His last sermon reminds us about the perils of not being woke.
 | By Susannah Meadows Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
You're probably familiar with the Martin Luther King Jr. maxim that goes: "I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." It's ubiquitous. You can buy mugs, posters, T-shirts and stickers emblazoned with the line. |
And why not? It is a beautiful sentiment, if a slight oversimplification of the words King delivered in Atlanta in 1967: |
And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems … I've seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. |
But something happens to a person's legacy when his words achieve mug status. If amplifying a line doesn't exactly diminish it, it does seem to eclipse the rest of what the person stood for, acting like the very airbrush that put King's words on merch in the first place. |
In an essay, the Opinion contributing writer Esau McCaulley writes about what we lose when we focus on certain parts of King's teachings at the expense of others. Because that love refrain is popular, McCaulley says, we tend to think of rejecting hate as the sum total of King's message. |
But there was much more. On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, McCaulley returns to the last Sunday sermon King gave before he was killed. Entitled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," this homily is "an opportunity to encounter the real King that is too often obfuscated," McCaulley writes. |
Referring to wokeness without calling it that, King said that Americans "needed to wake up to the injustice all around them and make demands for change," McCaulley writes. In the sermon, King argued for economic justice for Black Americans, making a compelling case for reparations. This was 55 years ago and, as with so much of what he said, he could have been speaking today. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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