Our Moral Mandate

Just two months after she had buried her husband in April of 1968, Coretta Scott King traveled to Washington, D.C. to address the largest gathering of the original Poor People’s Campaign. A trained vocalist, she began with a song. “Somebody’s hurting, Lord. Come by here,” she sang, looking out over tens of thousands of America’s poor who’d set up a tent city on the National Mall to demand that their fellow citizens see their suffering.

Mrs. King was hurting, but she found a way through the old spiritual to connect her pain with the suffering of millions of Americans—even poor white Americans who’d been fed the lie that her husband was a communist trying to destroy the nation.

Yes, her family had been assaulted by a political assassination that put a bullet through her husband’s body. But in her prophetic empathy, Coretta King was able to see how that violence connected her to others who were suffering from policy violence.

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence,” she told the crowd gathered for the Poor People’s Campaign’s Solidarity Day on June 19, 1968. “Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”

It was a profound act of nonviolent truth telling from the widow of a terrible political assassination. It was also an expression of prophetic public theology – an act of faith by a woman who lived her Christian convictions.

Religion that claims love for God but says nothing about injustice - religious nationalism that asks God to bless the nation without calling the nation to face her sins – is not true faith. And it is dangerous to any society.

The responsibility of moral leaders in every age is to make clear what our traditions of faith and conscience have passed down to us – that the way any society treats its most vulnerable members is the way it treats God. In times of political and policy violence, we have a moral mandate to bear faithful witness to the truth and justice that lead to life.

This is why we gathered today, on the 62^nd anniversary of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, to renew our commitment to a nonviolent, moral resistance to all forms of violence. We did not know that we would be gathering in the wake of another horrific political assassination, but as Dr. King said at his eulogy for those girls who died while leaving Sunday School, their lives still speak to us.

They spoke to America today. Their lives spoke through living witnesses who continue their struggle in the best of the nonviolent tradition.

We hope you have time to listen.

We hope you’ll share this call to conscience in your community.

We hope you will plan ways to engage in nonviolent moral actions to repair the breach wherever you are in the days and weeks to come.

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If you are in the Los Angeles area, we invite you to join us for a mass meeting this coming Friday, ahead of the Save America Movement’s launch and blessing of our Liberty Vans at MacArthur Park on Saturday, September 20^th.

You can also register now for our next day of coordinated Moral Mondays on September 29^th.