KING AND THE CROSS
from the FAITH AND RESISTANCE RETREAT for the HOLY WEEK RETREAT 2007
by James Douglass

When we realized that we were beginning this retreat on the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in NYC, and the thirty-ninth anniversary of King's assassination, there seemed no other choice for a resource person for our April 2007 Holy Week Faith and Resistance Retreat than Jim Douglass, who has spent a good part of the last 12 years of his life understanding the connection between the speech and that assassination. The following is a selection from his presentation, “King and the Cross.”
It has taken me a long time to see just how important the assassination of Martin Luther King was. When it happened, I was a thirty-year-old professor of religion at the University of Hawaii. I had a seminar on “The Theology of Peace” with a dozen students. At our first class after Dr. King was killed, several of the students failed to show up on time. When they came in, they made an announcement to the class. They said that in response to the assassination of King, who had given his life for peace and justice, they had held an impromptu rally on campus. At the rally they had burned their draft cards, thereby becoming liable to years in prison. They said they were now forming the Hawaii Resistance. They asked if I would like to join their group. It was a friendly invitation, but it bore the implication: “Put up or shut up, Mr. Professor of Nonviolence.” A month later, we sat in front of a convoy of trucks taking the members of the Hawaii National Guard to Oahu's Jungle Warfare Training Center, on their way to the jungles of Vietnam. I went to jail for two weeks – the beginning of the end of my academic career. Members of the Hawaii Resistance served from six months to two years in prison for their draft resistance, or wound up going into exile in Sweden or Canada.

Martin Luther King's martyrdom was our baptism into nonviolence as a way of life. But our beginning choice of nonviolence did not mean we recognized the deeper questions King's murder opened up. If one kept on probing his assassination, one would wind up at the cross, in spite of our government's efforts to bury that cross forever.

Martin Luther King's last book, The Trumpet of Conscience, published after his death, began to help me understand why he was killed. In his series of lectures delivered over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in late 1967, Dr. King envisioned first a national, then a global nonviolent revolution against corporate wealth and military power. He wrote: Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more that a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point…It must be open and, above all, conducted by large masses without violence. If the jails are filled to thwart it, its meaning will become even clearer…

King was thinking in Gospel terms. He said, “I don't know what Jesus had as his demands other than ‘repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.' My demand in Washington is ‘repent, America.'” (Garrow, p. 593)…

When 1968 began, King was ready to take that model of creating a moral and political crisis, by nonviolently dislocating the functioning of a city, to a national level here in Washington – and finally to an international level in cities around the globe. He meant specifically and concretely a global nonviolent revolution to abolish war and poverty…

The Trumpet of Conscience repeated themes from King's Riverside Church Address. It included a description of how he came to take a radical stand against the war in Vietnam. He talked about his failure to stop the rioting in the ghettos of the North: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion, while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But, they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” (p. 24)

King was creating a crisis of conscience in our national security state that went deeper than dislocating the functioning of our capital, Washington, DC. King was dislocating the functioning of our ideology. The deepest spiritual and democratic values that the U.S. claimed it stood for King drew upon to confront our contradictions, from the jungles of Vietnam to our city ghettos. He insisted that we walk our talk. If not, our government should be nonviolently disrupted and shut down. He would do all he could to accomplish that end, regardless of the consequences to himself.

I learned those consequences in detail in November-December 1999, when I attended the only trial ever held for the assassination of Martin Luther King. It took place in Memphis, only a few blocks from the Lorraine Motel where he was killed. In a wrongful death lawsuit initiated by the King family, 70 witnesses testified over a six-week period. They described a sophisticated government plot that involved the FBI and CIA, the Memphis Police, Mafia intermediaries, and an Army Special Forces sniper team. The twelve jurors, six black and six white, returned after two and one-half hours of deliberation with a verdict that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. For seven years now, the evidence and verdict of that trial have been public knowledge. The trial's entire transcript has been posted at thekingcenter.com. It has been massively ignored. No one wants to deal with its implications… Please see our website for the entirety of Jim's wonderful presentation, “King and The Cross.”

James Douglass's writings are recognized as among the most challenging and inspiring explorations of nonviolence and discipleship in the last century. Throughout his career, Jim has argued forcefully for the integration of contemplation and resistance, theology and cultural critique, spirituality and prophetic involvement. His work has inspired many of the key figures in recent debates regarding just war, Christian nonviolence, and radical discipleship and continues to be highly relevant in our contemporary situation.

Jim's themes work together to create an “ontology of nonviolence," an ontology that integrates the forces of resistance and contemplation.

Three historical trajectories gave context to his thought: the fusion of Christianity and American nationalism in the early Cold War period; the emergence of cultural critique in the late fifties and early sixties, and the Catholic pacifist tradition; and the post-1972 period of disillusionment. Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi and Thomas Merton were profoundly influencial on Douglass's ideas.

The themes of the cross and the kingdom developed chronologically in his writing career, but it is his ontology of nonviolence that is the key to understanding Douglass's integral theology of contemplation and resistance.