April 3, 2008

By Father John Geaney, C.S.P.

I can remember the time vividly. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, I was stationed as a Catholic chaplain at UCLA in what is known as the hills of Westwood in Los Angeles. Spring time is always lovely in LA because the hills are green only during that time of the year. But something terrible had happened and I had no idea how terrible that something was, other than to know that in the midst of the Spring greening, a terrible blood red color was seeping all over the United States. One of America's great leaders had fallen much as had happened to John Fitzgerald Kennedy only five years prior. I could never guess, then, that only months later, Robert Kennedy would suffer a similar fate.

For the first time in my life I wondered, would there be a repeat of the Watts violence? It's interesting to read a BBC account on April 6 of 1968. "Curfews are in place in many areas of the country and National Guard soldiers have been mobilised to help quell the violence which is threatening to engulf the US in a race war."

Gratefully, cooler heads prevailed and there was no race war, even though there were riots in many different cities around the country, not the least of which was taking place in Washington, DC. The damage from that riot was a constant reminder to me of how difficult it is to recover from incidents of that nature because I witnessed the results of that destruction in neighborhoods along 14th Street, for the thirty years I spent in Washington.

What did we learn? I'm hoping that we learned that a people who are divided are more likely to be destructive toward one another than when we are united. I hope we also learned that Dr. King is an American hero, and not just a hero to African Americans. Because Dr. King had a dream, we can all dream it with him and must do so even today.

While I was at UCLA, I was studying rhetoric for a degree in Speech Communications. Part of that study was to learn more about the young preacher from Alabama by way of Atlanta who was making compelling speeches all across the country. But studying the speeches and trying to bring the values Dr. King espoused into reality are vastly different tasks. If we are to build "the beloved community" that Dr. King called for, then we cannot just study his speeches we must also serve the needs of the poor and all those who keep us divided along racial lines.

Dr. King once said, "Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's "Theory of Relativity" to serve. You don't have to know the Second Theory of Thermal Dynamics in Physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love, and you can be that servant."

As we commemorate Dr. King's assassination, I'm urging all of us to remember his dream, to serve where we are needed and to continue to help build "the beloved community."