The Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. at Duke Chapel in 1977

October 7, 1977 in Durham, North Carolina was clear and warm with a high of 71 degrees. My father, the minister at Duke University Chapel, drove his black and white Ford LTD four door out NC Highway 54 to Raleigh Durham Airport to pick up the guest speaker at Duke Chapel for that morning. He would have had the windows rolled down with his stylish thick sideburns and eyebrows blowing in the wind as he listened to Simon and Garfunkel and Marvin Gaye on his fancy 8 track tape player.

This was a big day for him. He was the 12th son of a rural North Carolina tobacco farmer and the first in his family to attend college. Dad had grown up in one of the most conservative, racist areas in the South, yet he was as progressive as they came. The Reverend Martin Luther King Sr, the father of the late Civil Rights leader, was preaching in his pulpit today, and Dad couldn’t be more excited. He had been distracted Saturday night as we watched the Yankees win the AL pennant over the Royals. He was a big Red Sox fan so he wasn’t pleased with the outcome. Even then, our TV was old and outdated and I often was sent to the rear to fix the antenna. As Walter Cronkite came on, he sent me off to bed. I heard him in his office next to my bedroom working on his remarks until I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up to the smell of SOS gravy and biscuits, which we had every Sunday, and the sounds of my mother and sisters getting ready for church. After Mom woke us, my brother blasted AC/DC and KISS playing on his record player as everyone jockeyed for space in the bathroom to puff their hair up with the hairdryer.

I rode over to the Chapel with my Mom in her Honda, always clean as a whistle. She drove painstakingly slow and fixed my cowlick using spit on the bottom of her hand. NPR was the radio station of choice and she would ask me the name of every tree or plant as we passed them, admonishing me with a smile when I didn’t know.

Once we arrived and parked at the rear of the Chapel and Mom told me to be good. Everyone else had a part in the service but I was too young and I couldn’t sing. My brother would help take up the offering, my mother and sisters would sing in the choir and Dad, of course, was at the center of it all. My first stop was always the boxes of donuts in the basement choir dressing room before I walked around to my favorite hangouts.

No matter how many times you visit, the Chapel is intimidating. Built by a wealthy tobacco family after World War I, it is a 210 foot Gothic stone cathedral which seats over 1800 people and dwarfs other structures for miles around. It is shaped like a cross and built to look hundreds of years old, even though it was only 42 years old in 1977. Even the steps are worn in to look like they have been walked on for centuries. That Sunday the Chapel was packed and they set up overflow areas where folks could listen on speakers. They all just wanted to be near our guest speaker. I remember Dad had his hands full making room for all of the dignitaries, with — as usual — the most powerful sitting 10 rows from the 15 foot tall carved pulpit. The men would start focusing on their watches at 11:45 and glare at my father to finish on time so they could get to the golf course by 1. For this reason, Dad always kept a watch on the lectern.

I tried Dad’s office, a huge room overlooking a garden through an ancient looking glass and steel window, filled with books and sunlight. But it was off limits today and most of my regular spots were filled with people today. When I cracked the door, I saw Duke President Terry Sanford and his wife Margaret Rose were in attendance. He was an amazing man — war hero, Governor, US Senator, presidential candidate — who backed my father’s progressive stances almost without question. President Kennedy thought enough of him that he considered having Sanford replace LBJ on the 1964 Presidential ticket because of how progressive he was on Civil Rights.

I stayed in one of the hideaway nooks for a bit, listening to the music and sounds of people, wishing I had another donut. Some of the Duke family are entombed in the Chapel and it can be a little creepy. The sunlight streaked in through expensive stained glass windows that portrayed Jesus and images from the Bible. Even then, the hypocrisy hit me though admittedly it has become much clearer to me over the years -- these men made their fortunes off of slaves.

__________________________

Reverend King took the pulpit to a lengthy standing ovation and responded by saying “I get this kind of ovation” often “and I am very humble. Where I live it’s too hazardous to be boastful or chesty. Where I live, it is rough every day for me and my family.”

His first message, which he said was always his first message to a new congregation, was that he wanted us to help him carry the cross but that we must be pure. His next words took all of us aback:

I’m not bitter. I carry no ill will in my heart against any man. I’ll refuse to stoop low enough to hate anybody. If anyone has a right to hate, I would belong at the top…I’m not going to hate. Don’t you do it…(don’t come down). It destroys the man who has done the hating.”

You’re looking in the face of a black man who is every man’s brother. No matter the color of his skin, or the texture of his hair, or what he owns of this world’s goods…If you want to debate it, I don’t have time…I’m going on with my job, going on being every man’s brother. I love you, every one of you. I hope you love me. If we could just learn to live this way, the problems that we are faced with every day would be solved.

America has misplaced her emphasis, forgetting that all of us, no matter where we live, or who we are, or what we have, or what we do not have, all of us belong to God. God is not concerned with any color, texture of hair, of what one has of this world’s goods, materialistic things.

We need not boast on all of these things but boast that your name is written in the sky. It’s hard to do this. You’ve got to…get your cross up high to do this…(don’t you come down). And if you do this, you’re free. Free in your heart, free in your soul. I’m your brother.

Any man who stands to boast suffers an inferiority complex…The moment you move over to believe you’ve got it made, and you’re supreme, you’re suffering a superiority complex.

I think I always must speak of my son, and I never speak of Martin Luther King Jr, my namesake…I can always talk about him without praising a member of the family. He made it possible through his leadership that we might sit down at the table as brothers.

I’m glad that Martin Luther King Jr didn’t come down. If he had that first night when he was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, when they hauled him around for more than two hours deciding whether they’re gonna kill him or whether they’re gonna take him to jail. And they kept asking our boy if you would go away from here, we won’t take you to jail and we won’t bother you anymore. Are you going?

With his hands handcuffed. With chains around his legs. With his head bound in the backseat of this particular automobile.? Are you going? He said, I can’t. I can’t forsake those people that’s depending on me.

…I’m glad that he didn’t come down. I’m hurt, hurt! But I’m glad he stayed up there.

You know, they said that to Jesus too, you know? If you be what you say you are, come down from the cross. Young people and all the rest of you, the devil is gonna often say that to you. Doesn’t cost much to come down, but it costs a lot to stay up there.

Don’t take a defeatist way. Never say you can’t. If anybody else did, you can. I said to my children “Aim at the skies!” If you don’t get there, aim up there. Never feel that any man can do any more than you can do. If some other man did it, you can do it.

There are a lot of devils, you know? There is no one devil. The devil is everywhere. That’s what America must come to grips with, and I’m afraid she won’t do it. I’m worried, bothered, disturbed, and amazed. I love America. America is my home. But it worries me because America just won’t repent. America has men enough, orators enough, scholars enough, preachers enough, teachers enough, to lick all of the problems we have if she would just go ahead and repent.

We can find out who killed Martin Luther King Jr and Kennedy. They just keep coming up. (Don’t worry about who.) We can find out who put the dynamite of 16th Street Baptist Church and blew the heads off those poor little black girls there for Sunday school that morning. Don’t you worry about who, but worry about what. What did that?

You see the man got to lying down, and he’s pulling his mouth apart. And he’s whipping the line. That’s in the paper. You know who drew that paper? Man do that. My golly, you wait ’til the line draws that picture and you will see a different picture. When He paints that picture, it’ll be different.

All that Brother King’s trying to say to you this morning, all of us are God’s children, whether we are black or white…Thank you very much."