatch.  The Dispatch is a digital-only, center-right news and commentary outlet.  

Usually, The Morning Dispatch includes a rundown of top stories, each item consisting of a brief summary and further links, and then a deeper dive on one or two topics of significance.  Usually, those topics are contemporary news items.  For example, last week, it reported on President Biden's speech in Georgia.  

But today, The Morning Dispatch's feature story was a little different: it consisted of excerpts from one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches.  The newsletter explains that the text in question was

 ... a speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama just weeks after hundreds of nonviolent protesters were violently beaten by state troopers while walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 that legally prohibited race-based discrimination had been signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson months earlier, but black would-be voters continued to be disenfranchised at staggering rates in much of the South, where poll taxes, literacy tests, white-only primaries, and overt intimidation had guarded the ballot box for decades. In 1964, for example, just 6.7 percent of eligible black voters in Mississippi were actually registered to vote, according to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. 

The “Bloody Sunday” march—and King’s speech—played a key role in building momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Johnson signed into law that August. By 1967, nearly 60 percent of eligible black voters in Mississippi were registered to vote. In November 2020, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, that percentage had risen to 83, compared to 79 percent of eligible white voters in the state.

Before I get to the speech itself, let me add a couple of remarks of my own.  Even though demographers would consider me a member of the Baby Boom cohort, I'm a late Boomer - born in 1961.  I'm sufficiently young that many/most of the social and cultural markers of the Boomer generation's formative experience came before I was born, or at least before I was old enough to understand the world around me.  That includes phenomena as trivial as Elvis, Bob Dylan and The Beatles, and as profoundly important as the Vietnam War - and the Civil Rights movement.  I understand that, for virtually everyone else who comments here at NewGathering, the Civil Rights movement is part of your lived history.  For me, it really wasn't - I missed its heyday.  I was alive during some of it, but I was a very little kid during that time.  The first thing I remember, coincidentally, is all the rioting that was touched off by Dr. King's assassination.  So when it comes to that era, I don't have personal memories.  Whatever I know, I've learned the way we learn about any historical subject: school, books, articles and older people's reminiscences.

I've heard Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech several times.  But I hadn't known of this Montgomery speech until now.  It's magnificent.  Speaking as a preacher: this is preaching.  Excerpts of the speech are below the break.  These excerpts appeared in today's The Morning Dispatch newsletter; I understand they got it from the website of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute of Stanford University.

They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, “We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.”

Now it is not an accident that one of the great marches of American history should terminate in Montgomery, Alabama. Just ten years ago, in this very city, a new philosophy was born of the Negro struggle. Montgomery was the first city in the South in which the entire Negro community united and squarely faced its age-old oppressors. Out of this struggle, more than bus [de]segregation was won; a new idea, more powerful than guns or clubs was born. Negroes took it and carried it across the South in epic battles that electrified the nation and the world.

Yet, strangely, the climactic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil. After Montgomery’s, heroic confrontations loomed up in Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and elsewhere. But not until the colossus of segregation was challenged in Birmingham did the conscience of America begin to bleed. White America was profoundly aroused by Birmingham because it witnessed the whole community of Negroes facing terror and brutality with majestic scorn and heroic courage. And from the wells of this democratic spirit, the nation finally forced Congress to write legislation in the hope that it would eradicate the stain of Birmingham. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave Negroes some part of their rightful dignity, but without the vote it was dignity without strength.

Once more the method of nonviolent resistance was unsheathed from its scabbard, and once again an entire community was mobilized to confront the adversary. And again the brutality of a dying order shrieks across the land. Yet, Selma, Alabama, became a shining moment in the conscience of man. If the worst in American life lurked in its dark streets, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it. There never was a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.

The confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma generated the massive power to turn the whole nation to a new course. A president born in the South had the sensitivity to feel the will of the country, and in an address that will live in history as one of the most passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a president of our nation, he pledged the might of the federal government to cast off the centuries-old blight. President Johnson rightly praised the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation.

On our part we must pay our profound respects to the white Americans who cherish their democratic traditions over the ugly customs and privileges of generations and come forth boldly to join hands with us. From Montgomery to Birmingham, from Birmingham to Selma, from Selma back to Montgomery, a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has become a highway up from darkness. Alabama has tried to nurture and defend evil, but evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state. So I stand before you this afternoon with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in Alabama, and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral.

…

My people, my people, listen. The battle is in our hands. The battle is in our hands in Mississippi and Alabama and all over the United States. I know there is a cry today in Alabama, we see it in numerous editorials: “When will Martin Luther King, SCLC, SNCC, and all of these civil rights agitators and all of the white clergymen and labor leaders and students and others get out of our community and let Alabama return to normalcy?”

But I have a message that I would like to leave with Alabama this evening. That is exactly what we don’t want, and we will not allow it to happen, for we know that it was normalcy in Marion that led to the brutal murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson. It was normalcy in Birmingham that led to the murder on Sunday morning of four beautiful, unoffending, innocent girls. It was normalcy on Highway 80 that led state troopers to use tear gas and horses and billy clubs against unarmed human beings who were simply marching for justice. It was normalcy by a cafe in Selma, Alabama, that led to the brutal beating of Reverend James Reeb.

It is normalcy all over our country which leaves the Negro perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of vast ocean of material prosperity. It is normalcy all over Alabama that prevents the Negro from becoming a registered voter. No, we will not allow Alabama to return to normalcy.

The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgment to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice.