This Life
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At this time, King was traveling across the country to gather support for his Poor People’s Campaign. His radical initiative was being met in many areas by large-scale resistance and skepticism, even among those it was meant to emancipate. King was deeply discouraged and his own staff members questioned his vision of building a genuine class movement proceeding from the poorest members of the population. News of the Memphis strike thus emerged as a possible new front line for King’s initiative. The sanitation workers had managed to unite almost the entire black community in Memphis across class lines and thereby pursued a version of King’s vision on the ground. When he was asked to come to demonstrate his support for the strike, King did not hesitate and flew to Memphis against the advice of his staff.
King first arrived in Memphis on March 18, at a crucial moment of the strike. On the evening when King was scheduled to speak, more than fifteen thousand strike activists were gathering in the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ. It was the largest indoor meeting in the entire history of the civil rights movement and it restored King’s faith in the power of the people. “I’ve never seen a community as together as Memphis,” King testified, “you are all doing in Memphis what I hope to do with the Poor People’s Campaign.”79
In the Mason Temple, a space designated for religious worship was transformed into a place for the celebration and reinvigoration of a shared secular commitment to emancipation. The congregation sang old hymns that had been converted into anthems for the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. These hymns direct our devotion not to a transcendent God but to what we can achieve if we stand together and keep faith with our commitment to spiritual freedom. On March 18, the congregation sang “We Shall Not Be Moved,” followed by “I Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom,” and then the most famous of the hymns: “We Shall Overcome.” The latter hymn has become so iconic that its powerful resonance tends to be lost for us today, but it is crucial to hear the resolute expression of secular faith at its core. What we believe deep in our hearts—the hymn avows—is not that God will save us but that we shall overcome our subordination through collective action. The hymn had first been adopted as a labor movement anthem by black women on strike in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1946, and it had become an integral part of the civil rights movement under King. While people sang, donations were collected for the sanitation workers on strike. Participants testified to the unworthy labor conditions they were combating and spoke on behalf of the two workers who had suffered terrible deaths on February 1. In characteristic fashion, a back-and-forth developed between the speakers and their audience, in a mutual recognition and reaffirmation of the struggle for freedom. The whole evening was a powerful demonstration of what came to be known as “the spirit of Memphis”—the resolve of a people to change its conditions—and it gave King new hope. “Martin was visibly shaken by all this,” James Lawson later recalled, “for this kind of support was unprecedented in the movement. No one had ever been able to get these numbers out before.”80
The mass meetings in the Mason Temple—and the two speeches that King gave there—can be seen as profound manifestations of secular faith. To engage their implications, we must here make explicit the final aspect of secular faith. The object of secular faith is always a spiritual cause, which moves us to act and determines what is important to us.81 Spiritual causes are those for the sake of which we lead our lives and try to respond to the demands of our practical identities. For example, a spiritual cause can be the parental love that focuses our attention, the artistic vocation that gives direction to our aspirations, or—as was the case for King and many of the other activists in Memphis—the political cause for the sake of which we are willing to risk our lives.
The causes can vary, but any form of spiritual life has a spiritual cause. The question of who we are and what we do—as well as the question of whether we are succeeding or failing in our efforts—is inseparable from the spiritual causes for the sake of which we act. These are spiritual causes—as distinct from natural causes—since their efficacy is dependent on the commitments we sustain. A natural cause (e.g., gravity as the natural cause of falling bodies) operates independently of anything we do and desire. A spiritual cause, by contrast, only exists as a cause insofar as we believe in it.
The belief in a spiritual cause does not necessarily become explicit and it precedes consciously held beliefs, since it gives us a sense of who we are and what matters to us in the first place. Moreover, there is no neutral standpoint from which we are free to choose our spiritual causes. Before we can decide anything, we are already constrained by the spiritual causes we inherit from the social world into which we are born. Nevertheless, we are responsible for sustaining, contesting, or changing the spiritual causes that determine the stakes of our actions. For there to be demands of parenthood, artistic vocations, and political causes, we must hold ourselves to those demands and thereby believe that they matter.
When we own our secular faith, we acknowledge that the object of our faith—our spiritual cause—is dependent on our practice of faith. The practice of faith is our practical identity (e.g., political activist) and the object of faith is our spiritual cause (e.g., our political cause).
Secular faith is a condition of intelligibility for all forms of care, but there is always a question of the degree to which we own or disown our secular faith—the degree to which we acknowledge that our own being is at stake in our actions and that our spiritual cause depends on our commitments. Throughout this book, I have sought to show the emancipatory and transformative possibilities that are opened up when we own our secular faith, both individually and collectively.
Inversely, what I call religious faith disowns our secular faith. Religious faith takes the object of faith to be a god—or some other form of infinite being—that is independent of our practice of faith. Our spiritual cause is treated as though it were a being that commands and has power over us without being dependent on us. This is the type of faith that King espouses in his religious sermons. In his role as a Christian preacher, King claims that “the universe is guided by a benign Intelligence whose infinite love embraces all mankind,” namely, “the one eternal God” who has “strength to protect us” with his “unlimited resources”82 and on whose grace we depend. From this religious perspective, we cannot save ourselves through collective action. Rather, we must have faith in an eternal Savior who is beyond our comprehension, since “his will is too perfect and his purposes are too extensive to be contained in the limited receptacle of time and the narrow walls of earth.”83
For the same reason, however, the supposed relation between God and our emancipation becomes incomprehensible. What we take to be evil and unjust can be part of God’s “plan” or his unfathomable “purposes,” which purportedly redeem what happens to us beyond anything we can understand. Moreover, if God is beyond our comprehension, his notion of goodness and justice can be completely at odds with our own. As King avows in one of his religious sermons, “I do not pretend to understand all of the ways of God or his particular timetable for grappling with evil. Perhaps if God dealt with evil in the overbearing way that we wish, he would defeat his ultimate purpose.”84 Given this acquiescence of religious faith, the very idea of an “ultimate purpose” (a spiritual cause) becomes empty and unintelligible. The purpose of God’s “infinite love” is anything and nothing, since it has no determinate content. Any determinate content is what we sustain—what we hold to be good, just, and true—and only we can be responsible for the spiritual cause to which we devote ourselves. To own our secular faith is to acknowledge this responsibility and make ourselves answerable to others for the commitments we maintain.
In contrast, the Unhappy Consciousness of religious faith—the notion that we are sinful, fatally limited creatures who must defer to an incomprehensible God—cannot prevent itself from revertin
g back into Skepticism and Stoicism. If what we take to be evil can be good in the eyes of God, we can deny any authority to our moral judgments (Skepticism); and if what we take to be injustice can be part of God’s plan for justice, we can be enjoined to accept anything that happens to us with equanimity (Stoicism). As King explicitly affirms in one of his religious sermons, we do not need “an earthly fallout shelter” since “God is our eternal fallout shelter” and we should therefore “face the fear that the atomic bomb has aroused with the faith that we can never travel beyond the arms of the Divine.”85
Such a religious notion of God cannot account for the way King uses the term in his political speeches. When King says that “God” has commanded us to help the poor to emancipate themselves—and that he is doing “God’s will” in pursuing social freedom as an end in itself—King cannot be referring to the religious notion of an eternal God, since by his own admission he cannot determine the will of such a God. The command or the will of God only makes sense if we understand the term in a Hegelian way. “God” is a name for the communal norms that we have legislated to ourselves and to which we hold ourselves. When King invokes the will and the command of God in his political speeches, he is reminding us of what we are committed to in being committed to social freedom for all. The commitment to mutual social freedom as an end in itself—as a spiritual cause that commands us to act—is our secular achievement and not due to any religious revelation. Freedom as an end in itself is not promoted by any of the world religions or by any of its founding figures. Neither Jesus nor Buddha nor Muhammad has anything to say about freedom as an end in itself. That is not an accident but consistent with their teachings. What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation; what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive.
When King pursues the struggle for social freedom as an end in itself, he is therefore committed to a secular rather than a religious cause. In King’s own account, he chose the ministry because of “an inescapable urge to serve society” rather than because of any religious revelation: “My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something; on the contrary, it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.”86 Indeed, according to his biographer David J. Garrow, already as a young man King was dissatisfied with how “many ministers preached only about the afterlife, rather than about what role the church could play in improving present-day society.”87
The turn toward secular freedom rather than religious salvation is brought to a head in King’s final speech on April 3, 1968, the night before he was killed. While the storm was rattling the windows of the Mason Temple, King laid down the promise of his legacy:
It’s all right to talk about “long white robes over yonder,” in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It’s all right to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,” but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.88
To speak of the new Memphis—rather than the new Jerusalem—is to avow that we can achieve our collective emancipation in this life. The new Memphis is the object of a secular faith, a spiritual cause that moves us to take action and fight to establish the social conditions for mutual recognition of our freedom. The commitment to the new Memphis must therefore be distinguished from a commitment to Christian charity. Christian charity does not seek to abolish poverty in this life but rather maintains the poor in an asymmetrical position of dependence on those who offer them charity, leaving them waiting for redemption in an eternal life (the new Jerusalem). To be committed to the new Memphis is, on the contrary, to be committed to the actual emancipation from poverty in this life. No one should depend on charity, since everyone should be part of a society in which we are committed to give from each of us according to our ability, to each of us according to our need. This is the core of democratic socialism.
The spiritual cause of democratic socialism can be sustained only through secular faith. The new Memphis only exists insofar as we strive to achieve it. Even in being achieved, it will always remain fragile, always depend on what we do and how we recognize one another. Whether in striving to achieve or to sustain the new Memphis, it will always be necessary to make the double movement of secular faith. We must acknowledge the utter fragility of what holds our lives together—our institutions, our shared labor, our love, our mourning—and yet keep faith with what offers no final guarantee. This is the double movement of secular faith. What we believe in requires our devotion because it can be lost and cease to be if we do not act on its behalf. It is because our spiritual cause is fragile—because what sustains us can break apart or be shattered—that it matters what we do and how we treat one another.
When King turns toward the new Memphis at the end of his last speech, his words reverberate with a profound secular transformation of the religious notion of the promised land. King spoke without notes, and the gravity of the moment pervades the final sentences. Acutely aware that his own lifetime may be coming to an end—that he is risking his life for the sake of a spiritual cause—his words bear the weight of a future in which everything is at stake. He holds forth the promised land not as a personal afterlife but as the possibility of a different society for those who will live on after him:
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land.89
King’s vision of the promised land is not a vision of eternal life—not a vision of the new Jerusalem—but a vision of what we the people can achieve, a vision of the new Memphis. Because it is a vision of collective emancipation that can become a reality only through our generational efforts, it does not project a timeless eternity where we will all come together as one. Rather, King’s vision of the new Memphis is committed to a temporal future that we ourselves may not live to see. Like King, we may not get there. Yet we can act on behalf of the new Memphis, we can own it as our spiritual cause, we can make it our creed through our deeds.
At the first mass meeting in the Mason Temple—the one on March 18—King had promised to turn the creed into a revolutionary deed. Encouraged by his interaction with the fifteen thousand strike activists in congregation, King concluded his speech by calling for a general strike in Memphis. The momentous response can be heard right before the tape recording of King’s speech breaks off. As the labor historian Michael K. Honey recounts the event, the Mason Temple erupted in a “thunderous ovation from the crowd” as “people stood, cheering and yelling, clapping, dancing, singing, celebrating the very audacity of the idea….Black workers in alliance with the community could shut down all of Memphis.”90 As Honey reminds us, no one had ever proposed a general strike of the black population during the civil rights movement and general strikes are rare in American labor history. For King, it was a watershed moment. His call for a general strike embodied the shift from the struggle for civil rights to the struggle for economic justice, which was at the heart of the Poor People’s Campaign he was in the midst of launching.
More than any other form of collective action, a general strike makes explicit the social division of labor that sustains our lives. A general strike in Memphis would have brought home in the most concrete way that the city could not function without the labor of the black population who were working full-time but nevertheless living in poverty. As Honey argues in his study of the Memphis strike, “nonviolent direct
action on such a scale would have marked a turning point in the trajectory of the black freedom struggles of the 1960s,”91 which could have led to a further radicalization of the movement led by King.
Yet the general strike in Memphis never came to be. King was planning to return to Memphis on March 22 to lead the initiative of the general strike. The spiritual cause of the movement, however, was disrupted by an unexpected natural cause. A massive snowstorm—the second-largest in the entire history of Memphis—descended upon an otherwise warm early spring. Instead of a general strike shutting down the city, more than sixteen inches of snow prevented anyone from going to work.
At least nine people died from the violent weather and the impact of the snowstorm on the emancipatory movement in Memphis turned out to be severe. King was prevented from returning to the city until March 28, when he led a mass protest march through downtown. The delay due to the snowstorm had broken the momentum toward an imminent general strike and gave the police as well as the FBI time to plan how to infiltrate the mass protest. Planted participants began smashing windows during the march led by King, giving the police an excuse to attack. More than seven hundred people were taken to the hospital as a result of the violent confrontations, and an unarmed black sixteen-year-old—Larry Payne—was killed by the police. The FBI disseminated secret memos blaming the events on King and the national news media adhered to the narrative, indicting the strike movement as well as King’s leadership.