Redemption

have surpassed his greatest expectations. That story is well known. He found himself in a hotbed of racial oppression that ignited the city’s bus boycott and propelled him to civil rights leadership and national prominence. It had happened almost against his will. As he admitted in 1956, “If anybody had asked me a year ago to lead this movement, I tell you very honestly, I would have run a mile to get away from it.”¹¹

In Montgomery he discovered the high price that he would have to pay as a nationally prominent leader of the movement. His family then comprised a wife and baby daughter, Yolanda, whom he and Coretta called Yoki. The phone rang incessantly at the house. Callers screamed threats. The family’s life seemed in constant danger.

As King recognized what a high price he was paying for his political activism, a profound distress gripped him. On a sleepless night in late January 1956, a tortured King struggled to come to terms with the horror of it all. As he would write in Stride Toward Freedom, he bowed his head over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. Whereupon, he heard an inner voice saying to him: “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth, and God will be at your side forever.” The reservoir of strength and faith he found within himself that night, he would write, prepared him to face anything.¹²

As the movement pushed him more deeply toward the life of a national civil rights figure and he rose to the challenge, he redefined himself. His self-image acquired a new, larger dimension. Fate seemed to be calling him to a higher purpose. “This is not the life I expected to lead,” he told Coretta in 1958 after being released from jail in Montgomery. But events had swept him along, and gradually he came to view the movement as his calling and had given himself utterly to it.¹³

Giving himself utterly to the movement meant accepting the risk that he might die a violent death at any moment. He found comfort in the Christian concept that noble sacrifice for others had a “redemptive” value. Christian theology had adapted the word redemption from its usage in the Old Testament. In the earlier version, redemption had a specific meaning: paying a ransom to free or redeem a slave from bondage. In Christian theology the concept of redemption referred to the death of Jesus, a sacrifice to atone for the sins of others so that they might achieve eternal salvation.

By 1960 King was saying, in effect, that he had embedded the concept into his own psychic fiber. That year he published an essay in a Christian magazine explaining why he had reconciled himself to suffering in the struggle for freedom. “Recognizing the necessity for suffering,” he wrote, “I have tried to make it a virtue”—as a means to “heal” people afflicted by racism. The suffering he could justify by living “with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.”¹⁴ That is, the sacrifice of his life would have redemptive value if he died in a virtuous quest for social injustice

Had he been less deeply religious or courageous, he might have been less outspoken, lowered his public profile, and minimized the risk of violent death. Instead, he doubled down. Within a few years, he was demanding not just racial desegregation and voting rights but total relief from poverty as a citizen’s fundamental right. He couched the idea in the name of redemption of a different kind.

The idea cropped up in his “I Have a Dream” address at the Washington Mall on August 28, 1963. He lamented that African Americans were living on “a lonely island of poverty,” and he portrayed the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note” that the federal government must redeem. If all Americans had a God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, King reasoned, that promise translated into the government’s obligation to alleviate poverty.

In the glow of the “I Have a Dream” speech, he was ever more visible on the national stage. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and in his acceptance speech at Oslo he said grandly, “I accept this prize for all men who love peace and brotherhood.”¹⁵ Time magazine put him on its cover. He had a private audience with Pope Paul VI. He met in the Oval Office with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. By and by, he had come to see himself in a more exalted light. As journalist David Halberstam would say, he had “finally come to believe his myth.”¹⁶

His scope of purpose widened in proportion to his self-image. He dedicated himself to pursuit of a mammoth federal program to end poverty, once and for all. In 1964 he called on Congress to pass a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged. It called on the government to devote, in his words, the “full resources of the society . . . to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.”¹⁷

When Congress did not respond as he hoped, he determined that he would bring greater political force to bear, and it needed to happen urgently. His answer was the Poor People’s Campaign. He imagined that his intervening in the garbage workers’ strike would further that mission. So he had gone to Memphis.

In the Look article published in the early spring of 1968, he explained why he was making poverty his paramount concern. He wrote, “If something isn’t done to deal with the very harsh and real economic problems of the ghetto, the talk of guerrilla warfare [among black militants] is going to become much more real.” Further, he expressed alarm that a continuing surge of riots in the nation’s inner cities might “strengthen the right wing of the country, and we’ll end up with a kind of right-wing take-over and a fascist development” that would be “terribly injurious to the nation.”¹⁸

If King was right in saying that a massive federal antipoverty program would spare the country the calamity of widespread rioting and