The guests who attended the Christian Hospital Foundation’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Luncheon on Friday, January 18 were reminded that Dr. King was an activist who spent his later years fighting for human rights and social justice while campaigning against poverty.
Rev. William J. Barber II, one of the orchestrators of the revival of Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, was scheduled to deliver the keynote address, but a death in the family prevented him from attending. Rev. Traci Blackmon, who has a special connection to both Barber and Christian Hospital, was a fitting substitute.
“Christian Hospital was my first employer when I relocated to St. Louis as a young critical care nurse 32 years ago,” Blackmon said. “Christian Hospital was a socially conscious, community-oriented health provider back then, and it remains one today.
Blackmon is now executive minister of Justice and Witness at United Church of Christ, based in Cleveland, yet still pastor at Christ The King United Church of Christ in Florissant and firmly rooted here.
“I’ve lived all of my 32 years in St. Louis in North County,” Blackmon said. “I’ve lived here long enough to see the neighborhoods change drastically. Slowly we’ve watched opportunities leave our community, but Christian Hospital has remained. Not only has the hospital remained, but Christian continues to invest in quality health care and our communal well-being.”
Blackmon told the audience she believes that the hospital’s desire to celebrate the legacy of Dr. King is authentically rooted in King’s belief in beloved community – just as the man she was standing in for as keynote speaker.
Soon after becoming a national figure because of her work on the frontlines of the Ferguson unrest, Blackmon traveled the country with Barber, Rev. James Forbes and sister Simone Campbell in a Moral Revival that lasted 365 days.
“We were tilling the ground for what was to come with the revival of the Poor People’s Campaign,” Blackmon said.
“I learned so much from these giants of the faith. I’m grateful to be one who does not have to look to social media or TV or news reports for my heroes. I live among my heroes – and I learn from them daily.”
She said Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis are embracing the dream of Dr. King by leading a movement to make hunger and poverty visible again in the United States.
“As long as some of us can live in a dreamlike state of individuality and idealism, then it’s easier for us not to see the devastating effects of the interrelatedness of what Dr. King called the triple evils – racism, poverty and militarism – on the lives that can’t help but to see,” Blackmon said.
According to Blackmon, the national holiday in Dr. King’s name has resulted in the “sanitization” of his message.
“This selective framing of his legacy within a bus boycott and a march on Washington attempts to reshape Dr. King from a prophetic voice into a public personality – one that speaks of sentimental love and is disconnected from social justice,” Blackmon said.
“In the process, we have sanitized Martin Luther King Jr. – depriving our nation of King’s true dream of radical social vision, love and prophetic insight at a time when our world desperately needs Dr. King’s vision and wisdom like never before.”
She reminded the audience that by the time he was assassinated in 1968, 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and his emphasis on anti-poverty efforts.
Blackmon discussed Dr. King’s realization that the advancement of civil rights alone had not been enough to advance the social conditions of the marginalized in society – and the shift of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from reform to revolution.
“It was in 1967 that Dr. King had gone from being America’s negro of choice to what then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called him – the most dangerous man in America,” Blackmon said. “He went from being a moderate preacher to a national security threat. He went from being Time’s person of the year to being inconsequential to America’s mainstream in both black and white communities.”
Interactions with the people he served would not allow him to construct a moral framework that was dismissive of the social and economic inequities inherently present in their lives.
“How could Dr. King call himself a minister of a gospel concerned with the care of the least of these and yet watch a majority of our citizens of every skin tone fall prey to an unbridled capitalistic economy?” Blackmon said. “According to Dr. King, ‘Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of humanity and is not concerned about the slums that damned them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually morbid religion awaiting burial.’”
If King had lived to see what would have been his 90th year, Blackmon said his words would be just as relevant and challenging today – and his dream just as unrealized.
“We must strain to hear the yearnings of the powerless as clearly as we do the expectations of the powerful,” Blackmon said, “and be willing to see, to dream and to act to change this world.”
