Author: Gregory Rodriguez

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Where Liberals Come From

(Photo by José Antonio Cartelle)

Cádiz, Spain

It might surprise you to learn that the first time the term “liberal” was ever used to describe a political group or agenda was not in France, England, or even the United States.  It might surprise you even more to learn that it was first used here in Andalucía, Spain, in 1810, in the ancient port city of Cádiz. 

Last Friday, I caught an early train to Cádiz not simply to escape the heat in Madrid. Sure the coastal breeze has its charms, but what I was really after was a glimpse of the church that hosted the cortes —the representative assembly–that drafted and approved the Constitution of 1812, what was then the most liberal governing document of its time.

In 1807, the Spanish Crown allowed Napoleon’s troops to pass through Spain on their way to invade Portugal. But that double-crossing Napoleon wound up occupying most of the peninsula, setting up his older brother Joseph as the king of Spain, and placing Spanish King Fernando VII under house arrest in a chateau in the Loire Valley. Despite laying siege to Cádiz, however, he could not bring this dynamic, international city built on imperial trade to its knees.

In the absence of a legitimate monarch, this is where nationalist leaders ultimately hunkered down to form a resistance government during what became an all-out war to push out the invading French.  In what must have been a moment of inspiration, they chose to resurrect the cortes, the medieval precursor to the modern democratic parliament that had not been used for centuries, to create a written constitution to govern the Spanish Empire in a dire situation. 

It may or may not come as another surprise to learn that the modern parliamentary assembly was invented in León in northern Spain in the late 12th Century.  During the Middle Ages, various Spanish kingdoms convened similar assemblies.  According to Australian political theorist John Keane, the “modern practice of parliamentary representation” was “born of despondency” during the struggle between Christians and Muslims over the Iberian Peninsula. 

King Alfonso IX of León knew he couldn’t continue to impose taxes to pay for battles to push back Muslim armies without making compromises to his realm’s most powerful estates that would inevitably dilute his powers. So, in 1188 he assembled a parliament of representatives made up of nobles, bishops, and wealthy citizens. This assembly in León was “of profound importance,” writes Keane, because visitors to the court–the origin of the term cortes–were no longer expected to simply vow allegiance to their sovereign’s will.  They could now demand that their interests be taken into consideration if the monarch wanted political and financial support for his policies. 

Given the state of the Spanish Crown during the War of Independence, the government council knew that they had to root the legitimacy of the monarchy—they continued to support King Fernando VII in exile—in the people of Spain rather than in God. They were also responding to the incipient independence movements in Latin America. Thus, for the first time in Spanish history, deputies were elected from across the empire—the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and the Philippines—to make decisions on behalf and for the future of the monarchy.

The liberales was the name given to the group of political and economic reformers who made up a narrow majority of the Cortes de Cádiz.  What did they believe in?  Mexican political theorist Roberto Breña argues that “the first Spanish liberalism was a mixture of traditional and revolutionary elements.” It placed individual liberty at the center of Spain’s political design for the first time in its history.  The liberals’ handwork can be found in the most enlightened articles of the document, including one that protects individual rights, another that insists that the purpose of government is to care for the wellbeing of the individuals that make up the nation, and the right to free expression.  The 1812 Constitution also called for the division of powers, freedom of the press, the privacy of the home, universal manhood suffrage, and significant restrictions on the power of the king. 

As fate would have it, Fernando VII returned to Spain in 1814 whereupon he rejected the constitutional monarchy established by the Cortes of Cádiz and reestablished the absolute monarchy he had left in 1808.  But the Constitution of Cádiz lived on. In 1854, no less a figure than Karl Marx observed that “far from being a servile copy of the French Constitution of 1791, it was a genuine and original offspring of Spanish intellectual life.”  And that hints at why the story of liberals in Cádiz is so important. While they did not carry the day politically in their own time, their document lived on to become an extraordinary symbol to reformers in Spain, its former colonies, and beyond for decades and centuries to come. 

Liberals–and liberalism–have come a long way and taken on many forms since the term was first used in 1810.  For instance, the liberals in Cádiz were proud Catholics and supportive of a constitutional monarchy while other forms of liberalism have been decidedly republican and anti-religious.  Likewise, contemporary American liberalism, which prioritizes individual rights and fairness, is very different than the liberalism of the New Deal era, which focused on reigning in the excesses of capitalism. 

The story of the Constitution of Cádiz reminds us that liberalism started as a movement to both include people in–and liberate them from–government. Today’s resurgence of populism is a byproduct of the imbalance between the desire to empower people versus the desire to free them–between democracy and liberalism.  

Over the past few generations, liberalism has forgotten the importance of listening to people. Contemporary liberals have not only become much too dogmatic but also way too comfortable using governmental power to achieve their goals, whether the public wants them or not. That’s literally the definition of undemocratic. We’ve even seen the recent emergence of a punitive lock ’em up–or cancellation–liberalism, which is arguably not very liberal at all. 

Of all the books and essays I’ve read on the subject recently, perhaps none has done a better job reminding me of liberalism’s potential for renewal than one written for The American Scholar in 1955 by the late U.S. Vice President and Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey.

Liberalism, he wrote, “lacks the finality of a creed, and thus it is without the allure of those dogmas which attract the minds of men by purporting to embody final truth.” If that weren’t reassuring enough, Humphrey insisted that even as liberalism must “preserve the spirit and fact of dissent in the political community,” it must also “recognize its ultimate loyalty to a majority-rule society and to the protection of all the factors which make such a society possible.”

While liberalism and democracy are always in tension, we sometimes forget that the former should always be in the service of the latter. If today’s populist surge is ever going to be defeated, liberals will have to recapture the spirit of liberalism from when it was first born.

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The Democrats’ Deplorable “Deplorables” Strategy

For four years the Democrats’ strategy was to have Trump disqualified first as an “insurrectionist” and then as a “convicted felon,” while Biden played what has become standard liberal interest group politics. (A little something for this group. A little something for that.) At the same time, the Dems’ allies in the media played their roles by routinely belittling Trump’s plainly idiotic and unpatriotic supporters. It was a multi-pronged “basket of deplorables” strategy that wreaked of elitism, legal gamesmanship, and finger wagging.

In other words, Biden had four years to connect with middle America–maybe go to a Waffle House before the debate!–but his team was more obsessed with disqualifying their rival and punching down at his supporters.  Why does that matter? Because Thursday night’s face off  was only meaningful because of how tight this depressing rematch had become. 

That said, there were no surprises last night in Atlanta. Trump was a lying fool and Biden a bumbling one. It was a train wreck four years in the making. But all the slow motion in the world apparently couldn’t awaken the Democrats to the simple fact that “saving democracy”–in their breathless words–might require more from their party than cancellation and condescension.

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My Mother’s Independent, American Journey

Emilie Cacho, Mission San Antonio de Pala, April 14, 2012. (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

For reasons I will never know, my maternal grandparents chose to live among the Pala Indians in northern San Diego County when they first arrived in the United States in 1928. The liberal part of me likes to think it was because they had some affinity for indigenous people.  Born in San Francisco Peribán, Michoacán, a ranchería–now a village which two years ago voted to govern itself as an autonomous indigenous community–my grandmother spoke some Purépecha. But the realist in me says their choice was more a reflection of their status as very poor, recently-arrived pickers from Mexico. In any case, Pala, California, is where my mother, Emilie Cacho, was born 90 years ago this week.

In 2012, a decade before her death, my mom asked me to take her to the place of her birth. If you knew my mom, a thoroughly modern woman not given to looking back with anything approximating nostalgia, you’d realized how unusual this request was. In a word, mom was ambitious, intelligent, quick-witted, and prone to fight with anyone who’d get in her way. She also had the best taste in the world. Her life story was congruent with her worldview.  She believed that a person’s past was not her destiny, which means, yes, she was a licensed therapist. 

Mom grew up in a Victorian farm house on the other side of San Diego County, in Otay, a stone’s throw from the U.S-Mexico border.  Although she had to help her parents on the family farm–my grandparents soon purchased  their own land–mom got herself elected class treasurer in high school, where her grades were good enough to get her accepted into UCLA. In the mid-1950s, she’d often say, Westwood was light years from Chula Vista. Phone calls back then were still long distance and therefore too expensive.  In her four years of college, her parents didn’t visit her once.  The upshot, however, was that mom had almost single-handedly launched herself into America’s educated upper-middle class. So, again, when mom asked me to pick her up from her elegantly-decorated house in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains and drive her down to Pala, there was no saying no.

I had no idea how large Pala loomed in mom’s imagination until we took our road trip there.  The 1816 chapel where she was baptized, San Antonio de Pala, is the only church in the California Mission system that still serves a Mission Indian tribe. She had told me that she was born in a shack–seconds before her twin sister– on an avocado plantation less than a mile away.  But it was only when we drove to the property and a white Range Rover exited the plantation’s automatic gates that I fully realized that she was born on the plantation owner’s private property. My grandparents worked and lived on their boss’s land.  Mom, “I blurted out, “were you born into slavery?” “Mijo, that’s not funny!” she said, not at all joking.

From family lore, she learned that when it was time for my grandmother to give birth, my grandfather sent word to the Anglo doctor near the Mission, who was known to be a notorious drunk. Apparently, he arrived at the plantation in his usual state, and after helping deliver twins for a woman who already had two children, he offered to take one of the newborn girls with him. “Apparently, he thought my mom and dad were too poor to take care of all of us,” she said. “But my mother told him that there was no way she was going to let him take either one of us.”

On our quiet drive back to Los Angeles, I started to realize how much the story of mom’s infancy in Pala influenced her life. It was shocking, not just for its depiction of the helplessness of life in deep poverty, but also for the indignant refusal to be at the mercy of a pathetic white authority figure who still had the gall to pass himself off as benevolent. It helps explain why mom never trusted many people, why she never took for granted the beautiful things she surrounded herself with all her life. It was those things–her lovely home, the exquisite art on the wall–that kept her at a safe distance from the terrifying insecurity her parents had experienced in their first years in the United States. The house where mom lived by herself for three decades was a symbol of her independence, of her refusal to live either according to someone else’s rules or off the supposed kindness of others. By the time we got back to her home, I realized that mom had wanted to visit Pala to remind herself of how astonishingly far she had traveled in her life.  

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Now I Know the True Meaning of Timeless Art

Madrid, Spain

I think Pasadena’s Norton Simon is by far the best art museum in Southern California.  Its combination of exquisite curation and broad accessibility make it unparalleled.  My dad took me there often when I was a little boy.  And I loved it. In fact, two of the three images I had in my childhood bedroom were from the Norton Simon–a wild jungle scene with monkeys by Henri Rousseau and a playful Rembrandt portrait of a young boy who may or may not have been the Dutchman’s son Titus.  (The third image was a properly framed reproduction of El Greco’s  gloomy View of Toledo, but that’s a horse of a different–and darker–color.) But my thoughts turned to the Norton Simon today because one of its treasures–Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose–is on loan at the Prado Museum until June 30. Just this one extraordinarily simple, but precise and meditative painting was brought to Spain to hang with other Zurbarán masterpieces from the 17th Century. My dad had a poster of this work in the bedroom where he died. He bought it at the Norton Simon decades ago. So I came to the Prado as quickly as I could to see it, and I was so moved and grateful to see and feel my worlds converge so seamlessly.

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The “Good Negro” and the Meaning of Freedom

(Sign at parsonage where Vernon Johns lived before Martin Luther King, Jr. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Montgomery, Alabama

Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama to allow newly-boarded white riders to sit down. The driver called the police, Colvin was handcuffed, and dragged from the bus.  It was Wednesday, March 2, 1955. When leaders of the local NAACP chapter first heard of Colvin’s arrest, they discussed whether it could be used as a test case to challenge Jim Crow laws in the courts.  They decided against it for two reasons.  First, Colvin had fought back against the arresting officers, which resulted in her being charged with assault and battery.  Second, they discovered that she was several months pregnant out of wedlock. They concluded that the appropriate symbol in a case challenging an immoral system would have to be morally beyond reproach.

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Vernon Johns had been pastor at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for five years when he was dismissed in 1952. He had earned himself a reputation as one of the preeminent preachers of his day.  Brilliant, barrel-chested, highly principled, able to read Hebrew, ancient Greek, and Latin, Johns had also been variously described as “fearless,” “eccentric,” “aggressive,” “irascible,” a man with “strange ways” who employed “dangerous” methods to get his comfortable middle-class congregation to fight the evils of segregation. 

As Dexter’s pastor, Johns was among the first prominent civil rights activists in Montgomery.  But he was no organizer. Once, after he entered a bus and paid his fare, the driver asked him to get off and reboard from the back. He refused and instead took a seat in the front. When the driver refused to drive on, Johns demanded his money back. He got it. But when he called on his fellow black and white passengers to join him in protest, not a soul followed him. 

While more poetic, his exhortations from the pulpit were no more successful.  In one brutal 1948 sermon, Johns denounced his congregation for not doing more to help stop the lynching of African Americans. He told them that their passivity in the face of such violence made them no different than those who stood by while Jesus was being crucified.

Just as irking to the congregation, however, was Johns’ fervent belief in black economic self-sufficiency.  Much to the embarrassment of his urbane congregants, Johns would hawk meat and produce on the street after services. This was no way for the pastor of Montgomery’s elite Baptist church to behave.

More than one historian has credited Johns’ presence at Dexter Avenue for preparing his congregation for the arrival of Martin Luther King, Jr.  King would later thank Johns for “keeping the problem [of racial discrimination] before the conscience” of middle-class blacks who had been indifferent to the push for civil rights.  But the decision to hire King wasn’t driven by any desire to build on Johns’ legacy.  If anything, when the deacons hired the presentable, well-mannered, 25-year-old scion from an elite Atlanta family, they were trying to move their church as far away from John’s off-putting eccentricity as they could. 

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Much has been said and written about the burdens and perils of black excellence.  The drive to work harder and better in the face of white advantage and condescension can come at a personal cost, and can even threaten those whites who’ve never felt the same obligation to work that hard.  

The phenomenon, of course, is not exclusive to African Americans. My own dad, who was not the least bit racially militant, made my burden as a Mexican American clear when Dan Quayle became Vice President of the United States.  “We don’t have the privilege to be that mediocre,” he said, referring to the decidedly unimpressive former congressman from Indiana. “We have to work harder and prove more.”

There’s been considerably less commentary about the burden of minorities to prove their moral righteousness in the face of white fears.  Yes, we’re all familiar with the so-called Sidney Poitier Syndrome. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Poitier was the showcase, non-threatening, one-dimensional leading black man who, in the words of the late New York Times film critic Clifford Mason, was “given a clean suit and a complete purity of motivation so that, like a mistreated puppy, he has all the sympathy on his side and all those mean whites are just so many Simon Legrees.” 

Post-war black civil rights activists felt obliged to perform these theatrics of moral righteousness in real life.  They knew it wasn’t enough to be on the right side of the issue.  Because they sought to leverage guilt to move white opinion, they had to always maintain the moral high ground.  But that, too, had its personal costs.

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Tracey Scott Wilson said she felt guilty writing her 2009 play, The Good Negro. Having grown up a preacher’s child idolizing black civil rights leaders, she struggled to create fictional characters that were more morally complex than the plaster saints we’ve come to memorialize. Based on the heady events in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1962, the play features three flawed black activists who are struggling with the movement’s burden of righteousness. 

Painfully aware of the dangers of using morality as both a weapon and a shield, a charismatic preacher named James Lawrence, who is clearly modeled on Martin Luther King, Jr., frets that whites are “waiting for us to fuck it up. They’re waiting for us to talk wrong, walk wrong, be wrong and then they can say, ‘See? Look at them n******. No better than animals. I told you so.’”

Indeed, just as they did to King in real life, the FBI is recording Lawrence’s illicit sexual escapades and holding the audio tapes over his head.  When another character reminds Lawrence that white people don’t talk or walk any better than blacks, Lawrence agrees but suggests that the burden of their sins doesn’t weigh on them as much, because “they got their rights already.”

In one of the more poignant moments of the play, Lawrence, the King figure, confesses to a fellow preacher that it’s only during his escapades, when he’s not being responsibly righteous, that he feels “free.” “Not a Negro then,” he continues. “Just like everybody else. Feels good to be like everybody else.”

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James Lawrence, of course, was a fictional character just like those Poitier played.  But the struggles of his imperfect character ring truer than the quiet stoicism and preternatural self-control of Mr. Tibbs.  Particularly for black males—or Latinos for that matter, another group that has been cast as savages–assuaging white fear takes a lot of energy.  But so does having to feed their fetish for the ideal “good Negro” who just wants to get into “good trouble.”  After all, fear and fetish are the flip sides of the same coin.  Both sides, however, make it impossible for any complex human being to feel free and just be themselves in the world.

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Rights are Critical, But They are Not the Source of Dignity.

Lifting the Veil of Ignorance. Monument to Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee University.

Tuskegee, Alabama

The contemporary language of racial justice tends to focus on external threats to human dignity rather than on what individuals and groups do for themselves to maintain or rebuild a sense of self worth against the odds. The two narratives are not mutually exclusive, of course. But nor are they of equal power. While some forms of justice can be achieved by confronting those who’ve trampled on your rights, individual dignity and self worth can never be granted by a third party. They can only be developed internally, usually through a combination of strong will and hard work.

Yet because of the emphasis on the wound over the healing, minority progress is too often discussed exclusively in terms of the need for recognition from white society or redress from the government. Particularly since the 1960s, minority protest has eclipsed capacity building in the eyes of the intellectual elite. That’s likely because “the experience of rights-assertion,” as critical race theorist Patricia Williams has argued, can give individuals the feeling “of empowerment of an internal and very personal sort,” tantamount even to the “process of finding the self.”

While not insignificant, validation only goes far. And it still places the power to validate in the hands of a third party. At the very least, it requires a straw man against whom to define oneself.

Sometimes, the exclusive focus on protest and validation evades the question of rights or even solutions to any given problem. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, for instance, activists focused on mounting a racial validation campaign rather than directly addressing specific ways to curb police abuse. Almost three years later, it’s unclear what that campaign achieved substantively.

It is this narrow focus on protest–whether for rights or validation–that has led to the sidelining of one of the great men of American history, Booker T. Washington.

Washington, who was born into slavery in 1856, founded a teachers college in Tuskegee, Alabama, on July 4, 1881, under a charter granted by the state’s legislature. What started as the Tuskegee Institute grew to become Tuskegee University. The initial emphasis of the institute was to provide students with both academic and vocational training. Its first students built the school’s buildings, grew its food, and generally provided for most of the student body’s necessities. Implicit in these duties was Washington’s belief in the necessity of focusing on the moral, economic and educational development of African Americans. The larger goal was to have Tuskegee-trained teachers take this ethos of self-reliance communities across the South.

Given this extraordinary achievement– a 25-year-old, late-19th century black man building a school of higher learning even during the worst years of racial terror–one would think Washington would be a well revered figure in U.S. history.

Instead, over the course of more than a century, Washington has become a controversial figure, sometimes viciously characterized as the embodiment of “Uncle Tomism,” i.e., being subservient to whites. What earned him that derogatory epithet? He chose the path of self-improvement over protest.

In order to build the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had to appeal to sympathetic whites who had money and power. He found allies –and donors– in men such as Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan, and was consulted by several U.S. presidents. (In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House.)

Given his familiarity with this milieu, it isn’t surprising that Washington was fluent in the language of the marketplace rather than that of morality or justice. Nor is it shocking that Washington thought that integrating blacks into America’s growing industrial economy was the path to betterment—and better treatment—for African Americans.

In his infamous 1895 speech at an economic expo of Southern states held in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington clearly laid out his philosophy to his audience of white businessmen. He emphasized the importance of hard work and steady economic advancement for African Americans. He argued that rather than flee the South or put their hope in politics, blacks should “cast down their buckets” and find work in “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” “The wisest among my race,” he insisted, “understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” Emphasizing the need for African Americans to contribute to the regional economy, he said that, “[n]o race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges.”

At the same time, however, he asked whites to also “cast down their buckets” with black workers rather than hire immigrants, not as an act of charity but as one that furthered their own self-interest. As African Americans made up one third of the region’s population, he argued, “no enterprise seeking the material, civil or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.” Conversely, if they did not choose blacks to help themselves, it would be to everyone’s detriment. “We shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South,” he warned, “or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.” Washington believed that only through economic achievement, which required cooperating with those who had the power to hire, could blacks ever achieve political and social equality.

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At first, Washington’s speech was enthusiastically received by both whites and blacks. It was only as the violence and indignities of the Jim Crow era multiplied did he begin to receive criticism from a small cadre of Northern black intellectuals. In the decade after the speech, which his critics dubbed the “Atlanta Compromise,” most southern states disenfranchised black voters and formally established segregation. White racial violence was epidemic. It was then that his critics began to see Washington’s conciliatory Southern strategy as nothing less than cowardice. “Among his black critics,” writes historian Robert J. Norrell, “each denial of a constitutional right, every indignity against a black railroad patron, and every lynching became a mark against Washington’s leadership.”

It wasn’t until the mid-20th century, when activists began to demand more revolutionary change, that Washington would fully become a convenient antihero who symbolized the failed strategies of gradualism and accommodationism. 

But I see no reason why an undoubtedly great man has to symbolize all things to all people. Minority advancement requires more than one strategy, hard work and protest are not mutually exclusive.

It’s entirely understandable why 1960s militants saw rights as being more important than interracial cooperation and economic advancement. But almost 70 years after the dawning of the civil rights era, might it not be time to remind ourselves of the ultimate source of dignity? Rights are critical, as even Washington conceded, but has our near obsession with them allowed us to devalue the need to teach future generations about the importance of developing their own skills and inner fortitude?

Booker T. Washington insisted that, “[n]o race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”

Surely such wise counsel can benefit any young person of any background at any time.

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The Night Jesus Spoke to Martin Luther King, Jr.

(Parsonage, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Montgomery, Alabama

Of the many heroic deeds performed in the name of civil rights in America, perhaps none is more consequential than the epiphany experienced in this house at 309 S Jackson Street in January of 1956. It was here, in the parsonage of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr., spent, in the estimation of biographer David J. Garrow, “the most important night of his life.”

King wrote about that night in his 1958 book Stride for Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The bus boycott—of which King was a reluctant leader—was more than a month old. Montgomery’s white leadership had begun to push back hard.  King, who was only 27 years old, had just been arrested for the first time, and the obscene and threatening phone calls he was receiving at home were beginning to take their toll on his confidence as well as on his mental health. Ready to give up, he began to devise ways he could step away without looking like a coward.

King then began to consider how blessed and comfortable his life had been thus far. He thought of his wife, his two-month-old daughter, and his “marvelous” mother and father.  “I was about to conclude that life had been wrapped up for me in a Christmas package,” he wrote.  

But then it occurred to him that the religion he had experienced as a privileged young man would not help him through this moment. “Now of course, I was religious,” he recalled. “I grew up in the church. I’m the son of a preacher . . . my grandfather was a preacher, my great grandfather was a preacher, my only brother was a preacher, my daddy’s brother is a preacher, so I didn’t have much choice, I guess.  But I had grown up in the church . . . but it was a kind of inherited religion and I had never felt an experience with God in the way that you must, and have it, if you’re walking the lonely paths of this life.”

Around midnight of January 27, 1956, King picked up a phone call that shook him to his core. An angry voice said, “Listen, n*****, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”

It was in the wake of that call that religion became “real” to him, when he knew that he “had to know God for [himself].”  And then he bowed over his cup of coffee. “I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”

It was then, King recalled, that he heard the voice of Jesus telling him to continue the fight.  “He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”

For the remainder of his life, he would look back on that night whenever the obstacles before him seemed too big to handle. 

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