Where Do We Go From Here?

MLK and the human heart

I have been carrying around the title of Martin Luther King’s last book all week. Published in 1967, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? seems like an apt question for the moment for many different reasons. (If you have not read the book, he delivered a summary as a shorter speech, which you can read here.) As a nation, as a Church, we have a choice; but of course, thinking about it in these abstract terms sometimes distances us from the reality that the big choices are of course directly related to little choices. The choices that we face today are the direct result of billions of little choices made along the way, and whatever choice we make will not be made on some grand stage. It will be made around our dinner tables, in voting booths, in the quiet chambers of our hearts when we decide who we will allow to impact our decision-making and who we will dismiss.

King’s aim in the book was to take stock of the civil rights movement at the time and to lay out an agenda for its future. He notes the success the movement has had in helping Black Americans recapture a sense of identity, of self-worth. He particularly notes the success of Operation Breadbasket, which pressed businesses to hire more Black Americans through the power of the boycott. (King tells with pride of how a boycott worked against Sealtest foods, who had a dearth of Black employees. King and others met with Sealtest and said that they would be organizing a boycott against Sealtest foods, and boycotting stores that carried Sealtest, and in just a few days Sealtest had changed their hiring practices.)

Yet King sees that there are still miles to go and proceeds to lay out the agenda that is eventually going to get him killed. He rails against the injustice in the way schools are funded, argues for a guaranteed annual income, indicts the injustice of Vietnam and what he perceives as the absurdity of the Space Race while the ghetto crumbles. Against all this, he encourages the continued development of Black identity, pausing to realize even how often “black” is a negative symbol in English, while “white” is almost always positive. In the end, he realizes that the end goal of the movement is “restructuring the whole of American society.” “There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’” More and more, King says, “we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.” King the preacher says that America must be “born again”—re-thought and re-visioned.

Matched with this fairly radical agenda is a renewed commitment to nonviolence. King looks at the riots taking place in the cities and says that there is something “painfully sad” about them, that there is a kind of “suicidal longing” at their root. But more than the question of whether these riots are good or bad, King also essentially says, ‘they don’t work.” They don’t build connection or sympathy with others; maybe some money is floated by government officials who want to see the ghetto at a simmer instead of a full boil, but there is no real heart-change in a nation, nor anything hopeful developed in the rioters. For King, the riots amount to darkness, and anyone who wants change must choose the light of love. This love is not passive—it is a “strong, demanding love,”—a determination to be fully human by choosing the capacity to love in the face of hate.

My students don’t understand today how controversial MLK really was, how there are many stories of Christian college students rejoicing at the news of his death, happy that a “troublemaker” had been silenced. Then as now, some Christians labeled people like King “Marxists” as a way of emotionally dodging the points he was making (it flummoxes me that we are still doing this exact thing sixty years later). The choice to make today a holiday has had the effect of sanitizing King, giving his legacy over to an entire nation to do with what we please. So we remember “I Have a Dream” and not his impassioned objections against Vietnam. We make him in our image, enlisting his support in our agendas.

This is not to say that I support all of King’s ideas. I don’t even know what a guaranteed annual income would look like and if we could get there without violating some other essential principle. Living in a world of competing goods is complicated. But I need to sit with King’s question—why are there so many poor people in America? Is America really what we claim to be? Are we really a meritocracy? Are we really a land of equal opportunity? I think if we look at that question squarely, the answers are obvious—and certainly if we look at that question with a loving posture toward those who have not experienced America as what we wish it was.

Perhaps we Americans—especially we Christian Americans—could let go of the obsession with being “woke” long enough to really listen to each other’s experiences and solutions and find a way forward together. This would be love in deed.

King’s book reminds me, though, that the resistance against that kind of love is strong. If I take your ideas seriously, it means that I have to reconsider some things; it means that maybe what I call “common sense” isn’t as sturdy as I thought it was. It means that I have to let you into my head and into my heart, realizing that my flourishing is bound to your flourishing, and so my life gets way more complicated. In the end, King was killed because he asked people to open their hearts one too many times in this way.

And so—how do we live when the pushback is strong? King’s reminder is that the choice between chaos and community starts in each human heart. Will I love, understanding that love is what makes me truly human, trusting that love will indeed triumph over fear and death itself? Or will I yield to despair and anger and violence against others (and ultimately against self)? The choice is, as always, ours.