The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial will be dedicated Sunday in Washington. It will be the first monument on the National Mall to honor a non-president.

What is Dr. King’s religious and spiritual legacy? How did his ministry influence your own?

On April 4, 1968, I was in kindergarten. I remember the race riots that ensued in the years following, including one which had to be broken up by police outside my school in Ohio. My father, also a rabbi, would end up consoling families at Kent State and taking courageous stands as a white pastor. Dad helped me appreciate Martin Luther King, Jr. to be one of my rabbis. King continues to teach me the kind of courage that has sustained my faith-family in times of suffering. He reminds me to this very day that the greatest sin of all is indifference and that there is no Jewish God, no Christian God, and no Muslim God. There is only one God, the Creator of every human being. “Every human life,” he wrote, “is a reflex of divinity, and every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man.” Finally, Dr. King has taught me the necessity of making waves sometimes. People say, “Don’t make waves.” But sometimes we must make waves, tidal waves of affirming goodness in the face of evil. Thanks to Martin Luther King’s writings and example, I remain nauseated by the smell of bigotry, and motivated by his message that one person can indeed make a difference.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial will be dedicated Sunday in Washington. It will be the first monument on the National Mall to honor a non-president.

What is Dr. King’s religious and spiritual legacy? How did his ministry influence your own?

In 1971, my wife Emily and I came here to Memphis and have loved this city ever since. Oddly enough, part of what drew us here was tragedy, specifically the murder of Dr. King. We felt that there were bound to be people of all ethnicities here who wanted to demonstrate love, not hate, justice, not greed, reconciliation rather than separation among all people.

For us, the great leader’s legacy is a palpable, living one as we see Christ-like values he taught being lived out. My favorite MLK, Jr. quote sums it up: “We must evolve for all human conflict a method that rejects retaliation, aggression and revenge. The foundation of such a method is Love.”

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial will be dedicated Sunday in Washington. It will be the first monument on the National Mall to honor a non-president.

What is Dr. King’s religious and spiritual legacy? How did his ministry influence your own?

The legacy of Dr. King is anchored in his unselfish and unconditional love for all of humanity. In spite of the toxic environment of segregation, classicism, sexism and racism, Dr. King saw love as the only power in this universe to transform the negatives into positives. When he came under attack by his peers and detractors, he held fast to the principles of non-violence and the transforming power of love. While some participants advocated: “If somebody hits you, take their head off,” Dr. King led by example: “Turn the other cheek.”

I was greatly impressed, and impacted, by his use of speech and how he skillfully crafted and eloquently delivered sermons and messages to meet a specific need at a specific time. He was always at his best in the darkest hour of circumstances. Following his speeches and sermons, he put his faith and beliefs into action. His courage was contagious and spellbinding.

I remember the march after the assassination of Dr. King; it was really a march against fear. When we turned the corner of Main and Beale Streets, snipers were on every building with their riffles across their chests. We were told by the marshals of the march to do nothing to provoke the National Guardsmen, state troopers, Memphis police officers and FBI. I remember the feelings of defiance, anger, frustration and grief. That morning, I did not care about what could or would happen; I wanted justice for the killing of “my” leader and hero. Marching was my way of processing my pain and loss. While standing in front of City Hall, I resolved and committed to be a soldier in the “Redemptive Army of God” to prevent Dr. King’s dream and aspirations for the “Beloved community” from failure.

I will be in Washington on August 28 to witness the historic unveiling of the King Memorial. May the world pause to honor one who saw wrong and tried to right it, who saw hate and tried to love it, who saw hunger and tried to feed it, who saw the darkness and lit a candle. God bless the memory and legacy of Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial will be dedicated Sunday in Washington. It will be the first monument on the National Mall to honor a non-president.

What is Dr. King’s religious and spiritual legacy? How did his ministry influence your own?

For someone born and raised in the deep south (New Orleans) who served black people from a side window in my dad’s little coffee shop, to where I am now at 85, I am blessed and grateful to God for the influence by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – even before his arrival in Memphis and especially when he again put his life on the line and returned to the Bluff City. I am also grateful to fellow colleagues, such as Rabbi Wax and other white ministers for their leadership. But also to black ministers such as Rev. James Jordan who embraced me. However, it was Dr. King’s non-violence stand that made this southern “boy” realize what is proper, right, just, and God-given more than anyone else in my life.

Dr. King was not my only influence but he was the greatest in the race discrimination aspect of life.

May his memory remain eternal.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial will be dedicated Sunday in Washington. It will be the first monument on the National Mall to honor a non-president.

What is Dr. King’s religious and spiritual legacy? How did his ministry influence your own?

In a 1965 commencement address to the students and faculty of Oberlin College, Dr. King said, “We have inherited a big house, a great world house in which we have to live together.” Like so many of Dr. King’s wise charges to followers, listeners, and posterity, his message was profound in its simplicity: we’re all in this together, and we have to make it work.

In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated in our city, those men and women who would become MIFA’s founders realized that the challenges they were up against were darker and more powerful than they had realized. The poor grew ever poorer. The hungry prayed for relief. And the fury, grief, and mistrust of a fragile city widened the chasm between the races. Then someone said: this is our house, and we have to fix it.

Religious and community leaders from every corner of the city set aside the fundamental differences in their beliefs and united around the universal principles Dr. King spent his life preaching: justice, peace, acceptance, love, and service. If hate was a dividing force, then love must be a uniting one. Those leaders cast aside the burdens of fear and hate and chose instead to love. From their spirit of love, hope, and cooperation, MIFA was built to heal the wounds of a fractured city. From the ashes of inequity and unrest, they built a house.

“Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly,” Dr. King said. “For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

I might never be what I ought to be, and neither might you. But the point is that we’re trying, that we are building and tending and sharing and cleaning this great world house, and that we leave it a little better than when we arrived.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial will be dedicated Sunday in Washington. It will be the first monument on the National Mall to honor a non-president.

What is Dr. King’s religious and spiritual legacy? How did his ministry influence your own?

All told, Dr. King’s accomplishments for racial equality and justice are stupendous. His non-violent protest movement loosed winds of change that swept across our country – from buses to lunch counters to schools to the national Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. What a legacy! And it begs the question, what was the secret to Dr. King’s power?

For the answer, we go back to a Friday night, two months into the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when King was sitting alone in his kitchen, just released from jail following his first arrest. The target of several obscene and threatening phone calls, he thought about his baby daughter and wife. What might happen to them? Fearful, he considered withdrawing from his public role, giving up his leadership responsibilities, turning them over to someone else. Then something momentous occurred.

As King told it, “And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’”

“Almost at once,” King said, “my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.”

Three days later his house was bombed, yet he carried on. And he stayed the course until his dying day. Indeed, that pivotal experience in his kitchen, which he consciously recalled time and time again, explains the uncommon strength, courage, and wisdom by which he accomplished so much in the face of unimaginable opposition.

Dr. King’s turning point speaks volumes to me. God never expected or wanted him to think he could do God’s will on his own. Nor does he expect or want that of any minister. Even though my life is not so large as King’s, moments come when I’m challenged, in Frederic Buechner’s words, “to be more than I am and do more than I can.” And in those times I take comfort knowing God is with me.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial will be dedicated Sunday in Washington. It will be the first monument on the National Mall to honor a non-president.

What is Dr. King’s religious and spiritual legacy? How did his ministry influence your own?

I was born in 1969, a year after Dr. King’s death.  Growing up in George Wallace’s governorship of Alabama, I heard mixed reviews of Dr. King’s legacy.  But because he died before I was born and because like a lot of my contemporaries I was absorbed in my own time, I didn’t give much effort to forming an opinion of him.  He mattered to people my parents’ age, so I thought.

A man I respect makes a good observation: some of what I accept or believe today will embarrass and/or scandalize my grandchildren tomorrow.  We all like to think of ourselves that we’d have been on the right sides of history’s great divides; that what we know now we’d have affirmed and stood for then.  If I’d been a young man in the 60’s surely I would have realized the rightness of the civil rights movement!  With all my heart I hope I would have.  But I take to heart how Martin Luther—Dr. King’s namesake—confronted his smug congregation during one sixteenth-century Christmastime: Why do any of you assume you’d have given lodging to Mary and Joseph in busy Bethlehem that night?  If I’d been a young man in the 60’s, I fear I would have sinned the sin of my crew-cut fathers cheering Gov. Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.  (Gov. Wallace later had a conversion experience and genuinely repented of his bigotries.)

Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail was my first introduction to the concept of unjust law.  I read the Letter as an assignment in seminary and was moved by King’s use of language as well as persuaded by his argumentation.  Reading the Letter I could feel, for the first time, the injustice of being denied full personhood for scurrilous reasons.  “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair,” King wrote to those white clergymen who contented themselves with sympathy for him more than solidarity with him.  When I think of those in church history who were truly courageous, Dr. King is always among them.

On the national news broadcast of January 31, 1967, CBS commentator Eric Sevareid eulogized the three Apollo I astronauts who died in the fire that engulfed their spacecraft while it sat on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy.  A little over one year later Dr. King would be fatally shot in Memphis.  In his commentary about the fallen astronauts, Sevareid said, “The men who go first are accounted heroes, and rightly so, whatever the age, whatever the new element and horizon.”  This would be equally as fitting an epitaph for Dr. King, I think.  Though dead, he still speaks in the way of true heroes who moved the horizons of the possible for the good of those they went first for.