STONES OF HOPE - REFLECTIONS ON THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON (1963-2013)

Rev. Dr. C. Anthony Hunt
August 2013

 

In just a few days on August 24, 2013, thousands of people from around the nation and world will gather in Washington, DC for the 50^th year anniversary and celebration of the historic March on Washington.  Deemed in 1963 as the March for Jobs and Freedom, the march came at the height of the American Civil Rights movement, as over 200,000 thousand persons gathered to call the nation to action as it regarded the rights of all people to opportunity, equality and justice. 

Among those who spoke at the Lincoln Memorial on that sunlit day in 1963 was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  King shared with the crowd, the nation and the world a compelling dream – a vision - of Beloved Community and a world where every “child would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”  He articulated a hope that America would heed the true meaning of its creed as found in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all (people) are created equal.” 

For the masses that will gather this year, this will be a time of remembering, celebrating, and hopefully renewing a commitment to King’s (and others’) dream of peace, justice and equality among us. 

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann articulated in his book Theology of Hope that “Hope alone is to be called ‘realistic’, because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught.  It does not take things as they happen to stand or to lie, but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change.  Only as long as the world and the people in it are in a fragmented and experimental state which is not yet resolved, is there any sense in earthly hopes.”  

One of the things that King intimated in his 1963 speech was a hope that God would “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”  The despair that he was alluding to then was capsulated in what he deemed to be the “triplets of evil” – racism, poverty (classism) and war (militarism).  In King’s estimation, these were the major categories of the social disease that afflicted America then, and thus there was the need for the struggle for Civil Rights, human rights, equal rights and the March on Washington, and a renewed call/commitment to action.

 

For King, Christian hope served as the foundation for his vision of Beloved Community.  In one of his later sermons, "The Meaning of Hope," he defined hope as that quality which is "necessary for life.’  King asserted that hope was to be viewed as "animated and under girded by faith and love."  In his mind, if you had hope, you had faith in something.  Thus, for him, hope shares the belief that "all reality hinges on moral foundations.”  It was, for King, the refusal to give up "despite overwhelming odds." 

Today, many would agree that a great deal of progress has been made in light of King’s dream and the call to action in 1963.  With the passing of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 respectively, greater opportunities for many women and persons of color in our society, the election in 2008 of the first president of African descent, and expanding engagement of persons across cultures and classes in some cases, we have seen signs of the realization of King’s dream.

Yet, as thousands will gather, there is much that continues to ail our nation and the world – including persistent and widespread poverty and a shrinking middle class, ongoing wars and international conflict with seemingly little or no justification for them, ongoing street violence and gun violence, an American prison industrial complex that continues to expand, and disparities in educational achievement across race and class lines.  And thus, the need to renew our commitment to King’s dream, and heed a call to action. 

Every few years, I have the privilege of leading a group of scholars from Wesley Theological Seminary in a doctoral course that retraces many of the steps of the Civil Rights movement in Alabama.  The group that journeyed together last summer was very typical of others over the years.  We reflected much of the diversity of society today.  We were Hispanic, Native American, white and black, female and male, Baptist, Episcopalian, African Methodist Episcopal and United Methodist.  We prayed, sang, and shared our thoughts together as we traveled.  As we traveled, my memory harkened back to one of our earlier trips, where Dr. Eileen Guenther, a professor at Wesley Seminary who was a part of that study group, offered that it was a spiritual sung by many choirs, “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table,” that played in her head throughout our experience (see The American Organist, November 2008).    Dr. Guenther said that she thought about the variety of tables that we encountered as we traveled through Alabama:

• Lunch counters of restaurants where all had not been welcome (in the past);
• The dining room table in the parsonage of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery, where we were told, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed;
• The kitchen table of the same parsonage where Dr. King searched his soul and felt God telling him to press on with his work;
• The tables at which the people at 16^th Street Baptist Church served us lunch, tables placed adjacent to the site of the tragic bombing on September 15, 1963 that killed four young girls; 
• The tables around which members of our group gathered to share stories as victims of discrimination, of their courageous work in the Civil Rights movement (and other freedom movements), and their lament over a lack of awareness of what was going on at that time in our country’s history.  

For me, these are stones of hope hewn out of the mountains of despair among us. 

And so, each year, we journey with the confirmation class from Epworth Chapel UMC, the church where I serve as pastor, to the site of the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, DC.  Although the crowd is always much smaller than the one that will  gather in a few days, I sense that our young people and all who journey to the King Memorial day-by-day glean a sense of what King meant when he dreamt of such stones of hope. 

This hope beckons us to love everybody – both our enemies and allies.  This hope helps us to see that we can resist giving up on one another because our lives together are animated by the belief that God is present in each and every one of us.  It is a hope that all of us might realize and live, and one that can move us ever closer toward Beloved Community.