Today Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 92 years old.
On March 25, 1968, shortly before his death, Dr. King spoke to the Rabbinical Assembly Convention. Abraham Joshua Heschel introduced him. “Where in America do we hear the voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel?” he asked. “Martin Luther King is a voice, a vision and a way… The whole future of America will depend upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.”
More than a half-century later, in a world infused with hatred and racism, poisoned by ethnic nationalism and violence, Heschel’s words are especially prescient and haunting.
We remember Dr. King today with love and admiration, and we heed his call to dedicate ourselves to nonviolence, following his path. There is a voice crying through the vista of time saying, “He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.” (Matthew 26:52). And history is replete with the bleached bones of nations who refused to listen to the words of Jesus at this point. The method of violence would be both impractical and immoral. If this method becomes widespread, it will lead to terrible bloodshed, and that aftermath will be a bitterness that will last for generations.
There is another method which can serve as an alternative to the method of violence, and it is a method of nonviolent resistance…. This method is nonaggressive physically but it is aggressive spiritually… [T]he nonviolent resister seeks to change the opponent, to redeem him. He does not seek to defeat him or to humiliate him. And this is very important, that the end is never merely to protest but the end is reconciliation… And so the aim must always be to defeat injustice and not to defeat the persons who are involved in it. This method of nonviolence seeks to win the friendship and the understanding of the opponent… Another basic factor in the method of nonviolent resistance is that this method does not seek merely to avoid external physical violence, but it seeks to avoid internal violence of spirit. And at the center of the method of nonviolence stands the principle of love…
Martin Luther King, Jr, “Non-Aggression Procedures to Interracial Harmony,” Address Delivered at the American Baptist Assembly, 23 July 1956.
