Dreaming Beloved Community

I spent most of my childhood in the house my grandfather built. He was a first-generation Italian immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island in 1906 at the age of three. No birth certificate, no papers, just a weary mother and a 10-month-old sister. Maybe. The records are sketchy. HIs father and older brother arrived sometime before them.

He worked as a young man in a railroad shop, then in construction. He was a determined lifelong Democrat, in favor of unions, immigrants, and John F. Kennedy, the country's first Catholic president. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering "I Have a Dream"
at the 1963 Civil Rights March. Public Domain

I was small when I first heard Martin Luther King Junior's voice on my grandfather's transistor radio. He carried it around the house or propped it against his car when he was working in the garage. Baseball games were his top listening choice, but I can remember the drone of newscasters and the crackle of political speeches. When my grandfather stopped what he was doing to listen, I could sense something important. 

I was seven when King gave his most famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I'm not sure I heard it that day, but for sure sometime soon after. The cadence of that speech, and its echo of scriptures I'd heard in church, helped shape my heart and future. 

King was talking about race, but more than race. I had felt the sting of division, from neighbors not happy to have an Italian immigrant on their block. And from parents uneasy when their children befriended a child whose parents were inexplicably missing. I'd had people make jokes about my name (Capra. It means goat in Italian. But that's not where most jokes landed.) And I'd fielded awkward questions: where did you say your parents are? When did you say they'd be back? If it's rude to stay silent in the face of adult questioning, I fear I sometimes was rude. 

My youngest uncle was a high school classmate of Michael Schwerner, one of the three civil rights activists who vanished in Mississippi the summer I was eight. The mystery of Schwerner's disappearance rippled through our town for the 44 days of uncertainty, then exploded into grief when their bodies were found in an earthen dam. Schwerner was 24. James Earl Chaney was 21. Andrew Goodman was 20. 

In our town, civil rights questions were immediate and ever-present. I was eleven when I started junior high in the same school Schwerner and my uncle had attended. Four elementary schools funneled into that school. At that time, two were mostly wealthy and white. One was more heavily immigrant and Italian. One was African American. As students converged in one old brick building, lines were drawn all around us. Some were visible, like the stairways claimed by different groups, or the sections of the cafeteria where only some were welcome. Some lines were less visible: girls who had been my closest friends pretended they didn't know me when they realized my last name was Italian. Students walking to the chalkboard in class took odd detours to avoid walking past students who might whisper invectives, or stick out a leg to trip them. 

Bomb scares, rumbles, fights in the hallway. Night games were cancelled. Police patrolled the edges of afternoon football games. Dances were suspended. 

One day there were rumors that some students in the high school one town over had taken over the school and locked all the classroom doors, holding fellow students hostage.  Some on the lowest floor jumped out the windows and went home. Others were part of an all-day standoff. My church was once in the center of that town, torn down by the urban renewal that scattered the poor, smashed minority communities and left a simmering discontent. 

My sharpest memory from the days after Martin Luther King was assassinated is the moment of silence in my art class. The teacher asked us to stand at our tables for a minute to honor and remember. Some students stood grudgingly. Some rolled their eyes. 

My memory is of the boy on the other side of the large, square table we shared with two other students. He was African-American, a friendly, funny kid who seemed oblivious to the divisions, the quiet slurs, the not-quite-hidden hostilities. During times when we worked on our drawings or murals he entertained us with stories, jokes, bits of song. When other kids told him to shut up, he'd smile, wink and say "Shut don't GO up." Then go on with his stories. 

Just remembering him makes me smile. But that day, the day of the moment of silence, he stood at stark attention, stared straight ahead, and let the tears roll down his face. His unembarrassed sorrow spread through the room: sadness, shame, the weight of a history we had no way to cure. The teacher let the silence linger. When we all went back to our work, it was with a deeper sense of what was lost, and what it cost us all. 

King's dream was rooted in America's founding documents:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Even more, it was rooted in the scriptures he knew and memorized:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; 'and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.'

I've posted about King before:

• about his sense of call, the work of hope and his prophetic vision: Acorns, King, Beloved Community, January 20, 2014
• about his dream, setbacks and the inauguration of Barack Obama: Still Dreaming, January 15, 2017

I am certain that we are all called to some part of the work of reconciliation he envisioned. We're all called to help break down the invisible walls of division, to invite and welcome and value those different from ourselves.

As we listen, dream, hope, pray, we may find ourselves called to do even more. That's been true for me. 

Here's an interesting discussion about the way King's dream led him deeper into faith and deeper into action: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Soul of Leadership. If you've heard the voices discounting King because he fell short of moral perfection, be sure to read the comments on that, especially the reflection on the example of King David. 

We live in a divided world, still struggling with the heritage of slavery and racial oppression, still thinking some voices are more valid than others. Our daily choices and conversations can bring us closer to King's dream, closer to that beloved community King described in a conference address in 1957: The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation's Moral Dilemma:

The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape, which is understanding goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization.