photo: National Park Service

Tribute by Joanna M. Adams

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Annual Commemorative Service

Ebenezer Baptist Church

January 16, 2006

Mrs. King, Mrs. Farris, members of the King and Farris families . . .

I am honored to be a part of this meaningful occasion and to have the opportunity to gather with you and with this distinguished assemblage in the heritage sanctuary of Ebenezer Church, a place of great spiritual power and a place where I have spent many inspiring hours across the years.

All you know about me is that I am, as it says in the program, a Presbyterian minister. I want to add a word of biography. I was born in Atlanta at a time when the world was at war. I grew up in Mississippi at a time when the water fountains at the railroad station had signs over them that read “colored” and “white”. I was a junior in high school when the Freedom Riders crossed over into Mississippi from Alabama. Many of my classmates left school in the middle of the day to hurl rocks and taunts as the bus passed along the highway. Those were dark and troubling times that deeply affected us all. I give thanks to God for Dr. King’s vision of a better way, for his unwavering conviction that love, freedom, justice, and equality could prevail, not only in the southern United States but across the nation and throughout the world. This was his conviction when there was no evidence anywhere around that any of it was even a possibility. I give thanks to God for all the heroes and heroines of the Civil Rights Movement who, by their courage and moral leadership, reshaped the character of our nation. They stood up and walked out and sat in and rode on and did whatever it took to move our society to higher ground.

I have a granddaughter who will turn five in two weeks. I am proud that she was born in Dr. King’s birthday month. I hope that she and all the children of this great land will grow up with self-respect, which is where respect for others always begins. I hope that she and all the precious young ones will come to understand, as Dr. King understood, that to be a human being is not only being a citizen of one’s own nation but of the world. I hope they learn the life-giving principles of peace. I hope they will have respect for people who are different from the way they are, and see them, not as strangers and aliens, but as sisters and brothers in the richly diverse human family. Dr. King said that every person, “from a treble white to a bass black,” is significant on God’s keyboard because every person is made in the image of Almighty God. Think of the children now at kindergarten, about to take their naps in a little while, learning how to read and write. I hope that you and I will take special care with the children, treating them with kindness and modeling for them compassion for all people, especially the marginalized and the excluded. We can’t just hope they’ll turn out all right; we must treat them in such a way that they will be all right. You want them to be kind? You be kind to them!  You want them to love their neighbor? Then, you better start caring about your neighbor right now.

There is more I want to say today, but I am only small one note on the broad keyboard of this majestic memorial service. I don’t have time to tell you the urgency I feel about all of this. I only have time to say that we need a fresh infusion of commitment to build a society in which the needs of the least are judged to be as important as the needs of the important people are.

I only have time to testify to God’s love which reaches out to all.

One December evening in 1956, in the final days of the Montgomery boycott, after the U.S. Supreme Court had assured victory in the protest against that city’s segregation laws, Dr. King spoke to a gathering at the Holt Street Baptist Church. He could have said anything that night. He could have said, “Isn’t it great to win?”  He could have said, “Lord Almighty, didn’t we show them!”  He could have said disparaging things about those who had worked steadily against the cause of justice and equality, but what he said was, “We have before us a glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization. There is still a voice crying out across the generations, saying, ‘Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you, that you might be children of your Father who is in heaven.’ Remember, “the goal is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

We must tell the children these things and how it is that “unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” God still reigns over the heavens and the earth, and because God reigns, we shall overcome some day.