MLK Day

Deep in the South, where Interstate 575 dead ends into State Route 515, about 70 miles northwest of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, in Pickens County, in the land that used to belong to the Cherokee, there lies the unincorporated town of Tate, Georgia, which, though otherwise nondescript, is home to a rather fine marble quarry.

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On February 12, 1809, two uneducated farmers living in a one room log cabin in southeast Kentucky gave birth to the boy who would become our nation’s 16th president, until his untimely death due to complications stemming from a gunshot wound he had sustained the evening prior while watching a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in the Northwest Quadrant of the District of Columbia.

The last photograph taken of Lincoln, due to a crack in the photo-plate, quite prophetically, shows a line bisecting his head in the exact place a bullet fired from the gun of John Wilkes Booth would enter his skull. He was 56 years old.

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On January 15, 1929 a young Baptist preacher, named Michael King, and his wife, living in a humble home in the bustling metropolis of Atlanta, in the land that used to belong to the Cherokee, gave birth to a boy, Michael King, Jr., who would grow up to be a noted civil rights activist until his untimely death due to complications stemming from a gunshot wound he had sustained hours prior while talking with a friend on a balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

The man’s last words to his musician friend were, “Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty." The song to which he was referring begins and ends:

Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I'm tired, I'm weak, I'm lone
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on to the light
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.

33 years prior to the shooting, when Michael. was six years old, his Baptist father changed his own name and the name of his first born son to honor a famous protestant reformer. And by the time he was wheeled into a Memphis hospital, a lifetime later, it was too late to save him, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead at age 39.

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Starting in 1911, large blocks of stone were hauled from limestone quarries in Indiana and marble quarries in Colorado to a patch of swampland between Virginia and Maryland, near the nation’s Capitol Building, which had been drained and set aside for the purpose of housing a monument honoring the contributions and achievements of our 16th president. The formal construction of The Lincoln Memorial began in 1914, when the first stone was put into place on what would have been Abraham Lincoln’s 105th birthday.

The crowning jewel of the monument is a 19 foot 6 inch reproduction of the likeness of Lincoln himself, comprised of nearly 200 tons of single-source white marble drawn from a quarry just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, near Stone Mountain, in the town of Tate.

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The pivotal year for the Civil War was 1963. In January of that year, Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation, which effectively freed all slaves of the Confederate States of America. Then, in November of that same year, Lincoln delivered perhaps the most famous speech in American history, a short two minute address during the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It began, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and concludes, “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

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By the time the Northern troops marched past Tate, about 40 miles to the West, during the War of Northern Aggression, as it was characterized in those parts, the war was largely decided. Atlanta, one of the last Confederate strongholds, would fall in July of 1864, the final major victory before General Sherman would march his troops, largely unimpeded, all the way to the sea by winter. Thousands of freed slaves are reputed to have followed Sherman all the way to Savannah. The Confederate Army would formally surrender just a few months later at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia on April 9, 1865. Civil unrest came to an end and the black man had his freedom secured by a series of Constitutional Amendments created by acts of the United States Congress.

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In 1963, exactly 100 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and made his famous Gettysburgh Address, our nation was still struggling to give form to Lincoln’s vision, when a young black Baptist preacher then living in Birmingham, Alabama climbed the limestone steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looked down upon 200,000 supporters, engaged the eyes of history, and began his own speech that would ensure that those men, some hundred years before, had not died in vain. In the shadow of a larger than life marble rendering of Lincoln himself, fashioned from white marble taken just a stone’s throw from his birthplace, King, Jr. began his speech, in homage to Lincoln, “five score years ago.” Then, during his 16 minute speech, King Jr, an unlikely figure in an age long overdue, gave breath and ‘soul force’ to the calcified remains of Lincoln’s 100 year old dreams.

King concluded his powerful speech addressing the nation as a whole, asking that the echo of freedom be permitted to reverberate through “the mighty mountains of New York… the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania… the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado… the curvaceous slopes of California.” And when he turned his attention to the pressing needs of the South, he began with the land that used to belong to the Cherokee, the place of his birth, the home of the marble that shapes Lincoln’s countenance, and its highest peak: “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

But King’s vision of freedom extended beyond black and white, beyond the color of people’s skin, as he concluded, “And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Finally, a century removed, this nation had ‘a new birth of freedom.’ Just two months later, acts of Congress would topple the oppressive Jim Crow laws of the South, and separate was no longer equal.


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Here in the present, as I reflect back upon our nation just 45 years ago, it's hard for me to imagine how different life must have been then. It's also hard to imagine that such cruelties were commonplace, and even legally sanctioned, just 45 years ago.

But at the same time, as I view the partnership of my affluent and nearly-exclusively white church with an modest inner city nearly-exclusively black church, I have to wonder why some things are still the same. I can't help but wonder why there are any instances or circumstances under which, even today, after all we've been through together as a nation of brothers and sisters, it's all too easy to picture how life must have been 45 years ago. In his speech, King, Jr. warned against the 'tranquilizing drug of gradualism,' and stressed, instead, the urgency of Now. 45 years ago, "Now" was "the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children," and, yet somehow, it still is.