Strength Through Love
I attended the Martin Luther King, Jr. Prayer Breakfast today in Charlotte. It was the first time I had attended the event. I was reminded of honoring the struggles of generations before that sat in, protested, marched, prayed and gathered so that we could make the progress we have been able to make over the past five decades. As I was sitting there reflecting on Dr. King, I thought about all of those men and women who were chamipions for civi rights in their own right. The ones who were in the background fighting the good fight. I thought about my Dad.
Last year, I came across an article about my Dad that made me so proud. The article was entitled “Strength Through Love”, and it was a feature on him in The Daily Advance newspaper out of Elizabeth City North Carolina, which is where he lived and pastored Cornerstone Missionary Baptist Church. My father passed away in 2008 and I happened to find some old papers and old sermons he had typed and found the article neatly folded among a sermon he had drafted. I read the article and it brought tears to my eyes.
As a child, I knew that my Dad knew Dr. King personally and that he spoke at my Dad’s church, St. Stephen Baptist Church at the height of the movement. I remember hearing stories of threats to him from the Ku Klux Klan and yet people rallied in hope and not fear. What I didn’t know, and the article expounded upon, was that my Dad attended King’s School of Non Violence for two weeks after he first met Dr. King at a NAACP National Meeting in Richmond, Virgina. The group was otherwise known as the “King’s Disciples,” which tended to consist of young ministers. My Dad learned to love at time when it was common that Blacks disliked White people. He said “King taught me how to love and to use love as a weapon. Not only did love disarm the enemy, it also gave you a sense of power, integrity and self.” He went on to talk about his expereinces of truly being tested in Birmingham, Alabama because “the way people looked at you with hate-it was so thick you could cut it.” But despite those dark experiences, it inspired him to lead successful protests at Elizabeth City State University and helped organize and galvanize change in the voting laws in those Eastern counties that stifled the Black vote at late as the 1980s.
I remember hearing stories when my Dad moved back to Elizabeth City in 1981 and he got involved in organizing change in the voting laws and ordinances in the area. I remember the threats he received that quietly talked about. I remember when he would talk about his “protection”-not a gun, but those men who he always spoke to in the neighborhood that everyone else ignored as “drunks” who many nights stayed overnight near the parsonage and the church to guard it and protect it without even asking or wanting to be recognized.
We have made great stides in race relations in this country. But we have so much farther to go. The hope of having an African American President led to the reality of a system of checks and balances that can lead to stalemates and little progress in the areas that are most important to most Americans. Open racial hatred scenes such as Birmingham have lended themselves to less profound ways of expression with buzz words that we all know what it means. When homeless rates soar and more and more children are now a part of families of working poor, we have so much more work to do. The growing socio-economic gap between the have nots have far reaching implications. We must do more. We cannot be complacent as human beings in the midst of all that is going on around us in our daily lives. We must do more. We can’t ignore children who are being lost in the system in hopes that someone else will fix it. We must do more. In order to honor the legacy of Dr. King, we simply must not take the progress we have made for granted, as there is so much more work to be done. What will it take to motivate you, us?
I don’t know when this article was written, but I believe it was probably in the 1980s. What struck me most was a quote from my father when he says:
“His legacy is strength through love. But the honoring of his memory, to me, has been misdirected…Nothing beats concerted action. Flag-waving, long speeches and marches have their place, but they aren’t worth the time if it doesn’t motivate you, stimulate you.”
Preach Daddy.
