In Good Company Martin Luther King Jr., American

Jan 19, 2010

In observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, our local public radio station has played lengthy excerpts from his speeches all weekend.

The most famous addresses were all included, but what caught me in the throat was when King told an audience about his little daughter Yolanda’s desperate desire to go to a local amusement park frequently advertised on television and highway billboards.

His policy had been to demur and re-direct the conversation whenever she asked, but one evening she pleaded so directly that he had no choice but to sit her on his lap and explain that she could not go to Fun Town because of the color of her skin.

As the tears welled up in his daughter’s eyes, King told the audience he didn’t want this terrible news to embitter her, so he was swift to tell her three things: that she was every bit as good as the children allowed into Fun Town; that segregationists were deeply misled people; and that not all white persons thought that way –indeed, many were working at that moment so that some day she would be able to go to Fun Town.

The incident found its way in to King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin commented on at a prayer breakfast over the weekend.  The same thought struck the Congressman that struck me as I listened: namely, the nobility of King’s response to the injustice he experienced.

As Ryan observed, “How difficult it is, in a large nation of 300 million, to avoid the temptation of living in a little subculture!  Differences of race, power, culture, money, status honor diversity but also threaten to tear society into factions.”

King, of course, was not Catholic, but he seemed to live by the principle in Catholic social teaching known as “solidarity” instinctively. The Venerable John Paul II defined solidarity as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “socio-economic problems can be resolved only with the help of all the forms of solidarity: solidarity of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples.”

In other words, the just man looks for what the business seminars call “win-win” situations. He doesn’t look to exploit the poor, soak the rich, or “stick it to the man.” Class animosity, no less than racial prejudice (and the political demagoguery that seeks to stir it up), is sinful because it violates justice. It succumbs to the very “us” versus “them” mentality that King taught his little daughter to reject.

Injured by racial prejudice, King nevertheless would not do his many white counterparts the injustice of failing to acknowledge their good will. Even to his enemies he extended a certain empathy, calling them not wicked but “misled.”

King consciously patterned the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” after another famous prisoner: the Apostle Paul. In his speech over the weekend, Congressman Ryan remarked, “From the title and style of that [letter], we see that he believed in the Good News Paul preached about Jesus.  He believed that peaceful social reform was rooted in God’s love – not just for Greek or Jew, man or woman, slave or free, as Paul says…but in His love for all people, everywhere, for all time.”

The love of God for each human person is the foundation of solidarity, the social expression of charity. It’s a good virtue to renew when we remember Martin Luther King, who gave his life for the cause not only of racial equality, but for a re-dedication to the principle that “all men are created equal.” He wanted his children to grow up in peace, and for his persecutors no longer to be misled.

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