January 31, 2002
‘Beloved community’ was MLK’s dream
Thirty-four years after his death, the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. permeates every facet of our social and political world. Today we honor his life, and his vision of what America might be, by performing unselfish service to others because that is how Dr. King saw the duty and the responsibility and the privilege of American citizenship.
For King, all our lives are inter-dependent. He reminded us that we cannot get through a single day without depending — in some way — on the entire rest of the world. “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” he said. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
But King did much more than just preach. For his entire adult life, he worked through his personal fatigue and his exhaustion and his disappointments, which were many, in the hope of building his dream of a “beloved community.” In 1964 he was the youngest person — at age 35 — to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The money for that prize came to $54,600. Dr. King kept none of it for himself. He divided the prize money evenly between five organizations devoted to civil rights and peace.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, King said he was accepting this honor “in the spirit of a guardian of some precious heirloom which he holds in trust for its true owners — all those to whom beauty is truth and truth is beauty — and in whose eyes the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace is more precious than diamonds or silver or gold.”
And he concluded that important speech by saying this to the entire world:
“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time . . . The foundation of such a method is love . . . I have the audacity to believe,” he said, “that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”
Those words, written 38 years ago, can serve us well as America enters the twenty-first century.
Every year on Dr. King’s birthday some people wonder what he would say if he was alive today. If King had lived, and reached the age of 73, which is what he would be today, I think his message to us would be the same as it was during the Montgomery boycott in 1955, during Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965 and Memphis in 1968. It is the message that we find in his beautiful sermon “The Drum Major Instinct,” which was played at King’s funeral by Rev. Ralph Abernathy.
The essence of that sermon, in King’s own words, is this:
“There is, deep down within all of us, an instinct. It’s a kind of drum major instinct — a desire to be first . . . We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade…don’t give it up,” King said. He said, “Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That’s what I want you to do.”
English Professor Charles Johnson delivered this speech to the 1,100 members of the UW community who volunteered their service on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
