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EP 173 Mission Driven Story: Martin Luther King Jr.

I want to tell you about one powerful night in a kitchen in Montgomery, Alabama.

The man at the table was twenty six years old. He had a doctorate he had just finished, a wife asleep in the next room, and a baby daughter who had just been born. He also had a movement he never asked to lead: he was voted in. And the threats had started coming, sometimes thirty or forty per day. His house had even been bombed with his wife and daughter inside.

All of these realities laid heavily on him and he couldn't sleep, so he got up and made himself a cup of coffee.

He never drank it.

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AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 173: Mission Driven Story: Martin Luther King Jr.

My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary, it was an inner urge, calling me to serve humanity.

Introduction

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, founder of The Mission Driven Life and author of The Mission Driven Mom. Martin Luther King Jr. was a truly mission driven man, and he exemplifies a theme that we're talking about over these months through the summer and into the fall, and that is true vision. A real visionary, someone who knew what vision was and held onto it all his life.

AUDREY: I want to talk to you about some of the amazing things that he did that we're not as aware of nowadays, and point you to his autobiography. It is not technically an autobiography. It is a compilation put together by someone after he died from all original sources: his speeches, his journals, his letters, refocused into the first person. But it all comes originally from him, and it's in chronological order. It is beautiful. I loved reading it. I have watched many of his speeches and read articles and a couple of other books. Letter from Birmingham Jail is one of my favorites of all time.

AUDREY: There are some incredible stories and experiences I'm going to share with you, and I'm going to read some selections from his autobiography because he says it far better than I could. Reading it really nurtured my soul. It increased my faith. It told of miraculous experiences.

A Caveat

AUDREY: I'm going to give you one little caveat at the beginning: he is a controversial figure in some people's eyes. Two things I think are important to point out. One is that some of his closest friends did say after he died that he had affairs. There are FBI tapes under lock that will come out, I think, next year.

AUDREY: I can't speak to any of that. I don't know. I do know that the FBI did things that even the most conservative individual thinks are pretty shady, and I don't know how that interaction played back and forth. I don't know what they have under lock and key or what will come out. Maybe there is a chance that Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't exactly the man he positioned himself to be. But I do know that what he writes about rings true to me. I know that the principles he dedicated his life to served beautiful purposes and beautiful ends. He lifted our nation. He made our nation better through the vision that he held and the way that he sacrificed himself for it. So I don't want to discard all the good that he was and all the good that he did. I want to share with you the experiences that are undisputed, that we know actually happened, the things we know he said and did that I believe are truly admirable and worth learning about and worth looking up to him for.

AUDREY: I also had a conversation with someone recently that was very fascinating. They were saying they think maybe he wasn't really peace loving and didn't really practice nonviolent resistance. That seemed very bizarre to me. I was like, we have videotapes. We have evidence of that kind of thing. Like anything, we're rewriting history. We're telling the bad parts of the story and not always the good parts. I just want to share with you the things that have elevated and inspired me, the truths I know he teaches, and what we know for sure: that he made a conscious choice to give his life for his vision, and he did bring that about to the betterment of the people around him and our nation, and I truly believe, probably the world.

AUDREY: This isn't meant to be a full picture of everything about him. It's a mission driven story in the sense that he was a man truly dedicated to some true principles, and he lived those out. He did love God. He did everything he could to try to love humanity. He did love his family. If he had some faults, some weaknesses, some committed sins, I can't speak to that. But he did exemplify many of those mission driven qualities, and he was, for sure, a true visionary who changed the world.

Childhood in Atlanta

AUDREY: He was born in January of 1929. He had, in his own words, a marvelous father and mother. They didn't argue much or have very many falling outs, and they were very significant in determining his religious attitudes. He said:

It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where loving relationships were ever present.

AUDREY: He said this made him a more optimistic person: "I lean more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature because of my childhood experiences." And he also says, "I think that my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father, and I hope that the gentle aspect comes from a mother who is very gentle and sweet."

AUDREY: He tells about an experience he had with a little boy when he was young:

From the age of three, I had a white playmate who was about my age. We always felt free to play our childhood games together. He did not live in our community, but he was usually around every day; his father owned a store across the street from our home. At the age of six, we both entered school, separate schools, of course. I remember how our friendship began to break as soon as we entered school. This was not my desire, but his. The climax came when he told me one day that his father had demanded that he would play with me no more. I never will forget what a great shock this was to me. I immediately asked my parents about the motive behind such a statement. We were at the dinner table when the situation was discussed, and here, for the first time, I was made aware of the existence of a race problem. I had never been conscious of it before.

AUDREY: He was middle class in Atlanta. They lived, I guess, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and those were the people he mostly associated with. But he saw no color differences. It didn't make a difference to him what color this little boy was. They were just friends.

As my parents discussed some of the tragedies that had resulted from this problem, and some of the insults they themselves had confronted on account of it, I was greatly shocked, and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person. As I grew older and older, this feeling continued to grow. My parents would always tell me that I should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him. The question arose in my mind: how could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends? This was a great question in my mind for a number of years.

AUDREY: He always had a resentment toward the system of segregation. His mother talked to him about slavery and about the Civil War, and she tried to explain the divided system of the South as a result of that: the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing, drinking fountains, waiting rooms and bathrooms, as a social condition rather than a natural order. So she tried to explain, this isn't how things need to be. This isn't how God intends them to be. This is how humans are making it for each other.

She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. Then she said the words that almost every Black southerner hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: "You are as good as anyone."

AUDREY: So at a very young age, he has this really great friendship with this little white boy. He believes that we can all get along and be friends, and then it's shattered in this revelation at age six. His parents try to help him through it and help him see the truth about it, but he really, really struggles.

AUDREY: He learned a lot from his father too. He says:

The thing I admire most about my dad is his genuine Christian character. He is a man of real integrity, deeply committed to moral and ethical principles. He is conscientious in all of his undertakings. Even the person who disagrees with his frankness has to admit that his motives and actions are sincere.

AUDREY: His father was the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and he wielded great influence in the community and perhaps won the grudging respect of some whites. He says, "With this heritage, it is not surprising that I had also learned to abhor segregation, considering it both rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable."

AUDREY: What the Civil Rights Movement owes to Martin Luther King Jr., we also owe to his parents. They were the ones who pulled themselves up, got some education, became leaders in the community, and lived this middle class lifestyle. They believed in Christian love in the face of social injustice, even though they were the ones being acted against. They instilled in King a love for all mankind, or tried to at least, and tried to help him see that the system was broken, but that people were good.

Faith and Early Questions

AUDREY: He always talked about his religious experience. He said the church was always a second home for him, and he accepted the biblical teachings uncritically for a time. But as he was growing up, he was always questioning and very precocious. He says, "At the age of thirteen, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus," and he began to have more and more doubts.

AUDREY: One more note on the system of segregation. He said there was no Black YMCA. They couldn't go to the public parks, and they couldn't go to the so called white schools. [VERIFY AUDIO: the raw transcript reads "could go" for the parks and theaters.] Some of the stores downtown would only let them go to certain counters to buy things, and they couldn't go to the white theaters, and so on.

Morehouse at Fifteen

AUDREY: Now something really incredible happened to him. He was always very intelligent, and he was just going through school in regular fashion. Then World War II came, and many young men were lost. Morehouse College, which I think at the time was an all Black college and may still be, had vacancies to fill because young men were going off to war, and they decided to try to find some high school students who could start college early.

AUDREY: At the age of fifteen, some very significant things happened to him. First, he gave a speech on [VERIFY AUDIO: "The Negro and the Constitution"] and won at his school, so he was sent to a state competition. He went with his teacher, Mrs. Bradley, and they were on a bus returning home. White passengers boarded and told them to give up their seats. Martin didn't want to, but his teacher coaxed him.

I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. We stood up in the aisle for ninety miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.

AUDREY: So he's got all these experiences happening to him that are triggering this passion about segregation and these deep feelings of injustice. Of course, it's part of his nature to be a certain way. He's naturally brilliant, he feels the injustice of the system, and he wants to try to make things right. Even at a young age, he's giving speeches about the Constitution and natural rights and natural law. He talks about those again later in his writings and speeches, and in Letter from Birmingham Jail. He's very well aware.

AUDREY: So in 1944, Morehouse College has openings. They administer an exam, he does well, and they invite him to start college at just fifteen, which meant he graduated from college at nineteen, which is just crazy. He was on the fast track to get this incredible education, and a storm of circumstances happened in his life to make him the perfect candidate to lead this movement.

AUDREY: Just before he went to college, in his teenage years, he went to Simsbury, Connecticut, and worked a whole summer on a tobacco farm. He says:

After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation's capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta. The first time that I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate restrooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self respect.

The Search for a Method

AUDREY: So he's got all of these ideas brewing in him. By the time he gets to college at fifteen, he's already devoted himself to this cause. He already feels passionate about it. He's already written about it in junior high and high school. He's been thinking about it, talking to his parents about it, looking around in the world at it, and he pushes even further into these topics. In college, he gets a degree in sociology, so he has an opportunity to ponder these concepts more.

AUDREY: I think it was at Morehouse that he first read Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience. It introduced him to the idea that you need to stand on the true law: that natural law and civil law are not always the same thing, and that civil laws that don't honor natural law are not real law. Thoreau had refused to pay his taxes because he didn't agree with the war the money was being used for. All these ideas are growing in his mind, and he continues to build, at a young age, this vision of a different world. He wants a different world. He wants to find a way to insert himself into this problem and make things better.

AUDREY: At nineteen, he says:

Not until I entered Crozer Theological Seminary in 1948 did I begin a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil.

AUDREY: So up to age nineteen, he felt passionate about it. He studied sociology. But he's not very optimistic that society could be changed. He doesn't have any idea how that could happen. By nineteen, he's actively on the hunt for a method. He's saying, if we could do it, how could we do it? He has already formed this vision. He knows what he wants to do with his life and the kind of difference he wants to make. He is actively looking for a method to create social change.

I turned to a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke. All of these masters stimulated my thinking, such as it was, and while finding things to question in each of them, I nevertheless learned a great deal from their study.

AUDREY: He's getting a classical liberal arts education. He's studying all the greats. He's digging deep and learning the arguments of these different thinkers. One Christmas, when he goes home for several weeks, he decides this is his time to study Marxism, and he delves deep into all of the Marxist writings. He later dives deep into Nietzsche and other philosophers, and he rejects them on principled grounds. He's able to list the tenets of each belief system, what they're promoting, and why they are wrong.

AUDREY: He also reconnects with his faith. He finds great mentors, and he learns to discern the truths that the Bible holds. In Atlanta, he had been around many pastors, some of whom were not very educated, and some couldn't even read very well. He was very relieved in college to find men to look up to who were the kind of pastor he wanted to become. He had been deciding between education and the ministry, and he chose the ministry, which is why he went to the theological seminary. There he found a place where he could believe and put his whole heart into his religious beliefs.

When I went to Morehouse as a freshman in 1944, my concern for racial and economic justice was already substantial.

AUDREY: Like I said, even at fifteen he's already set on the problem, and he's studying it during these years.

Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

AUDREY: He talks about running across Gandhi and being exposed to the way he executed this in India, the incredible good that he did, the way he changed the world with the nonviolent resistance model. And he knew he had found a method that could work, if he found himself in a place where he could make a difference and implement these ideas in a real world way.

AUDREY: One of the reasons I've thought about doing this Martin Luther King Jr. podcast for a while: I prepared all this information for a book I was writing last year, and every time I would think, no, it's so controversial. Finally I decided he did so many good things, I just needed to talk about the good things. I want you all to know that when he was standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he had spent a lifetime preparing. It was no surprise that he was the man standing there. And I'll continue to tell you what he sacrificed for this vision. He really sacrificed everything. He put everything on the line for the cause he felt was the most important in the world, the one he wanted to give his life to.

AUDREY: He goes on to the theological seminary, and he eventually gets his doctorate. He says:

In 1954 I ended my formal training with all of these relatively divergent intellectual forces converging into a positive social philosophy. One of the main tenets of this philosophy was the conviction that nonviolent resistance was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice. At this time, however, I had merely an intellectual understanding and appreciation of the position, with no firm determination to organize it in a socially effective situation.

AUDREY: So he wasn't going to start his own movement or his own organization. He had just done all the groundwork. By the time he was twenty five, he was prepared. He was perfectly prepared and positioned.

Choosing the South

AUDREY: Then it was time to determine his career path. I want to read this to you because it is incredible. It is one of the things that really makes me admire him.

At this point, I was torn in two directions. On the one hand, I was inclined toward the pastorate; on the other hand, toward educational work. Which way should I go? And if I accepted a church, should it be one in the South, with all the tragic implications of segregation, or one of the two available pulpits in the North? Now, I thought, as the plane carried me toward Detroit, I had a chance to escape from the long night of segregation. Could I return to a society that condoned a system I had abhorred since childhood?

These questions were still unanswered when I returned to Boston. I discussed them with my wife, Coretta; we had been married less than a year. I found that she too was hesitant about returning South. We discussed the all important question of raising children in the bonds of segregation. We reviewed our own growth in the South and the many advantages we had been deprived of as a result of segregation. The question of my wife's musical career came up. She was certain that a northern city would afford a greater opportunity for continued study than any city in the deep South. For several days we talked and thought and prayed over each of these matters.

AUDREY: If you can imagine, here are two highly educated, highly accomplished individuals who have had the best life they possibly could have, coming from where they came from. They have their whole lives ahead of them. They're beautiful people. They are deeply devoted to Christ and Christianity. They are very highly educated, and their future is in front of them. Where will they go? What will they do? They had every reason to stay in the North, which they easily could have done. He could have taken a pastorate at one of the northern churches. She could have pursued her musical career. They could have had a few beautiful children and a wonderful life and never looked back. And then he goes on:

Finally, we agreed that, in spite of the disadvantages and inevitable sacrifices, our greatest service could be rendered in our native South. We came to the conclusion that we had something of a moral obligation to return, at least for a few years. The South, after all, was our home. Despite its shortcomings, we loved it as home, and had a real desire to do something about the problems that we had felt so keenly as youngsters. We never wanted to be considered detached spectators. Since racial discrimination was most intense in the South, we felt that some of the Negroes who had received a portion of their training in other sections of the country should return to share their broader contacts and educational experience.

AUDREY: So they felt like that's what others should do, and so they knew that's what they needed to do.

Moreover, despite having to sacrifice much of the cultural life we loved, despite the existence of Jim Crow, which kept reminding us at all times of the color of our skin, we had the feeling that something remarkable was unfolding in the South, and we wanted to be on hand to witness it.

AUDREY: And it is crazy to me how quickly it came. I'll give you this quick timeline. In 1944, he goes to Morehouse College. In February of 1948, he's ordained. In 1948, he gets his degree in sociology and enters the theological seminary. In 1951, he graduates from Crozer. In 1953, he marries Coretta. In 1954, he's given his pastorate. In June of 1955, he receives his doctorate from Boston University. And in December of that same year, Rosa Parks won't get up from her seat. It is crazy to me how right on the heels of his preparation, almost in the moment, he's called upon. By December 5th of 1955, they've arranged the mass meeting, and by 1956 the bus boycott, which lasted a little over a year, is in full swing.

Montgomery and the Bus Boycott

AUDREY: He's in this moment where he's been uniquely and perfectly prepared and understands that nonviolent resistance is the way forward, and he's still formulating the strategies, how to work this out in practical terms and how they can execute it. So they decide that everyone will boycott the buses. They will walk everywhere, and they will give each other rides. This required a lot of coordination: people with cars going to pick up people who didn't have cars and getting them where they needed to be. And they just did this day after day, week after week, month after month. It is incredible. He says:

We were saying to the white community, "We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system." From this moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive noncooperation. From then on I rarely used the word "boycott." During the rush hours the sidewalks were crowded with laborers and domestic workers, many of them well past middle age, trudging patiently to their jobs and home again, sometimes as much as twelve miles. They knew why they walked, and the knowledge was evident in the way they carried themselves. And as I watched them, I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.

AUDREY: This is something he talks about over and over again: how ennobling it was to be involved with people who would choose this work, who would choose to protest this way.

AUDREY: At one of these first meetings forming the association, he is asked to speak. He says:

I was almost overcome, obsessed by a feeling of inadequacy. In this state of anxiety, I had already wasted five minutes of the twenty I had to prepare. With nothing left but faith in a power whose matchless strength stands over against the frailties and inadequacies of human nature, I turned to God in prayer. My words were brief and simple, asking God to restore my balance and to be with me in a time when I needed His guidance more than ever.

The enthusiasm of these thousands of people swept everything along like an onrushing tidal wave. While I would not let this experience tempt me to overlook the need for continued preparation, it would always remind me that God can transform man's weakness into His glorious opportunity. No historian would ever be able to fully describe this meeting, and no sociologist would ever be able to interpret it adequately. One had to be a part of the experience really to understand it.

AUDREY: Because this is when it began: this rush of support and unity in the community, that they were going to do this and stand by each other and make it happen.

Christ Furnished the Spirit

AUDREY: This is where he goes into what nonviolence is, why he chose it, and what it's really about. It's really beautiful.

From the beginning, a basic philosophy guided the movement. This guiding principle has since been referred to variously as nonviolent resistance, noncooperation, and passive resistance. But in the first days of the protest, none of these expressions was mentioned. The phrase most often heard was "Christian love."

AUDREY: As I go back into this history and read it from him and from other people who were around him, I'm constantly reminded what a spiritual movement it was. Like the original abolitionists, they were Christian women and men. Like the original suffragists who wanted the vote for women, they were Christian women. It is amazing to me how the movement toward better principles and more freedom for more people is stimulated most often by those who love God, who want to love the people around them, and who make personal sacrifices, often when they have no personal stake in it.

It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love. Nonviolent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating ideal. In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.

AUDREY: That's so beautiful to me, because as we move closer to the love of Christ and those biblical ideals, we see good coming for all humankind.

Offering to Step Down

AUDREY: I included a couple of these stories simply because they really struck me as showing a deep self consciousness and a real striving to be honest with himself. Again, I can't speak to what other things he may have done. But as I read through his autobiography and listen to him and watch him, it seems to me that he is very sincere in his convictions. He basically sacrificed his life for his beliefs. He is a real martyr in that way. And so we have to believe him that these were his convictions, regardless of what his weaknesses may have been.

AUDREY: He was struggling with himself. He had a heavy heart because he knew he sometimes got angry, and he had had moments where he was disappointed in himself because he had been indignant and angry. So he calls a meeting of the [VERIFY AUDIO: "Southern Conference"] and basically says, I am not worthy to be your leader. I'm still young. He was twenty five, twenty six at this time. He says, I just don't have the maturity. I get angry. I don't think I can do it. I will be one hundred percent with you. I will do everything that's needed. But I think you should get a different leader. And they all said, we trust you one hundred percent. We are completely behind you.

With a unanimous vote of confidence, they made it clear that they were well pleased with the way I was handling things, and that they would follow my leadership to the end.

AUDREY: So there's this aspect of humility in his work all the time. No one knows these things about him: that he was concerned about his ability to do this and offered to step down. He didn't choose these leadership roles. He was voted in. He was asked to do it.

AUDREY: This is one I really love. This was later on, when he was world famous:

When you are aware that you are a symbol, it causes you to search your soul constantly, to go through this job of self analysis, to see if you live up to the high and noble principles that people surround you with, and to try at all times to keep the gulf between the public self and the private self at a minimum.

One of the prayers that I prayed to God every day was: "O God, help me to see myself in my true perspective. Help me, O God, to see that I'm just a symbol of a movement. Help me to see that I'm the victim of what the Germans call a Zeitgeist and that something was getting ready to happen in history; the time was right for it. Help me to see that a boycott would have taken place in Montgomery, Alabama, if I had never come to Alabama. Help me to realize that I'm where I am because of the forces of history and because of the fifty thousand Negroes of Alabama who will never get their names in the papers and in the headlines. O God, help me to see that where I stand today, I stand because others helped me to stand there and because the forces of history projected me there."

AUDREY: So he's constantly doing the work of trying to take his ego out of his convictions and his work: all of the fawning, all of the attention, all of the women throwing themselves at him, all of the ego boosting everyone around him is doing. Compare this to someone else who was just as world famous as him. Are they praying these prayers? Are they trying to check themselves? Are they trying to live up to the way other people see them? Or are they surrounding themselves with yes men who will do whatever they want?

The Bombings and the Gun

AUDREY: As the boycott heats up, the death threats begin. People are calling or writing letters. He said at one point that he would sometimes get thirty or forty threats per day. In Montgomery it's starting to heat up, and his home is bombed. It's actually bombed twice. The first time, he says to the crowd:

We believe in law and order. Don't get panicky. Don't do anything panicky at all. Don't get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember, that is what God said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love your enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them.

AUDREY: What a thing to say on his front porch when his home had been bombed and he almost lost his wife and daughter, who were in the home at the time. He goes on:

I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.

AUDREY: The second time his home is bombed, he has this to say:

At home I addressed the crowd from my porch, where the marks of the bomb were clear. "We must not return violence under any condition. I know this is difficult advice to follow, especially since we have been the victims of no less than ten bombings. But this is the way of Christ; it is the way of the cross. We must somehow believe that unearned suffering is redemptive."

AUDREY: I think that's a core principle he really believed and tried to live out: that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Then, since it was Sunday morning, I urged the people to go home and get ready for church. Gradually they dispersed.

AUDREY: In the middle of all of this, he and his wife had a long conversation about what it meant for them, and how they should protect and defend themselves as the threats were coming in and the bombings were happening. He says:

Meanwhile I considered: how could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection? Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution. We decided to get rid of the one weapon we owned. When I decided that I couldn't keep a gun, I came face to face with the question of death, and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun, nor have I been afraid. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety, we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.

AUDREY: He was also at one point put in a car by the police and driven off, and they weren't going toward the jail, so he didn't know where they were going. Again, he was really scared. At another point, he was in a crowd and a woman lunged toward him and stabbed him in the chest, and it almost killed him. Afterward, people commented a lot about how calm he was in the midst of it all. This is what he said about it:

If I demonstrated unusual calm during the recent attempt on my life, it was certainly not due to any extraordinary powers that I possess. Rather, it was due to the power of God working through me. Throughout this struggle for racial justice I have constantly asked God to remove all bitterness from my heart and to give me the strength and courage to face any disaster that came my way. This constant prayer life and feeling of dependence on God have given me the feeling that I have divine companionship in this struggle. I know no other way to explain it. It is the fact that in the midst of external tension, God can give an inner peace.

AUDREY: And this goes back to a really powerful spiritual experience he had, when he offered himself up, faced his own humanity, and accepted that this might cost him his life, which of course it did. As a little tangent: Gandhi was also a man of faith. He also saw these as spiritual as well as physical principles, and he also worked to discipline himself and give the glory to a higher power. In that way, both men tapped into deep spiritual principles and called upon the consciences of the people around them through nonviolent resistance, this turning of the other cheek. As Gandhi explained to others, he also learned it from Christ.

The Kitchen Table

AUDREY: So here is the experience Martin Luther King Jr. had.

Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born. I'd come in night after night and see that little gentle smile. I started thinking about a dedicated and loyal wife, who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her. And I got to the point that I couldn't take it any longer. I was weak. Something said to me, you can't call on Daddy now. You can't even call on Mama. You've got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way.

AUDREY: That's one of the themes. Way Out of No Way is also the title of a book by one of his companions in the work. This was a key element of King's faith: that even when he saw no way, God could provide a way out of no way.

With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. I think I'm right. I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now, I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. Now, I am afraid. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone."

It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world."

I tell you I've seen the lightning flash. I've heard the thunder roar. I've felt sin breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.

AUDREY: And that conviction, that unflinching knowledge that God was walking with him, stayed with him through all sorts of other trials. He said once:

As far as the repeated attacks on me and my family, I must say that here again, God gives one the strength to adjust to such acts of violence. None of these attacks came as a total surprise to me, because I counted the cost early in the struggle.

Jail and Birmingham

AUDREY: As we get close to the end here, I want to point out a few more things about their work, and reiterate that many of the most important things ever created for humanity were done in obedience to divine laws, in submission to God and His ways. We see that in the founding of our own nation. We see it in past movements with Wilberforce and other martyrs and great men and women. The Civil Rights Movement in America is right along the lines of all of those movements.

AUDREY: We know they started to do sit ins and peaceful walks and protests to raise the conscience of the community, and sometimes they would get themselves arrested because they were acting against the law. But of course, in their minds and truthfully, they were acting in line with the natural law, that all men and women are created equal.

AUDREY: Many of their meetings took place in churches. It was spiritual from the beginning. They were asking people to turn in their weapons and sacrifice themselves in the gift of love to others, to put their bodies to work against evil by offering them up, even in prison. Among all the prayer, scripture study, and striving to live a Christian life, he fasted to prepare himself for his stay in prison. He took responsibility when any Black person was violent in any respect. He called for a day of penance for all Black people to evaluate their hearts and minds and see the rightness of the nonviolent way. They held a prayer vigil in front of City Hall to call for peace and negotiations, and they were arrested again. They stayed in jail, missing an important Meet the Press TV interview. In jail, they read scriptures often, held services twice a day, and sang religious songs.

AUDREY: From a letter he wrote to Coretta at one point when he was in jail:

Today I find myself a long way from you and the children. I know this whole experience is very difficult for you to adjust to, especially in your condition of pregnancy, but as I said to you yesterday, this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people. So I urge you to be strong in faith, and this will in turn strengthen me. I can assure you that it is extremely difficult for me to think of being away from you and my Yoki and Marty for four months, but I am asking God hourly to give me the power of endurance. I have the faith to believe that this excessive suffering that is now coming to our family will in some little way serve to make Atlanta a better city, Georgia a better state, and America a better country. Just how, I do not yet know, but I have faith to believe it will. If I am correct, then our suffering is not in vain.

AUDREY: This is an example of what happened when they were holding these mass meetings all over the South and asking for volunteers:

Toward the end of the mass meetings, Abernathy or Shuttlesworth or I would extend an appeal for volunteers to serve in our nonviolent army. We made it clear that we would not send anyone out to demonstrate who had not convinced himself and us that he could accept and endure violence without retaliating.

AUDREY: That's why they did these trainings. They made people think about and consider what they would do if people were hitting them or beating them or pushing them.

At the same time, we urged volunteers to give up any possible weapons that they might have on their persons. Hundreds of people responded to this appeal. We proved that we possessed the most formidable weapon of all: the conviction that we were right. We had the protection of our knowledge that we were more concerned about realizing our righteous aims than about saving our skins.

AUDREY: And that is vision. He had the vision in his own mind. He developed it over years of education, thinking about it, studying it, talking about it, writing about it. And then in his personal life, when the moment came for him to sacrifice himself, he did it. He took on leadership roles he felt inadequate for. His home was bombed, and he chose to stay in the work and not walk away, and he turned to God, and God gave him the strength and the conviction. And then he asked others to do what he was doing. He never asked anyone to do something he wasn't willing to do himself. And he shared the vision, shared the dream, over and over and over again, and the circle got wider and wider.

AUDREY: This is the principle: we can only control ourselves, and to the level at which we control ourselves, we get out of drama. We decide to be creators. We formulate a vision and we live according to that vision, and our circle of influence will grow and grow. It is incredible how he came to have worldwide influence.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

AUDREY: So we get to the moment where they're doing these protests and going to jail for it, and they make a decision. He says the city government obtained a court injunction directing them to cease their activities until their right to demonstrate had been argued in court. They believed they had the right to demonstrate, but the city was trying to stop them.

Two days later, we did an audacious thing, something we had never done in any other crusade. We disobeyed a court order.

AUDREY: He makes this justification in Letter from Birmingham Jail. He explains why they were being obedient to law, because they were obeying the natural law above the civil law. He says:

I intended to be one of the first to set the example of civil disobedience.

AUDREY: Which is the title of that Thoreau essay from years before, when he was in college.

Ten days after the demonstrations began, between four and five hundred people had gone to jail. Some had been released on bail, but about three hundred remained. Now that the job of unifying the Negro community had been accomplished, my time had come. We decided that, because of its symbolic significance, Good Friday, April 12, would be the day that Ralph Abernathy and I would present our bodies as a personal witness in this crusade.

AUDREY: So they gave themselves up and offered themselves into jail, and then he writes Letter from Birmingham Jail. Here's one little segment of it. We go through it in detail in Level Two of the Academy, where we drill into how to understand it and identify its principles.

Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.

AUDREY: So here he is citing the natural law as the justification for the actions he's taking. It's incredible how this natural law and its first principles bring about justice and healing and freedom for so many people. The truth makes us free.

God Had Been My Cellmate

AUDREY: I don't have all of this in perfect chronological order. I have snippets that stood out to me that I wanted to share with you today. There was a moment in prison when he was put in solitary confinement, which was incredibly difficult. He was finally let out long enough to have a visitor, a man named Clarence Jones who was working with him. Here's how he recounts what happened:

When Clarence Jones arrived the next day, before I could even tell him how happy I was to see him, he said a few words that lifted a thousand pounds from my heart. "Harry Belafonte has been able to raise fifty thousand dollars for bail bonds. It is available immediately. And he says that whatever else you need, he will raise it."

AUDREY: There were all these people in jail, and they couldn't get any of them out. The bail bonds had been set so high, and he didn't know how he was going to help these people go home and live their lives.

I found it hard to say what I felt. Jones's message had brought me more than relief from my immediate concern; more than gratitude for the loyalty of friends far away; more than confirmation of the life of the movement that could not be snuffed out. What silenced me was a profound sense of awe. I was aware of a feeling that had been present all along below the surface of consciousness, pressed down under the weight of concern for the movement: I had never been truly in solitary confinement; God's companionship does not stop at the door of a jail cell. God had been my cellmate. When the decision came in Room 30 on Good Friday that we must act, God was there. And He was also present in a Fifth Avenue New York City apartment, where a dedicated young star had worked night and day, telephoning everyone he could think of to raise money for Birmingham. In the midst of the deepest midnight, daybreak had come. I did not know whether the sun was shining at that moment. But I knew that once again I could see the light.

A Vision Bigger Than Himself

AUDREY: He was truly a visionary, with a vision so much bigger than himself. His life was swallowed up in a cause and a movement that involved first dozens, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually millions of individuals who came together in a common cause, lived out this vision, and changed the whole face of America.

AUDREY: Vision is really what changes everything. It helps us get out of drama. It helps us stay in a creator mindset and keep moving toward something that matters, something bigger and better than we are as individuals. And as he devoted his life to this vision, he literally changed the world. He as an individual is so inspiring to me. The vision he formulated and held, the light he held up, is just like the torch that is our logo. It's the image of our movement here at The Mission Driven Mom. That light that we hold up: the light of goodness, the light of truth, the light of God, the light of principles. We become principled mothers who then link arms with other principled mothers. We get ourselves in line. We get our homes in line with truth. And we go out and make a difference in the community. Together we can do that, because this vision makes all the difference.

AUDREY: If right now in this moment of your life you feel stuck, if you aren't sure how to move forward, just know that as you make the decision to become a creator and find a new vision for your life to move toward, as small as that may be, it will start to change you. Maybe it's a clean kitchen. You hold to that vision that you are going to have a clean kitchen, and you're going to figure out how, you're going to find a way to have a clean kitchen all the time. It will start to change you. The very fabric of who you are will begin to change. As you stay in that creator mindset by holding onto that vision, big or small, grand or minimal, it will make all the difference for you.

I Have a Dream

AUDREY: I want to end with his I Have a Dream speech, because this was the ultimate moment when his vision hit the world stage. They had the March on Washington. So many people came; the whole Mall was full. You can watch videos of it on YouTube. It's so incredibly inspiring. He shares with the world the vision he has risked his life for, at this point for a decade. He has shown that he is all in and willing to give everything for this cause, even to be in prison. One of the things he says in his autobiography is, I might be in prison for a decade, but that's okay, because the cause is worth it. The change for our nation, the change for the people, the prospects for our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are worth the sacrifices we have to make today.

AUDREY: These are some of the words of that speech. He gave it one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Lincoln. He's standing there in front of the Lincoln Memorial, pleading with those in power to bring greater levels of freedom to the nation.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal." I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Closing and Invitation

AUDREY: As I have said throughout this podcast, Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and legacy continue to inspire me today to be a woman of vision, to devote myself to causes and ideals that are higher and bigger than myself, and to let God help me in the work I am called to. That is why we are The Mission Driven Mom.

AUDREY: If these ideas resonate with you and you would like to dig deeper, I have a few suggestions. I have an older podcast, I think it's number 36, called Meeting Life with Nonviolent Resistance. It goes deeper into the tactics and principles of nonviolent resistance and how you can use some of those principles in your everyday life. I would encourage you to go listen to that podcast, which we've linked below. I would also encourage you to keep listening to these podcasts and go back to some of the ones we've done over the previous few months, because these are all the concepts and principles we want to arm you with to be the visionary and the creator of your own life: to take hold of the problem stories you have right now, arrest them, turn them around, and gain a better vision and future for yourself.

AUDREY: And most of all, we would love for you to join our Mothers of Creation celebration. It's not just an event, although it is an event, live in Provo, Utah this September. We would love to see you there, meet you in person, and help you get to know our community. We are super excited. We're going to take your problem stories in the morning and teach you how to deconstruct them, how to see the drama and victim types in your life, how to disconnect from that problem story, reframe it, become a creator, build a new vision, and write your creator declaration. It's going to be an incredible day.

AUDREY: In the meantime, as soon as you sign up, you get access to the private community that's being mentored by Lindsey Wright. You've seen her on the podcast recently. She's digging deeper, doing workshops that are recorded and available to you immediately. You can meet other moms who are going to be there and get to know them before you arrive. We'd love to have you there. We'd love for you to bring a friend. But most of all, we would love for you to be empowered with truths that can make you free, and to be the creator of your own life by determining a new vision for yourself, having passion around that vision, and taking the necessary baby steps to get you there. That's the key. Martin Luther King did it from the time he was a young boy, and he changed the world. But all of us can do it right now in our everyday lives. You have far more power than you think you have to turn your life around, and it won't take very long. You just need those principles.

AUDREY: Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a joy to share the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy with you. He's a man who continues to inspire me today. We'll see you next time.