"Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars."
- Memphis, April 3, 1968
It’s been my tradition the last five or six years to take a solo retreat over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to Silver Falls State Park, where I hike the waterfall trails practicing my photography, and hole up in a cabin catching up on my reading and writing. This morning I read Dr. King’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech from 1964 and the speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis the night before he was murdered four years later. I usually select a quote to share with everyone on my Monday morning e-mail and leave it at that, but today I am moved to share exactly what it is about Dr. King that makes him such a hero of mine.
First, his intelligence. This man was a genius, a dedicated student from an early age who never stopped striving toward wisdom. He had the ability to think on the highest levels and then transform his message into invigorating but accessible language that could engage both world leaders and local sanitation workers. Like Jesus of Nazareth, whose work he studied more than anyone else, Dr. King had the ability to teach in parable, using the heartbreaking and uplifting stories happening all around him to teach a greater lesson. As an aspiring writer, I am both jealous and inspired by his command of the English language.
Secondly, his courage. Here was a man who predicted his own murder the night before it happened. He could have stayed in that motel room in Memphis or never gotten on the plane to Memphis in the first place. In the course of his career he had been jailed repeatedly, taunted with disgusting racial epithets, hung in effigy, beaten and stabbed, and perhaps most horrific for a devoted husband and father of four young children, his home had been bombed. How must he have handled that? How did he weigh the work he was doing against the lives of his family? Nothing could have scared him more, and yet he never hid from the struggle.
Finally, his nonviolence. Dr. King was a warrior to rival any other, and though his struggle must have seemed as insurmountable as the most dire military battles, his only weapons were his words and peaceful actions. Borrowing from the passive resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and the “turn the other cheek” philosophy of Jesus, Dr. King put all of his faith in the strength and transformative power of love. To join his movement, one had to be trained in how to fight without fighting, how to “rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” And it worked. When the atrocities of police brutality became normal nightly news, the American people raised their collective voice and demanded more from their country.
The quote I have chosen this year is from that speech Dr. King gave to the sanitation workers the night before he was murdered: “Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Last night I found myself surrounded by a formidable darkness at Silver Falls. I often take a night hike on my retreat, and it is always a little spooky, but this year I was more jumpy than usual. Perhaps it was the extra separation I felt being apart from my wife and our baby boy still nestled in her belly, but after two days of solid rain, it was the first sighting of stars through the parting clouds that finally brought me back down to earth. There will always be dark times and frightening struggles looming before us, but there will always be hope, and we have no better source of hope than the legacy of Dr. King.
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 18, 2010
Copyright © 2002 - 2010 Tom Cantwell