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Why would someone place
the interests of others above their own self-interest? Why
would a person put their life on the line to improve the
lives of others? Yet, that is what those who fight for
social change often do. And, like for cultural hero and
political messiah Martin Luther King Jr., along with the
external fight there also comes an accompanying internal
struggle resulting from the experience of being a suffering
servant, wounded healer or wounded warrior that requires one
to deliver tangible hope to marginalized communities while
attempting to mask the leaders’ own inner pain.
King’s experience is also
informative for black religious and community leaders and
those today who are attempting to “save America from
America.”
I spoke with noted King
biographer Stewart Burns, Ph.D. to get a sense of the inner
anguish experienced by King and its implications for the
social and political strategies of today’s leaders.
This is part one of our
two-part discussion.
Perryman:
Black History month or MLK celebrations are unlikely to talk
about King’s personal spiritual journey. Please describe his
spiritual struggles.
Burns:
Well, most of us know that Dr. King was suffering from
severe depression during the last few years of his life, but
Birmingham Sunday, the destruction of Denise McNair and
Cynthia Wesley and Carol Robertson and Annie Mae Collins on
September 15, 1963, was as significant a turning point for
him as his initial so-called kitchen conversion in January
1956. King felt directly responsible, even though he was
not, and was completely devastated by that tragedy and it
triggered a full-scale depression.
Perryman: What
other issues did King wrestle with?
Burns:
So his depression accelerated after he came back from the
Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and was also very evident to
people during the Selma Campaign in the spring of 1965.
People on the march from Selma to Montgomery talked about
how King just seemed really depressed, really remote and not
really engaged, which was so unusual for him. That all tied
in with his struggle over the Vietnam War and his struggle
over corporate capitalism and his belief that corporate
capitalism had to be replaced.
Perryman:
Can you elaborate?
Burns:
King was a Democratic socialist but was actually more to the
left and ultimately more of an outright socialist than other
allies such as Bayard Rustin or Philip Randolph. King, then,
was somewhat alone in his opposition to corporate capitalism
and US imperialism around the world, but also alone in his
speaking out against the Vietnam War. So that was a huge
emotional struggle for him, and then when he came out
against the Vietnam War, in particular, to be lambasted - he
expected the hostility from the White House and from some
reporters, some of the media, but he did not expect that
even his fraternity brothers and close friends would turn
against him and Jackie Robinson, in particular, who had
become a friend. It’s one thing to privately oppose you, but
to publicly oppose you as Jackie Robinson did, that made
King cry.
So it was all of these
things, and then it was just three months after the
Riverside Church speech when the riots or uprisings broke
out in Newark and Detroit and 160 other cities. King, again
feeling responsible, because he felt that he hadn’t
delivered, even though he had not really made promises about
economic justice or ending poverty, but nevertheless, he
felt that, by omission, he had neglected the inner cities
and had neglected poverty as an overriding issue.
Perryman:
I am aware of some difficulties in the north where King was
disillusioned by a lack of success as compared to what he
was able to accomplish in the south.
Burns:
In Chicago, the campaign was focused on opening up rental
and home ownership for black people in the suburbs of
Chicago, it didn’t really focus on the ghettos, the west
side and the south side of Chicago as it originally had
intended to. And so even with this major year-long campaign,
they didn’t achieve…they achieved another half a loaf
agreement with Mayor Daily this time, but King had a lot of
reasons for feeling that he had failed in various ways. Even
though they had achieved the Voting Rights Act and Civil
Rights Act, he still felt this tremendous sense of failure.
And so there was one layer of guilt on top of another and
then of course there was also the guilt of his being an
absent father and an absent husband and marital infidelity,
and all of that.
The guilt feelings
worsened the depression, but nevertheless, it pushed him
forward as he came to see himself more and more as a martyr
and that martyrdom would be his only redemption. And so he
increasingly felt determined to be a role model for
everyone, a true suffering servant who would not give up,
even though it looked like all the odds were against him.
Perryman:
What lessons do you draw from King’s spiritual struggle that
might inform other leaders?
Burns:
Well, as I was saying before, for the last four and a half
years of his life he was a wounded warrior. It does seem
that from a psychological or emotional perspective, it is
very often the case that activists or people who are leaders
for social change find themselves, not only at on the edge
of society in the sense that they’re really pushing for
significant change in the society, but also that their minds
and consciousness and spirits are somewhat on the edge of
what’s considered normal. So whether we’re talking about
draft resisters who are willing to go to prison for
resisting the draft during the Vietnam War or Civil Rights
or SNCC activists who were riding the busses from Washington
D.C. to, aiming for New Orleans, but ultimately getting as
far as Jackson, Mississippi, who wrote wills before they
took off on the busses because they expected that they would
be killed. If you look at a lot of the most significant
leaders, there was always an emotional…a lot of
vulnerability and a lot of…in order to take risks like
activists sometimes need to take,… and this is putting it in
kind of an extreme way, but someone might wonder about their
sanity sometimes.
Why would someone be
willing to risk his or her life? King stated as early as
his first historic speech, I guess, the first night of the
bus boycott, he said “if you’re not willing to sacrifice
your life for a cause you believe in, you’re not fit to
live.” Now that’s a pretty extreme statement and I’m not
sure that King then really meant it for himself, but it
takes courage to be an activist taking risks and a lot of
times it’s the warriors who have been wounded in one way or
another, who are willing to take those risks.
But one of the lessons
that I think we need to learn is that just because we might
feel wounded in our lives in certain ways for whatever
reasons doesn’t mean that we should refrain from activism.
It means that there’s all the more reason to take part in
activism. I also think that we should not see people’s
emotional and spiritual vulnerabilities or weaknesses, if
you want to call them that, as something detrimental or as a
liability…
Perryman:
Is it possible for diverse individuals with diverse
experiences to respond differently to the experiences that
contribute to their “woundedness”? King had a relatively
drama free childhood and experienced no personal trauma that
I am aware of, prior to the Birmingham tragedy.
Burns:
I considered myself a wounded warrior coming out of my
childhood and family alcoholism and all the rest. And, for
me, getting involved in the new left, the anti-war movement
and then other movements, subsequently was a healing
experience. Now on the other hand, a lot of people who got
involved in the sort of armed struggle wing of the movement
during the late 60’s, early 70’s, I think were also wounded
warriors. I think if they had not been wounded warriors
they would not have got involved in such “crazy activities,”
as The Weather Underground organization would say. But the
movement experience, for them, was not a healing
experience. If anything, it worsened their woundedness and
ultimately kind of spiraled out of control to the bombings
that they did and all that, and all the dehumanizing
rhetoric too, including calling police “pigs” and all of
that, I feel was not helpful to them in terms of their
mental or emotional health.
Whereas in the nonviolent
movement, we also were far from perfect and there were all
kinds of personality conflicts, people with problems, and
bad things that nonviolent activists did for sure. But
overall, I think the experience of nonviolent activism was a
healing experience for many of us, and I think for many in
the Civil Rights Movement.
And then when you’re
feeling that you’re getting healed in terms of your
emotional struggles, it can further encourage you to keep on
keeping on and maybe continue to take risks because you have
this healing experience, part of which is just simply,
experiencing community, as I did for the first time, real
community. And I really miss that from those days.
Ed. Note: Highly regarded historian of the
Civil Rights Movement, author or editor of eight books,
Stewart Burns served as an editor of the King Papers at
Stanford University, where he also taught U.S. History. His
first book Social Movements of the 1960s (1990), still in
print, has been the most widely used college text on the
subject. His documentary history of the Montgomery bus
boycott, Daybreak of Freedom (1997), was made into the HBO
feature film Boycott (on which he consulted), winner of the
NAACP Image Award in 2002.
Burns has been a nonviolent activist for most
of his life, for over a quarter century engaged in
interracial healing in higher education. He remains
committed to applying King’s legacy to our troubled world.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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