Dear Reverend King, 

 

I am writing this letter to you in a spirit of humility and admiration. The reason is simple -- I consider you to be the most consequential and extraordinary American of the 20th Century. I really mean that. 

 

But you may be wondering how it came to be that I am writing to you in the year 2020, some 50 years after your death. You see, I have written a number of such letters – letters to famous, legendary figures of ages past. I like to refer to these as Letters to My Friends of the Ages. May I call you friend? I began writing these letters last year, and am writing about one letter a month. This is my 7th letter so far.  

 

Since the others were in past generations from you, I thought you might be interested to know who they are. In chronological order, they are John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, C.S. Lewis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. You obviously have a strong connection to Mr. Lincoln. And oh yes, there is another Friend whom I hope to write to later this year. He happens to be my favorite Hollywood movie star – he is a contemporary of yours as he applied his trade, but maybe I'll tell you about him in a future letter. 

 

My hope for my Letters are to explore the experiences and adventures of Friends such as you as a way to shine light on things that truly matter. I like to think of myself as a Storyteller, Historian, and Philosopher on the human condition. For we all have a commonality in our lives – our aspirations, our dreams, our mortality, and our search for meaning. I am convinced that you and the rest of my Friends have much to teach my generation – your triumphs and failures, your joys and struggles, your thoughts and feelings, your boldness and insecurities, your life questions and conclusions. 

 

I am so grateful for the trail you blazed, truly changing the course of American history, and feel very privileged to have read your first book, Stride Toward Freedom, which told the story from the very beginning of what eventually became known as the Civil Rights Movement. It all started with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. As I read your book, I felt I was there observing it all. Forgive me for using significant portions of two early chapters of your book in this letter, but those two chapters were so very, very good. 

 

It seems God brought you to Montgomery for such a time as this. I'll write more about this timing near the end of my letter. But for now, the story begins with your life as the new pastor at the youthful age of 25 for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954. It was the next year, on December 1, 1955, that Mrs. Rosa Parks got on that Montgomery bus early Thursday evening, and chose not to sit in the segregated Black section, which got her arrested. As you wrote, "No one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out 'I can take it no longer!' Mrs. Parks’ refusal to move back was her intrepid affirmation that she had had enough. It was an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom." 

 

That night it was the work of women in the Black community who telephoned each other, and came up with the idea for an immediate bus boycott as a response to Mrs. Parks' arrest. The next morning, at your church, you met with 40 Black leaders of Montgomery and decided that a bus boycott would happen the following Monday, and that a mass meeting would be held that evening to determine how long to maintain the boycott. On Saturday, thousands of leaflets were produced to help get the word out, and pastors pledged to announce the boycott at their Sunday services.  

 

And then God's hand seemed to work unexpectedly, as He often does. A Black maid happened to pick up the leaflet, but because she could not read it, she gave it to her white employer. It then got passed to the local newspaper, who immediately published a front-page story about the planned boycott, including the contents of the leaflet, clearly to warn the white community about what was being planned. But the newspaper story actually worked to advance the cause -- Blacks who did not receive the leaflet, and did not go to church, could read about the planned boycott, thanks to the newspaper. 

 

But that newspaper story worked in a deeper way. For on Sunday afternoon, you sat down in your chair, as was your custom, to read the morning paper. You read the article which compared the planned bus boycott to the methods of an organization called the White Citizens Council across the South, who used brutal terror and intimidation to preserve segregation. You began to wonder whether the boycott was unethical and unchristian, about whether immoral means could justify moral ends.  

 

That Sunday afternoon, the newspaper story was the catalyst for you to grapple with the true nature of the bus boycott, and to think deeply and critically.  

 

You reasoned that the word "boycott" was really a misnomer because a boycott suggested "an economic squeeze". But rather, your goal was not to punish the bus company and put it out of business, but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system -- so that justice could be put into the busing business.  

 

As you wrote, "Often, the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression, so long as the oppressed accepts it. So in order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system. This I felt was the nature of our action. From this moment on, I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation. From then on, I rarely used the word boycott."  

 

I would call your experience that Sunday afternoon an epiphany. 

 

That night, with the welcome cooperation of your 2-week-old daughter, you got some needed sleep before the pivotal day. 

 

Monday, December 5, 1955 dawned on the city of Montgomery. You called it "the Day of Days". There were three critical Acts to this unfolding drama. 

 

Act One, the protest itself. You felt that in order to be successful, the protest needed at least 60% cooperation from the Black residents of Montgomery to refuse to ride the buses. You were unsure whether it would reach that high. In actuality, cooperation was nearly 100%! Crowds cheered as the empty buses passed by on the roads of Montgomery all day long, and thousands from the Black community walked to where they needed to go that Monday. You were jubilant and considered it a miracle. Success was achieved in Act One. As you wrote, "I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity." 

 

Act Two was the afternoon leadership meeting held at 3:00pm to prepare for the mass meeting that evening. After the success of the day with the buses, the dominant question was 'how long should the non-cooperation resistance last'? And how would the movement actually be organized and managed? At that leadership meeting, the group decided to create a new organization to guide and direct the protest. They elected you to be its president, and elected various other officers to serve as the governing board. Then a name for the new organization was needed, and the name selected was the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).  

 

Shortly thereafter, MIA decided unanimously to propose at the mass meeting that the protest continue until certain demands were met. MIA drew up such a resolution for the evening mass meeting. One officer would preside at the mass meeting, and you were selected to give the main address. You all felt that if the mass meeting was well-attended and there was much enthusiasm, you would move forward; otherwise, you would plan to call off the protest that very night. 

 

Then you went home to prepare the most decisive speech you had ever given up to that point in your life, and you had all of 20 minutes to prepare! You knew that perhaps thousands would be there, including reporters and television cameras. After turning to God in prayer and giving him your feelings of inadequacy and anxiety, you prayed for God's guidance. You only had time to prepare an outline. You decided you needed to "be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action, but yet moderate enough to keep this fervor... within Christian bounds". Militant and moderate -- that was the goal of your speech. 

 

Then Act Three began when the time for the mass meeting arrived. Thousands of people had shown up, overflowing the church, and another four thousand people stood outside to listen to the proceedings on loudspeakers. After a hymn, a prayer, and a Bible reading, you were introduced to give the main address. 

 

"We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired – tired of being segregated and humiliated. Tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. We have no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight -- to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice...  

 

But in our protest... there will be no threats and intimidation. We will be guided by the highest principles of law and order. Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. We will only say to the people 'let your conscience be your guide'. Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the centuries – 'love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you'. If we fail to do this, our protest will end up as a meaningless drama on the stage of history...  

 

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say 'there lived a great people, a black people -- who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization'. This is our challenge -- and our overwhelming responsibility."  

 

Then Mrs. Rosa Parks was introduced, and the people cheered wildly. Ralph Abernathy got up to slowly read the all-important resolution, which stated that the Negroes would not resume riding the buses until: 1) courteous treatment by bus drivers was guaranteed; 2) passengers were seated on a first-come, first-served basis, Negroes seated from the back of the bus toward the front, and whites seated from the front toward the back; and 3) Negro bus drivers were employed on predominantly Negro routes.  

 

Then came the pivotal words in this Act Three: "All in favor of the motion -- stand". 

 

Every person in the meeting stood up. Every single individual in this amazing drama. Cheers rang out everywhere -- from inside and outside the church. The motion was carried unanimously. 

 

In all the peoples' enthusiasm for freedom, you knew that no historian would be able to fully describe this meeting, and no sociologist would understand it without being there in person. You said to yourself that the victory was already won, and in fact, the victory was infinitely larger than the bus situation. The real victory was in the mass meeting itself -- in which thousands of black people stood with their heads held high, with a new sense of dignity and destiny.  

 

Looking back, the crucial question you asked yourself was "why did this event take place in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955"? It cannot be explained by Mrs. Parks, not by some pre-existing unity among the leaders, not by the arrival of new leadership, not even by the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in May 1954. 

 

No, your words at the close of this chapter spoke the perceptive truth: 

 

"Every rational explanation breaks down at some point. There is something about the protest that is supra-rational. It cannot be explained without a divine dimension... Whatever the name, some extra-human force labors to create a harmony out of the discords of the universe. There is a creative power that works to pull down mountains of evil, and level hilltops of injustice. God still works through history. His wonders to perform. It seems as though God had decided to use Montgomery as the proving ground for the struggle and triumph of freedom and justice in America. And what better place for it, than the leading symbol of the old South. It is one of the splendid ironies of our day -- that Montgomery, the cradle of the Confederacy, is being transformed into Montgomery, the cradle of freedom and justice.  

 

The Day of Days, Monday, December 5, 1955 was drawing to a close. We all prepared to go to our homes, not yet fully aware of what had happened. The deliberations of that brisk, cool night in December will not be forgotten. That night we were starting a movement that would gain national recognition, whose echoes would ring in the ears of people of every nation. A movement that would astound the oppressor, and bring new hope to the oppressed. That night was Montgomery's moment in history." 

 

If I may, I would like to add a postscript to your divine dimension -- by recalling what I wrote earlier in this letter -- that God had brought you to Montgomery for such a time as this. It wasn't just that God had brought a young, charismatic, and talented preacher to Montgomery. I imagine there were many that could fulfill that description.  

 

But God used someone who had thought deeply and critically, in seminary and in his doctoral studies, about the philosophy of social movements. About the power of nonviolent resistance. About how Gandhi took Jesus' words to love your enemies and transformed it into powerful social change. About true pacifism as not being nonresistance to evil, but active nonviolent resistance to evil. And about personalistic philosophy -- your fundamental belief in which ultimate reality is found in personality, revealing the truth of a personal God as well as the dignity and worth found in every human personality. You had been grounded in these deep philosophical theories in your studies -- and Montgomery was the catalyst to ignite those theories into a bonfire of practical application in real life -- on the street, as it were. You truly were meant for that moment in history. 

 

As I close this letter, I am struck by a thought. You might even call it an epiphany. Like your Sunday afternoon before the Day of Days, when you grappled with the nature of the protest movement, I had a similar moment. A long time ago, I grappled with the nature of my early career as a financial controller at a large bank. What was my true calling, my true nature? In that moment in time, I discerned that my true calling was to go in a very different direction -- to seek justice for the poor with a lifetime of servanthood. This was the true nature of my calling and purpose, at least from a vocational perspective.  

 

In that moment of life, God took me to east Africa to live for 15 months on a new journey, serving the urban poor by starting a microenterprise loan program. There in Africa, God taught me a life lesson that I have carried with me for the rest of my vocation. And the lesson was this: that while the cross-cultural, racial divide did exist, it was nowhere near the height and depth of the socioeconomic divide. Living in Africa, I learned I had much in common with the Africans who were educated and lived in the middle-class, while the actual greater divide was what could be called "social class". And that divide exists whether in the destitute slums of my large African city I called home for a time, or in the urban inner cities of our own America. 

 

I look forward to writing again to you in my next letter -- about your second book and the Birmingham experience in that pivotal year of 1963. And about how you answered your decisive, driving, and defining question for the Civil Rights Movement – where do we go from here? 

 

Your friend, 

Ted at Common Reason