It is impossible to live in Atlanta without the ever-present shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr., bearing down upon us all who are here, his words and spirit so often evoked in even the most basic of conversations. Even a simple drive to work for many downtown winds us past his grave and that forever burning light that so symbolizes the legacy of which he left behind. But because he is such as presence, it is sometimes easy to forget exactly the man he was, be it behind the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church or behind the bars of a Birmingham jail.

Lucky for us, there is Jon Rieder. He’s taken it upon himself to delve deep into a world most of us would never know. His book -- The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- is beautifully bound and vast in scope, offering a glimpse into King beyond the sound bites so often played.

The interview below is easily one of the best we’ve had in Pine, and we are honored to present it, especially this week as many commemorate the 40th anniversary of the assassination of King.


Holly Lang/Pine Magazine: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Jonathan Rieder: I am a sociologist at Barnard College, Columbia University, and for decades now I have been studying that vexing question of race in America. I have studied everything from white backlash in a Brooklyn neighborhood to conflicts among African-Americans, West Indians and Asians.

HL: What brought you to this book?

JR: I’ve long been unhappy with the larger society’s trivialization of Martin Luther King as a lofty dreamer. But that ignores what a tough-minded thinker and doer he was and minimizes the power of his prophetic vision of his faith. I am sure that if King were alive today, he would be proud of the undeniable strides in race relations he helped bring about with help from the larger movement. But he would still be an angry prophet, unhappy, as he put it over and over, with the way many of his poor, suffering children were being treated.  That’s why I called the book The Word of the Lord is Upon Me, because it captures the unsettling character of his commitment to deliver the captives and feed the hungry. Actually, that wonderful colleague of Dr King’s, Reverend C.T. Vivien made the powerful point to me: If you want to understand King, don’t read the fancy philosophers he liked to quote but read the four gospels.

Secondly, the more I read about King-- and there have been extraordinary works about him, but especially the more I listened to King, I was struck by the power of his love of black people and his powerful sense of black identity that simply wasn’t so obvious when he was in the larger public spotlight. But of course, I’m simply saying what most Atlantans and people in general who knew him already know. I wanted to know more about how he straddled the lines between “blackness” and “whiteness,” and to do that, I knew I had to talk to those who were close to him and to track down every tape I could of King preaching in black churches and exhorting in mass meetings in Selma and Birmingham to become acquainted with him in a different way. That’s the unique thing I’ve done in my book: no other work has made King’s talk -- all kinds of his talk -- the central work.

Since he was very much a person of the word as well as The Word, I needed to hear him in informal moments as well as in formal speeches, get a sense of how he talked when he was joshing around with Andrew Young and Joseph Lowery and others, when he was giving in to gallows humor in anticipation of being murdered, when he was tenderly telling the people of Selma, “I come to Selma to tell you are somebody.”

And especially those moments in which he gives into an intense indignation at racism and inequality. Talking about the efforts of whites to wipe out the Indians, he warns, “A country that got started like that has a lot of repentin’ to do.” But it’s not just that he warns American in prophetic terms; he grasps the fundamental contradiction between the words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the treatment of black people. He says at one point, what sense of cruel rejection, of estrangement, could cause a people to come up with a song and a metaphor, “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child.” And he says that even though it’s written on the Statue of Liberty that America is the Mother of its Exiles, American has never shown maternal warmth to its Black Exiles. Of course that’s close to what Malcolm X charged America: “You’ve been as cold as icicles to black people.”

HL: The book is broken into four sections, all which explore different aspects of King and his rhetoric. Can you tell us a little about these sections?

JR: The Word of the Lord is Upon Me explores the extraordinary performances of Dr. King before white and black audiences, in down home moments and refined ones, as he joshed and justified. Part l considers the special talk -- from rowdy teasing to the spiritual intimacy of SCLC retreats -- that emerged when King was with black colleagues and the rival pulls of black identity and mankind that accompanied it.

Part ll delves into the tension between raw and refined, race and “all God’s children,” that marked King’s preaching.

Part lll examines King’s rousing oratory in mass meetings, which mixed black preaching and civil religion, race rapture and the universal tasks of every insurgency.

Part lV explores the crossover King who stirred whites with lofty appeals to “amazing universalism” and “beloved community”; in those addresses to the nation, high Protestant churches, Jewish organizations, labor unions, and readers of his trade books, King’s “rude” censure of whites and displays of irrepressible, at times even bitter, blackness qualified the sublime voice, reassuring images of black nobility, and deference to white moral notions.  

HL: You've mentioned before King's ability to transform himself and his audience. Can you tell me a little about that? In your opinion, how was he able to bring to whites the feelings blacks endured?

JR: It’s best to start with what I originally suspected but did not find. That it would be easy to see very different Kings when he was joking, preaching and exhorting among black people and the crossover King who addressed whites.

And I do spend a lot of time pointing to those differences. In fact, I discovered one amazing tape in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute of King preaching at a black church not long after he got out of jail. In the Letter from Birmingham Jail he wrote while in his cell, he begins his answer to the white ministers who have criticized him, “my dear fellow clergymen.”

But after getting out of jail, he’s clearly still indignant at his critics, and he refers to them sarcastically as “these preachers telling us we’re naughty.”  In one sermon, he refuses to chastise the Watts rioters, insisting, “I know the temptation to become bitter that comes to all black people.” In other words, he places himself squarely in that community of rage, even though he then urges his audience to rise above it.

But he surely understands it and empathizes with it. Or he engages in praise of the slave ancestors, exulting in their faith and courage, and he merges himself with the old slave preacher who told his audience, “You are not nobodies, your are not niggers.” And of course he had a wicked sense of humor and liked to josh about black and white backstage with his colleagues. And play the dozens.

But just as important was that King moved in and out of black and white style, language, and themes not just as he moved from black to white audience and back again but within his black talk and within his white talk. This was the virtuosity of his performance. As Rev. Joseph Lowery told me, his audiences loved it when he spoke in his high-flown manner. King didn’t really see these different styles as “black” or as “white,” but all-powerful ways to express himself. Similarly, even when he reached out to white audiences, he never disguised his powerful sense of black identity.

What after all is the meaning of King’s final run of preaching at the March on Washington if not to declare how faith and pride in black religion and black performance? In a subtle way, he makes white people black, by having them sing, “We are free at last.” That was only one sign of King’s powerful sense of humanity: he constantly glided into every kind of experience; nothing was foreign to him. He enters the suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany and says he would wear a Yellow star; In India, he says, “I am an untouchable.”

And he was constantly entering the world of white racists, the better to understand them so he could redeem them. Maybe they were vicious, maybe they were “sick white brothers,” but they were brothers in a theological sense. In the end, whether King was speaking fancy or down-home, the constancy waxes his deep humanism, his Christian faith in “all God’s children,” and his commitment to free everyone.     `

HL: Can you tell me a little about your process? Did you conduct many interviews?

JR: The process rested on two foundations. The first was an intensive tracking down of recordings of as much of King’s talk as I could. And that simply could not have been done without the remarkable people who tend archives across the country. The second foundation was the interviews with his remarkable colleagues who you in Atlanta know so well.

HL: What interviews stood out most to you?

JR: Well, as everybody in this town pretty much knows, Andrew Young, C.T. Vivien, Joseph Lowery were incredibly helpful. And although he had recently had a stroke, Wyatt Tee Walker generously shared much with me, as did Walter Fauntroy. And John Lewis. There’s not a single one of these men who don’t have amazing stories to tell. Certainly, C.T. Vivien’s account of the time racists in St. Augustine held his head under the ocean when they integrated the beaches was extraordinary; when I asked him if he was frightened, he said he was laughing, and started laughing when he retold the story!

And let’s not forget this town’s inimitable Tom Houck, who joined the movement as a teenager: imagine the courage and the moral sense required for him to lead demonstrations in his southern high school and then getting bounced out of school and enlisting in the struggle. And getting put in the white section of the jail with, how shall we put it, his fellow white brothers who maybe hadn’t been redeemed yet and weren’t so supportive of the movement. It doesn’t get much more righteous than that.  And there were others I talked to as well.

But as powerful as these stories were, I have to admit that the voices of another extraordinary group of men, the foot solders who organized the Black Belt and prepared for a King appearance at a mass meeting, have been less audible.

Talking to Rev. Willie Bolden and J.T. Johnson here in Atlanta, and Andrew Marrissett in Birmingham convinced me that to understand King and the movement, I had to add a whole chapter on the foot soldiers.

Bolden told the story of the night in Marion Alabama, when Jimmy Jackson was shot and a lawman stuck a gun in his mouth and warned him that he would shoot him if he breathed. You see, Willie Bolden had corrected the lawmen when he referred to King in a disrespectful way by saying, Doctor King. And Rev. Bolden would look back on that night and say, “Thank God I didn’t breathe,” echoing King when he had a bullet in him that would have killed him and King said, "Thank God I didn’t sneeze."

J.T. Johnson put it just as vividly; he talked about how many of the foot soldiers didn’t necessarily believe in nonviolence at first. As he put it, “we took the beating” because they had to protect the women and children. But over time they came to believe in nonviolence. Johnson also told me of the time they were in Philadelphia Mississippi on the Meredith March, and they were so scared King was talking about praying with their eyes open.

HL: What about King did you learn you never expected to?

JR: That was another aspect of King -- not just his ability to relax that super-dignified demeanor when he was with those he trusted, but also his impact on those around him. And King understood that men like Bolden and Johnson embodied his Christian faith that it’s better to live with a scarred up body than a scarred up soul. At one retreat, at a time that Big Lester and a number of the other foot soldiers had been roughed up and were faltering a bit in their spirit, King recognized this.

In one of these fancy moves in his rhetoric, he brings Jesus forward into contemporary history, makes him a foot soldier. After all, the foot soldiers were crucified in a sense, and King imagines Jesus saying fighting for civil rights may get you scarred up, may get your house bombed, but that suffering is redemptive. And in fact all of the people in the movement really did share in the sacrificial vocation: The physical courage of Bolden and Johnson and all the rest of their colleagues was thus inseparable from a kind of moral courage. Of course that was just as true of Lowery and Young and Vivien.

This is something that’s been lost to many people today: that a nonviolent for an integrated society was not something weak and soft and sentimental. King and the entire movement of which he was only one part were tough-minded in the best sense of the word.

In fact King recognized that in his last statement to SCLC colleagues at his last retreat. I’ve listened to the tape and you hear King saying, I may not see you again until April. He means he won’t see some of his colleagues until the Poor People’s March converges on Washington, but listening to the tape with the knowledge that he has only months to live, that he will die in April, it sounds haunting, like a premonition. In any case, he then urges his colleagues, “But I still will feel as Jesus said to his disciples, as sheep amid wolves, be ye as strong and as tough as a serpent and as tender as a dove.”  I don’t know that you can improve on that description.