The Bluegrass and Beyond

In a coincidence of history, the national holiday honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. falls on the same day this year as the second inauguration of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent.

That makes it a good day to talk about leadership, said Jeff Johnson, a journalist, commentator and social activist who is the featured speaker at Lexington’s holiday commemoration program, 11 a.m. Monday at Heritage Hall.

“I’m going to be talking a great deal about current-day leadership and what kind of leadership we need in the face of the daunting challenges in our community,” Johnson said during a telephone interview last week.

“In the face of trying to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., do we do more of a disservice by being unwilling to do the things that he did to be able to bring about change?”

Johnson, 39, is a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network, the Tom Joyner Morning Show and TheGrio.com, an NBC News website that focuses on news and opinion tailored to black audiences. He also runs an Ohio-based organization trying to recruit and develop 80,000 black male teachers.

Previously, Johnson spent seven years as a commentator for Black Entertainment Television and was national director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division.

Today’s social justice movements could learn a lot about leadership by studying the methods of King and his colleagues during the 1950s and 1960s, Johnson said. A key ingredient in the effectiveness of the civil rights movement was training in practical leadership skills and discipline.

“You weren’t allowed to be in the marches and the demonstrations if you were not trained, because the various agendas they had were so focused,” Johnson said. “Not just from a PR standpoint, but from a legislative one. They operated from the standpoint of being able to bring about systemic and pragmatic, legislative and policy changes.

“So often the movements of today are about ‘Can I get on the front page of the paper?’ or ‘Can our organization be on CNN?,’” he said.

Training and focus are just as necessary for achieving goals in today’s more complex social, political and economic environment, Johnson said.

“It’s not about antiquated civil disobedience tactics,” he said. “It’s about whatever tactics you choose to use in the process of creating change.”

That can include learning technical skills to organize an online get-out-the-vote campaign or developing human relations and business skills to form public-private partnerships to achieve neighborhood development projects.

Working with business and government is a key to modern progress, he said. So is tackling problems in a comprehensive way, involving players with a variety of perspectives and viewpoints.

“We each have a role to play,” he said. “If we did this in a nonantagonistic way, I think some of these nontraditional partnerships would create spaces where you’re really not asking people to go too far out of the way of what they already do, because everyone is stepping up.”

Today’s social justice issues are more subtle than during King’s era, and the nation’s demographic picture is more complex.

“For example, there are African-Americans who may be in the same family who may want drastically different things,” Johnson said. “I think we have to be sophisticated enough to do that.”

He mentioned the recent controversy in which ESPN commentator Rob Parker lost his job because of remarks he made about Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, including calling him a “cornball brother.”

“You do the entire race a disservice by saying he’s less black because his black experience is different than mine,” Johnson said. “The real issue is ‘Who believes what I believe, and can I work with them to push it?’ That’s what we’ve got to help people understand.”

Effective change agents focus on simple agendas, even single issues, that others can rally around, Johnson said.

“You should ask, who are the people I can work with? Who are the people who believe what I believe? How can we pragmatically work around a concise agenda to be able to bring about those realities?” he said. “What it also does is it removes so much personal foolishness from what should be about communal advancement.”

If Martin Luther King Jr. were somehow able to attend Lexington’s annual celebration of his birth Monday, where would he spend his time?

He probably would get up early for the unity breakfast, then walk in the symbolic march around downtown, which attracts several thousand people. He probably would return to Heritage Hall at 11 a.m. for the inspirational program and guest speaker.

This year’s event includes music from Mahalia, a musical honoring the late gospel singer Mahalia Jackson that was first performed in Lexington in 1983. The guest speaker is Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University professor, host of the syndicated TV show Our World With Black Enterprise, and political commentator on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.

After that, King could choose among many other activities, including a program at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and a screening of the documentary film Freedom Riders at the Kentucky Theatre.

But I suspect that King would be most interested in spending some time at the corner of Main Street and Esplanade, where local participants in the Occupy Wall Street protest have kept a steady vigil for 107 days, as of Friday, and counting.

Hill, this year’s guest speaker, thinks so, too. That is because the Occupy protesters in Lexington and cities across America echo many of the concerns about economic justice that King expressed, especially during the final year before an assassin’s bullet silenced him in 1968.

“We’ve always needed to talk about the have-nots and the have-gots,” Hill said in a telephone interview last week. “The Occupy movement kind of revives that conversation.”

Hill, who is best known to many TV viewers as a liberal foil to Fox talk-show host Bill O’Reilly, plans to discuss some of those issues during his Lexington speech.

“We live in a really, really dangerous moment, for a variety of reasons — politically, socially, culturally,” Hill said. “There has never been a moment where we more needed to draw on the insights of Dr. King’s legacy, not only to bring the nation together but to move the nation forward.”

Hill thinks America’s core problem is poverty, because it is a major cause of the crises in health care, education, crime, violence and high rates of incarceration.

“What we see is a gap between what we have and what’s possible,” he said. “And the gap isn’t an intelligence gap, an effort gap, it’s an opportunity gap.”

One reason for rising economic inequality, Hill said, has been a lack of effective regulation of big business since the 1980s.

“The point is not to demonize business, it’s not to demonize success, but to certainly challenge and critique excess,” he said. “There’s a way to have responsible corporations. There’s a way to have responsible markets.”

Hill said Americans can best honor King’s legacy by continuing to work toward the goals he pursued.

“I want to challenge us to go deeper,” he said. “To not just think about the man who wanted people holding hands and singing We Shall Overcome, but someone who really forced us to reimagine the relationship between the government and its citizens, between the rich and the vulnerable.”

That thought and work will be especially important during this election year, Hill said.

“Beyond the everyday political banter we hear on cable television and read in the newspapers, we have to pay attention to what’s going on in our communities,” he said. “One of the things Dr. King represented was mass action on a national level, but locally rooted. He said that when dogs bit us in Birmingham, we bled everywhere. That kind of mentality is what’s necessary.

“I want to challenge people to do something — to join organizations, to volunteer, to start organizations,” Hill said. “What can we do in our communities? What can we do in our schools? What can we do in our respective religious institutions? What can we do in our homes to bring about the world that is not yet?”

Tired of cabin fever? Want to get out of the house, meet people and learn something new? There are some great opportunities to do that in Lexington at the beginning and end of this week.

The annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration begins downtown Sunday with a nondenominational service  at 6 p.m. at Central Christian Church. There are a full morning of activities downtown Monday  — a breakfast, a program, a march and service opportunities. Click here for details.

On Friday evening, Debra’s Social Stimulus kicks off 2011 with a gathering on Delaware Avenue to highlight an east Lexington neighborhood many people don’t even know is there. The festivities, which are free and open to the public, are from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Barnhill Chimney Co., 1123 Delaware Ave. The street runs between Winchester Road and Henry Clay Boulevard. Here’s a map.

Debra Hensley, an insurance agent and former Urban County Council member, started these gatherings in 2009 to help people in Lexington get to know each other and become more involved in their city. If you haven’t been to one, you are really missing something. I try never to miss. Click here for information.

One of the most remarkable people I got to know as a young reporter in the 1980s was Myles Horton, whom Rosa Parks called “the first white man I ever trusted.”

Horton helped start the Highlander Center in Tennessee, which became a cradle of the civil rights movement. He was a confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he told me he first met when King was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

As Horton and I sat outside his hilltop cabin at Highlander one afternoon, enjoying a view of the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance, he talked about King and his legacy.

In focusing on King’s work for racial justice, Horton said, many people ignore the fact that he was equally passionate about economic justice. “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter,” Horton quoted King as saying, “if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and cup of coffee?

Economic justice was at the heart of King’s career as an activist, from the Montgomery bus boycott that thrust him into the national spotlight in 1955 to the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike where he was assassinated in 1968.

Conservative extremists last year called President Barack Obama a “socialist” for pushing through what had been a Republican plan for healthcare reform. But some of the things King advocated five decades ago, such as a government-guaranteed minimum income, really did approach socialism.

The public was scared of communism in King’s day, so his enemies often called him a “communist” for challenging America’s status quo. A photograph of King with Horton at Highlander was posted on billboards around the South with the headline, “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.”

“I’m not talking about communism,” King later replied. “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.”

Many of King’s proposals for achieving economic justice seem quaint, even far-fetched, today. He was a minister, not an economist. A half-century of history since then has underscored the power of entrepreneurial capitalism to improve society. But it also has shown the pitfalls of corrupt, monopolistic capitalism and unchecked corporate power.

This is a good time to review some of King’s thoughts about economic justice. The King holiday Monday comes at a time when Wall Street has recovered from the Great Recession, but Main Street still has a long way to go. Meanwhile, politicians talk about making drastic cuts in America’s social safety net.

“The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst,” King said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. “The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. … In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent.”

In a 1967 speech, King said: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Because King was a Christian minister, his words often echoed those of the Biblical savior worshipped by both liberals and conservatives. In a speech only days before he was murdered, King had this to say: “One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

“It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, ‘That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.’ That’s the question facing America today.”

While much has changed since King’s time, much else has not. That is why his words remain so powerful and relevant. King had a gift for bringing America’s strengths and weaknesses into sharp focus and inspiring us to do better than we have.

Pastor Nancy Jo Kemper, right, greets Dan Rosenberg, left, State Auditor Crit Luallen and Mehmet Saracoglu after an interfaith service Sunday at New Union Christian Church in Woodford County. Photo by Tom Eblen

If a tiny church in Florida could inflame religious strife around the world, the Rev. Nancy Jo Kemper figured that her tiny church in Woodford County could help heal it.

So the pastor of the 176-year-old New Union Christian Church held a special service Sunday to promote interfaith understanding. She invited a Muslim to read from the Quran and a Jew to read from the Torah.

“This church is unashamedly Christian, but we try to be good listeners,” Kemper told her two dozen parishioners. “We shall overcome hate and bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

The Disciples of Christ congregation is one of several Kentucky groups that have spoken out against the Rev. Terry Jones of Gainesville, Fla. His threats to burn the Quran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists sparked deadly protests in Afghanistan and international condemnation.

Georgetown College, a Baptist-affiliated school, sponsored several well- attended events last week to promote understanding between Christians and Muslims. “I saw students from many backgrounds open themselves to learn from members of a faith community that differs from their own,” said Emily Brandon, who helped organize the events.

Lexington’s Christian-Muslim Dialogue, which meets monthly, will have a special speaker Saturday. Monica Marks, who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness in Carter County, is a Fulbright scholar and a Rhodes scholar who studies Islamic law and reform movements in modern Middle Eastern culture. Her free lecture, “The Interfaith Issue in America and Abroad,” is at 10 a.m. in Lexington Theological Seminary’s Fellowship Hall. The public is encouraged to attend.

Kemper, retired executive director of the Kentucky Council of Churches, began her Sunday morning service by telling the congregation, “A church not much larger than our own sent shock waves around the world with its threat to burn the Quran. We decided to read from it and learn more about it.”

She then introduced Mehmet Saracoglu — a Muslim from Turkey, a graduate student in mining engineering and founder of the University of Kentucky’s Interfaith Dialogue Organization. He told the congregation that the Quran clearly forbids killing innocent people, as terrorists have done.

Among the Quran passages he read was this one: “O mankind! We created you from a male and a female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know and honor each other (not that you should despise one another).”

Saracoglu was followed by Dan Rosenberg, a Thoroughbred industry consultant and retired president of Three Chimneys Farm. He read from the Torah’s book of Leviticus, including this passage: “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Afterward, Rosenberg said he was pleased to participate in the service. “I think it is always important for people to speak out against intolerance and injustice,” he said.

The service emphasized beliefs that Christianity, Judaism and Islam have in common as the three religious traditions that trace their origins to a covenant between God and Abraham, described in the Hebrew Bible. In all three religions, love of God and of neighbor are inseparable.

In her sermon, Kemper asked God’s forgiveness for having called the headline-seeking Florida minister an idiot. “I think it is not for us to judge, but it is for us to act on our own values,” she said. “Too often we all let our prejudices get hold of us and lead us in ways that are not helpful.”

Jones’ stunt followed well-publicized protests over plans to build an Islamic center in New York, a few blocks from the former World Trade Center site, and mosques in towns including Mayfield and Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Kemper noted that Christianity, as well as Islam, has been perverted throughout history by zealots. People can honor their own religion and still respect others’ beliefs, she said. “All across America, people are saying ‘no’ to the Terry Joneses of the world, and for the most part they are doing it gently and kindly,” she said.

In addition to scripture, Kemper read several quotes from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But she left out the one that keeps popping into my head each time I see another news story about religious intolerance.

“We must learn to live together as brothers,” King said, “or perish together as fools.”