African American politicians:Martin Luther King - Essay Example

?Martin Luther King, Jr. encourages us to “project the ethics of love to the center of our lives.” Would you recommend King's call for an ethics of love in our own time? Why or why not? Introduction Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a difficult life. He faced violence nearly every day. Assaulted in Birmingham, several times arrested, hit by a rock in Chicago, his voiced grew into a mellifluous and brilliant chord of guidance for a lot of people. Many people rejected this ethics of love philosophy. But upon hearing him, upon experiencing his leadership and what he had been through, one felt they were experiencing the sudden real growth of America. Dr. King was a Christian and he was an educated one. He had studied the roots and origins of Christianity and the various philosophies that had grown to defend it. King had put together a philosophy for African Americans that was based on essential Christian and secular principles that he had researched and learned while a student at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University. Those principles he had shaped served to galvanize and lead not only a movement of African Americans, but they rebounded into the hearts and souls of so many people that they simply became the reflection of the American ethics. Dr. King gave renewal to certain basic American principles by giving them public demonstration and experiences that could not be denied. Because he did this, America could again say it was a country based on delivering American ethics to its people. Can his kind of Christian ethics serve today? Of course it can. It certainly can and it's the role of African Americans and those influenced by Dr. King to again lead the country back to a renewal in faith and the principles of agape love. The reason is because Dr. King's concept of love made Christian love an active power that could help define people and how they got along with each other. Discussion For Dr. King agape love, because it could stand in the face of centuries’ worth of built-up numbing hate, was "the only cement that can hold this broken community together" (Luker 47). He essentially found agape love in the First Epistle of Saint John, where it says "God is Love". What did this mean to the southern black man who kept getting his cotton stolen from him when he came to sell it at the mill?. What did it mean for the black woman who had to stand aside and behind as she grew up and took care of white babies who had enough food to eat and her own children did not? The black man complained and got lynched, hung up from a tree. The woman stole food and was placed in jail. The black woman couldn't say anything when she was raped by the while landowner. What did an ethics of love mean in these situations? For one thing it meant confrontation. This statement is strange in the fact that Dr. King lead a movement of nonviolence. But nonviolence was based on being a coercive act that required and met force. King had studied the philosopher theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was at first a pacifist, he later criticized the pacifist position. But he had observed that it was impossible for the Negro man to "expect complete emancipation ... by trusting in the moral sense of the white main ... [and it is] hopeless to achieve emancipation through violent rebellion" (Niebuhr). These were stark realities. White people had destroyed entire black towns in a display of hate-filled force. Dr. King knew that a point blank revolution would only mean death and annihilation of black people. Dr. King was a Christian and a serious one. He was not his own man. He gave up his individual self to become a man of a movement and a history. He became agape. Before he led the moment to boycott buses in Montgomery (1955), his first public staging, the Negro movement for rights had been gaining acceleration in America and had reached a pinnacle. This occurred when the Brown vs. Board of Education struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had ruled southern segregation since the late 1800s. The movement was ready to reaffirm American principles and stand up front with a pinnacle of agape upon it. As a Christian minister Dr. King drew the concept of agape from the Greeks and then enlightened Christian thought with his findings. The Greeks had defined love as eros and as philia. Eros was romantic love, philia was the love of friendship. That left agape. In several passages, Dr. King defined his concept of agape. He importantly drew from another philosopher theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich saw agape in the New Testament as a self-sacrifice for the 'other' of the other person to come out and thrive (Tillich 152). Dr. King was able to see this as a concept for a love that would enable all in a community to come together. In order to do this the love had to be willing to sacrifice individuality for the sake of mutuality. Importantly it had to be an active sort of love that would recognize the humanity of others for their own sake. Going back to Niebuhr, the concept of recognizing others would entail others understanding their common human fragility under a bind of nonviolence. Dr. King's concept of agape love could do this. By allowing expressions of violence it could eventually force the conscience of the other to recognize their essential human sameness and effect a change in coconsciousness. So it is by nonviolent confrontation in the spirit of agape that a community of the all can be built. Agape allows one "to face evil with an infinite capacity without flinching" and while seeking nothing in return (Smith 149). In this way Dr. King draws thought from another theologian thinker, Anders Nygren, that love creates value (King, King (Jr.) and Washington 16). Hence the sight of police dogs biting children protestors in Birmingham streets splashed across the black and white TVs, was an expression of agape love. The pictures became a value expression of creating and joining community. But how could that be seen? How could meeting raw hatred and violence today with nonviolence and agape be seen as a workable ethics? Conclusion "There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice and so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship. And this was one of the things that kept the people together, the belief that the universe is on the side of justice" (King (Jr.) 32)(my italics). Justice was not separated from agape as it is in criminal law. Justice derives nakedly from love. An application of the ethics of agape today would say that it is okay to give spontaneous love to a human being who may be different from what you are. Why? Because this expression of love represents an inner law that has been written on the heart, and it is a higher law than civic law. It is the law of agape (Gross 77). Today social justice is more or less accepted as an activity, an action toward justice. This derives from the social movement led by Dr. King, the social movement of justice and agape. How may this love as practiced by Dr. King "project the ethics of love to the center of our lives” today? How can agape be possible when we are presently in a period of meanness, when money is being cut from child and youth programs; when citizens can no longer expect as many teachers that are needed; when homeowners who had dreams are now being forced into large garage like homeless shelters or to have their families live in cars? The ethics of love can be projected to the center of our lives today because agape from Dr. King, the way he is telling us to express and the way we have expressed it, means love is not weak, it is action. Love seeks to face evil while preserving and creating community. That is how. Bibliography Gross, Francis L. Searching for God. Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1990. King (Jr.), Martin Luther. "Some Power in the Universe that Works for Justice." Washington, James M. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. New York: Scotts Foresman and Co., 1986. King, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King (Jr.) and James Melvin Washington. The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. Ed. James M. Washington. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. Luker, Ralph E. "Kingdom of God and Belowed Community in the Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr." The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South: Essays. Ed. Ted Ownby. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Richard Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life. Ed. Larry Rasmusen. New York: Harper and Row, 1991. Smith, Donald Huge. Martin Luther King, Jr: Rhetorician of Revolt. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1964. Tillich, Paul. The Essential Tillich. Ed. Forrester F. Church. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Read More