“Somebody Told A Lie One day”
I would urge white Evangelicals who shallow-quote and whitewash Dr. King today to seriously consider Jesus’ rebuke of hypocrisy in Matthew 23:29-36. White Evangelicals in large measure resisted the Civil Rights Movement and often felt Dr. King was demanding too much, too soon.
“Somebody told a lie one day” — Dr King
For instance, immediately after Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, Billy Graham conducted a press conference saying, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”
“Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”— Billy Graham
In Dr. King’s own words:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is… the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;.. who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom;… and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season'".
Most Evangelicals also dismiss the Black prophetic tradition that nurtured and formed Dr. King as liberal, liberation theology. But both his person and his leadership were deeply rooted in this tradition — a tradition that overflows with oratorial power, theological fullness, and intellectual depth — that then translated into a robust praxis, speaking in the heart-language of the poor to inspire and mobilize them in courageous non-violent resistance against the white supremacist "Christian" society that oppressed them.
So don’t try to hide white Evangelicalism’s historic complicity and continue diluting Dr. King’s radical message and appropriating him — essentially attempting to re-enslave him to your purposes.
Don't weaponize him against the Black Lives Matter movement. If he were alive, you would be the target of his scathing rebukes.
Don’t bear witness against yourself by saying, “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets”.
Refuse to share in “the measure of your fathers”.
When you’re tempted to do so, just imagine Dr. King looking at you with his piercing stare and saying: “Somebody told a lie one day”. Because I suspect he’ll be doing a lot of that today.
