Struggle Until the End
Martin Luther King, Jr., was weary but ever hopeful. Twelve long years had passed since he was chosen to lead the modern civil rights movement that began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Then, King urged unity, nonviolent action, and above all love, until in the words of Amos, “justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Now, on April 3, 1968, King saw that the promised land was finally within sight. Still, there was a long hard road ahead: wars continued to kill, poverty continued to erode, disunity was rampant, violence raged, and spirituality was declining rather than growing.
“One of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinished,” he began his address in Memphis, Tennessee. “And so we, like David, find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled.”
It sounded like his own eulogy. The crux of his message was that there is a struggle in the universe between good and evil, and evil was winning, if only slightly. “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,” he preached. “We’ve got to see it through. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, if I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not be in vain.”
The next day, April 4, King was shot outside his motel room, his spinal cord severed instantly. He died less than an hour later. “If death had to come,” Benjamin Mays eulogized, “there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors,” highlighting King’s support for the sanitation workers’ strike.
It was a powerful symbol that King was slain exactly 14 years after he delivered one of his greatest sermons.
“There is something wrong with our world,” he said Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on April 4, 1954. “Yes, the scientific and educational means by which we live can hardly be surpassed, but the moral and spiritual ends for which we live stand almost in a state of oblivion.”
There were in 1954 “moral and spiritual values” that humanity had left behind, much like how Jesus’s parents had left him behind in Jerusalem; only they “realized that they had left a mighty precious value behind,” King continued, “and before they could go forward to Nazareth, they had to go back to Jerusalem to rediscover this something of value they had lost.
“If we are to go forward, we must go back and find God” and rediscover those moral values. The modern world, he concluded, can never provide substitutes for God and first principles, “for long before any of these things came into being, we needed God, and after they will have passed away, we will still need God.”
Following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, King wrote, “Our nation should do a great deal of soul-searching as a result.” Why? Because Kennedy was not slain by bullets alone; he was slain “by a morally inclement climate,” one “filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence.” Kennedy spoke through his death and told us that “this virus of hate that has seeped into the veins of our nation, if unchecked, will lead inevitably to our moral and spiritual doom.”
That King had just five years to live in 1963 is precisely illustrative of the spiritual atomic bomb he warned his contemporaries of in 1954—the bomb “which lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness.” That bomb slew both Kennedy and King.
Yet in tragedy, as Robert Kennedy said in 1968, quoting Aeschylus, “comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” King’s death, like Kennedy’s, summoned a torrent of reflection that mustn’t cease.
On July 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded King the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation read that he “was the conscience of his generation. He gazed upon the great wall of segregation and saw that the power of love could bring it down. From the pain and exhaustion of his fight to fulfill the principles of our founding fathers for our humblest citizens, he wrung his eloquent statement of his dream for America. He made our nation stronger because he made it better.”
The symbolism of the moment was not lost on Coretta Scott King. “It is highly significant,” she said, “that you, Mr. President, a white Southerner, would become the first American president to recognize the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s contributions to the human rights movement in this country.”
Two years later, standing inside Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King served as pastor, Carter said, “Had he not lived, had his voice not been heard, had his actions not prevailed, it would now be an embarrassment for the United States to mention human rights.”
We honor King, President Obama said in 2011, “because he had faith in us. He saw what we might become.” That quality made King “quintessentially America—because for all the hardships we’ve endured, for all our sometimes tragic history, ours is a story of optimism and achievement and constant striving that is unique upon this Earth.
“Let us keep climbing toward that promised land of a nation and a world that is more fair and more just, and more equal for every single child of God.”
King may not live, but his spirit surrounds us. As Carter beautifully put it in 1977, “His dream sustains us yet.”