stride

 

On a snowy day in January 1981 a small crowd (small by Washington standards, about thirty thousand people) drawn down toward the slope beyond the Washington Monument, not far east of the Lincoln Memorial, gathered to hear speakers such as Elihu Harris, and listened to Stevie Wonder introduce a new song he had written for the occasion, "Happy Birthday [Dear Martin]". In the softly falling flakes of snow we heard the call for a new holiday, to remember not only the man but the movement.

STRIDE TOWARD FREEDOM

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his first book, an account of the Montgomery bus boycott, "Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story" (1958, Harper & Brothers; 2010, Beacon Press), tells the story of the collective nonviolent resistance movement that began as Mrs. Rosa Parks stayed in her seat on a bus. And it tells the thinking behind his leadership, relating how his mind had changed, to borrow a phrase, as he began to experience satyagraha (soul-force) in his nascent activist organizing, after studying nonviolent resistance in his academic work. Along with the major twentieth-century Protestant theologians he cites (as James Cone will in turn in his memoir) King got to know about Mohandas K. Gandhi and his application of methods as old as Henry David Thoreau, and perhaps Jesus, to a twentieth-century struggle.

Here are some excerpts: 

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice." (27)

"...the use of violence in our struggle would be both impractical and immoral. To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding." (74)

"When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent resistance would be applicable. I neither started the protest nor suggested it. I simply responded to the call of my people for a spokesman. When the protest began, my mind, consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. As the days unfolded, I came to see the power of nonviolence more and more. Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life. Many of the things that I had not cleared up intellectually concerning nonviolence were now solved in the sphere of practical action." (89)