"One Honest Man"

READING

Martin Luther King's book "Stride Toward Freedom" tells one of the central stories of the civil rights movement: the Montgomery bus boycott. It was during this action - the resistance and arrest of Rosa Parks and the subsequent protest - that King articulated his understanding of civil disobedience. "Stride Toward Freedom" not only set the tone, it became the guidebook to the civil rights movement.

While the action was pending, King wrote, "I was forced for the first time to think seriously on the nature of the boycott. Up to this time I had uncritically accepted this method as the best course of action. Now certain doubts began to bother me. Were we following an ethical course of action? Is the boycott method basically unchristian? Isn't it a negative approach to the solution to the problem? . . . Even if lasting practical results came from such a boycott, would immoral means justify moral ends? Each of these questions demanded honest answers. . . .

"As I thought further I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our economic support from the bus company. The bus company, being an external expression of the system, would naturally suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with evil. At this point I began to think about Thoreau's essay on Civil Disobedience. I remembered how, as a college student, I had been moved when I first read this work. I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, 'We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.'

"Something began to say to me, '[The one] who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as [the one] who helps to perpetrate it. [The one] who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.' . . . So in order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous [person] has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system. This I felt was the nature of our action. From this moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation. From then on I rarely used the word 'boycott.'"

SERMON

Martin Luther King, Jr., entered Morehouse College at the age of fifteen, young and impressionable, but eager to participate in the struggle for racial justice. He read Henry David Thoreau's essay on "Civil Disobedience" in his freshman year, and noted in his autobiography that he was "deeply moved." "Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico," King wrote, "I made a first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance."

Henry David Thoreau's essay inspired generations of protestors, who took to heart his insistence that a person of conscience had a moral obligation to resist an unjust government. Thoreau was steeped in the Transcendentalist philosophy he shared with his fellow Unitarians: the conviction that individual conscience held moral authority - higher moral authority than the rule of law, or the conventions of society or religion. "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats [the individual] accordingly," he wrote.

So great was his faith in the individual, he declared that one person alone could change society. "I do not hesitate to say," Thoreau wrote, "that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts . . . ." And he added, "I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name - if ten honest men only - ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever."

Thoreau took his stand against slavery by refusing to pay his poll tax - he did pay taxes to build highways and support schools - and for his refusal he spent one night in the Concord jail. He gives a colorful account of that night, which, when read side by side with King's encounters with the law, seems more like a lark than an act of resistance.

Still, Thoreau's nonconformity left a lasting impact, and he was, in King's estimation, the originator of the creative protest. "The teachings of Thoreau," King wrote, "came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and no moral [person] can patiently adjust to injustice."

Martin Luther King was still a young man when at the age of 27 he mounted the bold Montgomery bus boycott. The Montgomery police had arrested Rosa Parks for sitting in the section of a bus reserved only for white people. She too spent the night in jail. Outraged by the humiliating treatment Rosa Parks received, King, Ralph Abernathy, and the Baptist Ministerial Alliance agreed it was time to announce a bus boycott.

King struggled with what it meant to defy the law. Reflection brought doubts and anxiety. But King was a disciplined critical thinker, honest, and educated. He thought back to his reading and re-reading of Thoreau, and concluded, just as Thoreau had, that people of conscience had a moral obligation to confront injustice. "The basic aim," he wrote, "was to refuse to cooperate with evil." For that is what it took "to be true to one's conscience," as Thoreau insisted. That is also what it took, as King insisted, to be "true to God."

Martin Luther King was a man of the church. "Of course I was religious," he wrote in his autobiography. "I grew up in the church. My father is a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great- grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my daddy's brother is a preacher. So I didn't have much choice."

He was as attuned to the life of religious community as someone can be. So he knew the great power of the congregation, the energy and conviction of ordinary people called to take extraordinary steps towards justice. Rosa Parks was only one among many.

When the time came to put the word out about the boycott, King and the rest of the ministers in Montgomery, joined by civic leaders and professionals in the African American community, the network was already in place. Everyone knew: don't take the bus on Monday morning. And on the day of days, as King called it, no one did.

King and his family watched from the front window of their home as first one, then two, then three buses rolled by, empty, but for a couple of white passengers. "I jumped in my car," King wrote, "and for almost an hour I cruised down every major street and examined every passing bus. . . . By this time I was jubilant. Instead of the 60 percent cooperation we had hoped for, it was becoming apparent that we had reached almost 100 percent."

This was King's triumph. The day of days was over, and at a meeting that night, they started "a movement that would gain national recognition; whose echoes would ring in the ears of people of every nation; a movement that would astound the oppressor, and bring new hope to the oppressed." Thoreau's legacy of creative protest had come into its own.

Martin Luther King's great genius as a leader can be described in many ways. One of the ways is how he merged the moral power of the individual conscience with the moral power of people in community. King looked back on his triumph in Montgomery and saw it as God working through history. We can look back and see Martin Luther King working through people to transform the world with their courage and their faith.

It is a source of pride for us Unitarian Universalists that one of our own, Henry David Thoreau, helped to launch our civil rights movement. Although he never faced the menacing threat that finally overcame Martin Luther King, he wasn't afraid to take personal risks for his stand. This weekend, when we set aside time to celebrate King's legacy, we might also reflect on our own - the example set by Henry David Thoreau and what it means to us today. Are we living true to our conscience? Have we set aside our comfort - even just for a day - to take a stand against injustice? Would we be willing to take the risk of nonconformity, to let others think us foolish or wrong, and to give up personal gain, for the sake of principle?

These are unprincipled times. People live for themselves, huddled according to self-interest, concerned for their security. The risks are greater than they were in Thoreau's time. I would not gladly spend a night in one of our Los Angeles jails.

Think then about Martin Luther King, who spent more than one night in the Birmingham jail, who knew that his life was always under threat, who feared for his family, and still - despite all that, held true to his conscience. With his faith community behind him, and the conviction that justice would come down on his side, he took Thoreau's example and wrote it large for the whole world to see. One honest man found another.

These times are different from Thoreau's times, and thankfully, from King's as well. Yet Thoreau's words still challenge us as they challenged King. They were both critical of their government. Thoreau wrote, "The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war," he continued, "the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure."

When we people would not consent, what would we do? What can we - as individuals and as a community - do to live up to our heritage and our faith? When the answers are hard to find, we remember the example of one honest man, or two, and go, one by one, from there.

Resources used to prepare this sermon include Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience," 1849; Martin Luther King, Jr., "Stride Toward Freedom," in "Testament of Hope," edited by James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991); "The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.," edited by Clayborne Carson (New York: Warner Books, 1998).