by Bruce Feiler
I wanted to know what Young thought about the role Moses played in the civil rights movement and the fascinating, if fragile, alliance between blacks and Jews that was built in part on their shared use of the Exodus. I began by asking what role the Bible played in his early life.
“My grandmother was blind from the time I was eight years old, and every night she had me read the Bible to her,” he said. “I also learned the stories in chorus. But I went through a period in college when I pretty much abandoned religion. We used to say as Congregationalists, ‘You can’t get to heaven unless your subject and verb agree.’ The emphasis was so much on learning and proper speech that they forgot the spirit.”
In his late seventies now and involved in international charitable work inspired by his years as U.N. ambassador, Young was dressed crisply in white shirt and tie. He spoke deliberately and was noticeably heavier than the former track star who marched alongside King, a reminder that the carefully scrutinized leaders of the civil rights movement were merely young men at the time—in their late twenties and early thirties.
“But all that Sunday-school training came back to help me in the movement,” he continued. “All the songs we sang were about the Old Testament. ‘When Israel was in Egypt land, Let my people go.’ ‘Joshua fit de battle of Jericho, and the walls came a-tumblin’ down.’ ‘There’s a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.’ Martin used to say that black men and women took Jeremiah’s question ‘Is there a balm in Gilead?’ and straightened out the question mark into an exclamation point. ‘There is a balm in Gilead to heal the wounded whole!’”
“Did you know that singing those songs would lead to revolution?”
“Absolutely. Because in addition to being born into that biblical environment, fifty yards from where I was born was the German American Bund. From my porch I could hear people heiling Hitler. Plus, a lot of my father’s dental suppliers were Jewish, so the talk in my house was constantly about these Nazis on the corner. And my father’s mantra was ‘Don’t get mad, get smart.’ He took me to see newsreels of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics where Hitler refused to shake his hand. ‘See, that’s the way to deal with white supremacy. Jesse Owens didn’t get angry. He just went out and beat them.’”
In recent years, Young has come under attack by some Jews for remarks he made about Jewish merchants taking advantage of blacks. It was another wound in two decades of deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews over such issues as Louis Farrakhan, Israel, Palestine, economic development, and anti-Semitism. But in the fifties and sixties, Jews were among the staunchest supporters of civil rights. A number of the founders of the NAACP were Jewish. Two-thirds of the Freedom Riders in 1961 were Jewish, as were 50 percent of the Mississippi Summer volunteers of 1964. Half of the lawyers who brought civil rights cases to trial were Jews, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were both drafted in the conference room of the Reform Jewish movement in Washington. When I asked Ambassador Young, whose grandmother was half Jewish, whether a shared allegiance to the Exodus was a factor in this relationship, he said, “Always.” Then he cited the example of Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Beyond sharing grand, operatic names, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr., formed one of the more unusual partnerships in twentieth-century American history. One was a Baptist preacher with roots that stretched into slavery, the other a Polish rabbi and émigré from Hitler’s Europe whose ancestors were among the founders of Hasidism. The former was colorful and rousing, the latter pious and earnest. But Heschel, whose hair looked like Einstein’s and beard like Freud’s, shared with King a common interest in the overlapping narratives of Judaism and Christianity. At a time when few others were saying it, King wrote openly about the Jewish roots of Jesus: “The Christian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, but the fact is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine.” As America’s leading Jewish theologian, Heschel wrote openly that Jews ought to acknowledge the “eminent role” that Christianity plays in God’s plan for human redemption.
But the foundation of Heschel and King’s partnership rested on mutual respect for a different story. “The preference King gives to the Exodus motif over the figure of Jesus certainly played a major role in linking the two men intellectually and religiously,” explains Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, a scholar of Jewish thought at Dartmouth. “For Heschel, the primacy of the Exodus in the civil rights movement was a major step in the history of Christian-Jewish relations.”
The two men met in early 1963 at the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, an unprecedented ecumenical gathering of one thousand religious leaders. Heschel opened his speech by comparing modern America with ancient Egypt. “At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses,” he said. “The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.”
The following year, King invited Heschel to join him in Selma for what would become a high point of the movement. Heschel described the march as an act of “service to God” and said he felt “as though my legs were praying.” He wrote King, “The day we marched together out of Selma was a day of sanctification.” A century after white Protestants in the North and South argued over whether Moses endorsed slavery, black Protestants and American Jews together formed what might be called a new Moses alliance to redefine power in the United States. And once again, Moses was on the winning side of a definitional change in American life.
“Hardly a day passed when somebody didn’t make a reference to the Moses story,” Andrew Young said. “It was our story. It was no longer a Jewish story. And Heschel, who was such a great man, understood that what we were doing was a theological event. There was no way we could stand up to the government of the United States on our own if we did not feel as though this was divinely motivated.”
Susannah Heschel agrees. “My father came from a religious family,” she told me. “If the movement had been about Jesus, it would have been much harder for him to connect. The Exodus is much more unifying. Plus, it tapped into his sensitivities about racism. My father came out of Nazi Germany where Christians were throwing the Hebrew Bible out of the Christian Bible. ‘No more Old Testament! It’s too Jewish!’ So just think of what it meant to him to hear these black Baptist preachers quoting Moses.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel (far right) marches with (from left to right) Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Maurice Eisendrath, in Selma, Alabama, March 24, 1965.
Heschel and King’s friendship grew so strong that the rabbi invited King and his family to join the Heschels for a seder in 1968. The first night of Passover that year was on April 12. King was killed on April 4.
“I met Dr. King several times in my life, and he was always incredibly warm and wonderful,” said Susannah, who was fifteen years old at the time. “The last time was just ten days before he was assassinated. There was a convention of Conservative rabbis in the Catskills honoring my father. Dr. King came to give the keynote, and when he came into the room there were a thousand rabbis, and they all stood up, linked arms, and sang, ‘We Shall Overcome’ in Hebrew.”
I mentioned C. L. Franklin’s 1950s speech about the Exodus and his idea that every generation raised up a Moses. “Was King that figure?”
“My father did feel that way,” Susannah said. “He put it beautifully in his introduction of King that night in the Catskills. ‘Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us. His presence is the hope of America.’”
THE MASON TEMPLE is about a ten-minute drive from downtown Memphis, a few blocks from a bend of the Mississippi River that divides Tennessee and Arkansas. Not a Masonic
temple, as I expected, the building got its name from Charles Mason, a local Pentecostal preacher who in 1897 founded the Church of God in Christ. Today the denomination boasts fifteen thousand pastors in fifty-six countries. Built in the 1940s, the blocky, concrete facility contains Bishop Mason’s tomb and what the church claims was the largest black sanctuary in America at the time. With steel in low supply because of the war, the room was built with a tin roof and wooden folding seats that encircle the pulpit. The effect is even more church-in-the-round than the design of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn; most of the 3,732 seats are actually above the preacher, who stands near the lowest point of the room like a drum major at the fifty-yard line. The speaker preaches not from the top of a mountain but from the bottom of a bowl.
In early 1968, Mason Temple became ground zero for civil rights. On February 1, during a vicious rainstorm, Memphis’s most famous resident, Elvis Presley, left Graceland for Baptist Hospital with his wife, Priscilla, who soon gave birth to their daughter, Lisa Marie. At the same hour, two black sanitation workers, seeking refuge from the weather, were crushed to death in the compactor of their garbage truck. Earlier, twenty-two black sewer workers had been sent home without pay while their white coworkers received their salaries. Two weeks later, eleven hundred black sanitation workers went on strike for better benefits. When the mayor balked at their demands, another of the rolling civil rights face-offs was under way. The difference now was that King was distracted by the backlash against his opposition to the war in Vietnam and his struggling Poor People’s Campaign. On March 18, King visited Memphis and delivered a speech at the packed Mason Temple. Ten days later he led a march that descended into looting and death. In response, Tennessee imposed its first state of emergency since 1866, and King vowed to return in April to conduct a peaceful demonstration.
On Wednesday, April 3, King’s Eastern Airlines flight from Atlanta to Memphis was delayed for more than an hour by a bomb scare. When King, Andrew Young, and their colleague Ralph Abernathy finally arrived in Memphis, police offered protection, but the tender was declined as King and company feared, correctly, that the white hierarchy was more interested in surveillance than security. King checked into room 306 at the black-owned Lorraine Motel, a frequent haven for musicians, preachers, and other traveling African Americans. A storm blew in, complete with tornado warnings and sheets of rain. A tornado actually hit Star City, Arkansas, at seven that evening, killing seven people. Fearing a low turnout, King decided to forgo the rally that night and asked Abernathy to speak on his behalf.
“Martin had been depressed and feverish,” Young recalled. “But when we got there, the sanctuary was full and people were standing outside with umbrellas. We walked in and people started clapping. Ralph said, ‘These people ain’t clappin’ for us. They think Martin’s comin’.” So we called and said, ‘Martin, you’ve got to come.’” Young sent Abernathy to the pulpit and hopped into a car.
Abernathy spoke for nearly forty-five minutes, listing the accomplishments of King’s life. King had not decided whether to become president of the United States, Abernathy joked, “but he is the one who tells the president what to do.” Then King arrived and took a seat on the podium just as the winds and rain were reaching their peak. With no air-conditioning, the church had fans that would blow air out through the windows, but the fans were off and the tin shutters were slamming against the walls. “The shutters kept banging—bam! bam!,” the Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles later explained to me. Kyles, a local preacher and a friend of King’s, was seated on the podium along with Young and others. “Every time they would bang, Martin would flinch,” Kyles continued. “He thought it was a shot. I called over the custodian and said, ‘Turn on the fans and let the shutters blow out. The sound is really disturbing Dr. King.’”
Finally, at 9:30 P.M., King rose to speak. After a few jokes about Abernathy, he began with a bit of whimsy. “If I were standing at the beginning of time,” he said, “and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you live in?’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt and would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there.” He also wouldn’t stop in the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, or at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, he said. “Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, ‘If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.’”
King went on to celebrate the accomplishments of the Memphis movement and stressed the importance of maintaining unity. “Whenever the pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite formula for doing it,” he said. “He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery.” He discussed the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a man is left to die beside the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Several men pass him by, before a Samaritan stops to help. “That is the question before you tonight,” King said. “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” Then he proceeded to his close.
In Deuteronomy 29 and 30, the 120-year-old Moses gathers the tribes together and gives a wrenching valediction. Informed by God that he will die short of the Promised Land, Moses steals one final moment to help shape the stiff-necked people he has guided for two generations, through a geography of miracles and a wilderness of doubt, to the lip of the land of milk and honey. “I led you through the wilderness for forty years,” Moses says. “The clothes on your back did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet; you had no bread to eat and no wine or other liquor to drink.” He was speaking not just to the people gathered before him on the mountain, Moses stressed, but to all their descendants throughout history. With everyone’s emotions at their peak, Moses then rehearses the blessings God has bestowed on his chosen people. “You have seen all that the Lord did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his courtiers and to his whole country.” He reiterates the people’s obligations not to mingle with other nations or deities when they cross into Canaan. He renews their covenant with God. And finally Moses tells the Israelites that if they heed his advice and follow God’s commandments, God will “grant you abounding prosperity in all of your undertakings.”
Despite the overriding difference between the two talks—King didn’t know his speech that night would be his last—King’s emotion and structure bear striking similarities with Moses’. First, the thirty-nine-year-old preacher recounted the deeds God bestowed on his new chosen people. “I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding—something is happening in this world.” He mentioned Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Accra, Ghana, as well as Atlanta, Jackson, and Memphis. Then he stressed the obligations the chosen people have not to mingle with other nations (in King’s case, he called for a boycott of white-run companies that practiced discrimination, including those that made Sealtest milk and Coca-Cola—milk and honey!). He reminded his audience of the sacred covenant between freedom-loving people and God. And finally he reaffirmed that if black Americans made sacrifices and upheld their commitments, God would reward them with abundance and prosperity.
King’s mood then turned darker. “Several years ago,” he said, “I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written.” A woman came up to him and said, “Are you Martin Luther King?” then pulled a letter opener from her raincoat and plunged it into his chest. With the handle still protruding from his body, King was rushed to the hospital. “It was a dark Saturday afternoon,” he continued, “and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta. And once that’s punctured, you’re drowned in your own blood.” The New York Times reported the next day that “if I had merely sneezed, I would have died.” Within days, he began
to receive letters from all over the world. One was from a young girl.
Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School. While it shouldn’t matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.
As the audience roared its applause, King turned his masterful trick. “And I want to say tonight that I, too, am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here for…,” and he went on to mention several highlights of the civil rights struggle.
King often spoke about death. As early as 1956, his mentor Bayard Rustin told him, “Dr. King, I have a feeling you had better prepare yourself for martyrdom, because I don’t see how you can make the challenge that you are making here without a very real possibility of your being murdered.” After John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, King told his wife, “This is what is going to happen to me. I keep telling you, this is a sick society.” And all through 1968, his aides commented that “he felt his time was up” or he appeared to be “a profoundly weary and wounded spirit.” “You think I’m paranoid, don’t you?” he asked Rustin. “Sometimes I do, Martin,” his friend replied.
“One thing I learned from Martin,” Andrew Young told me, “is that the price of leadership is death. We knew every time we left home it could be the end. Martin’s home had been bombed. He had been arrested and thrown into a jail at a time when the jailers wanted him dead. Once in Atlanta, he had been thrown into the back of a paddy wagon in chains with a police dog and nobody else, then driven seven or eight hours to the state penitentiary, rolling back and forth. He said that was the most horrible night of his life.
