Separation and Black Christian Communication Strategy in Sermons of Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King, Jr

SEPARATION AND BLACK CHRISTIAN COMMUNICATION STRATEGY IN SERMONS OF VERNON JOHNS AND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

PÉTER GAÁL-SZABÓ Debrecen Reformed Theological University

Abstract: In the co-cultural discourse delineated by Mark P. Orbe, three types of preferred outcomes shape the communication strategy of members of minority groups: assimilation, accommodation, and separation. It is the latter type that I examine in the speeches and sermons of Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King, Jr. in order to add a tinge to their ultimately integrationist/accommodationist oeuvre. Keywords: African American sermons, co-cultural, separation, Vernon Johns, Martin Luther King, Jr.

1. Introduction

The 1950s and 1960s mark a profound change for the African American community from many points of view, but perhaps, most importantly, and underlying other changes as well, they mark its new self-awareness. It is this renewed understanding of the black self that becomes palpable in the speeches and sermons of black religious leaders, seeking to position itself in relation to and in the context of mainstream America. Regarding black Christian communication tactics, the integrationist and accommodationist approach and objectives are commonly taken for granted, also identified as characteristics of the “moderate” wing in the Civil Rights era. In view of Mark P. Orbe’s (1998) co-cultural discourse, however, it is not at all obvious that black Christian leaders only rely on any clear-cut category of accommodationist tactics, as their overall strategy would suggest, especially since, as pastors, leaders like Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King, Jr. often rebuke and chastise their audiences, black and white alike. It is the preferred outcome of separation (the other two being integration and accommodation in Orbe’s scheme) that I will thus examine in the sermons of the two religious leaders in order to offer a more varied look at their communication toolkit and their ultimately accommodationist oeuvre.

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2. The communication tactics of separation in black Christian sermons

Even though the question of separation is commonly raised in discussions concerning the Nation of Islam, it is not at all self-evident to limit the discourse to Black Muslims. As early as 1956, King told an interviewer,

We’re not going to harm anybody unless they harm us. When a chicken’s head is cut off, it struggles most when it’s about to die. [. . .] A whale puts up its biggest ﬁght after it has been harpooned. It’s the same thing with the Southern white man. Maybe it’s good to shed a little blood. What needs to be done is for a couple of those white men to lose some blood, then the Federal Government will step in. (qtd. in Rieder 2008: 260)

Strangely similar to the early Malcolm X, who asserts at one point, “Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays hand on you, send him to the cemetery” (1965: 12); King is aware of more militant communication tactics as possible tools in the scenario. From the perspective of intercultural communication, thus, the tactics of separation refers to a more or less outspoken, i.e., aggressive or (non-) assertive, communication practice, which can be traced in the speeches and sermons of Christian leaders, who cannot otherwise be considered separatist. Similarly to Black Muslim dynamics of isolation, the communication maneuvers employed by King and Johns also work toward establishing group cohesion by insisting on the general homogeneity of African Americanness and differentiation from whites and white Christians. In doing so, they rely on communication practices which are characteristic of separation, i.e., primarily on working with stereotypes, exemplifying strength, and even attacking ingroup and outgroup members. Showing increasing vehemence over the years, his “American Dream”, delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, on Independence Day in 1965, claims place for African Americans in the American nation, and thus signals accommodative strivings in the first place. King, however, employs assertive practices of separation to display a distinct autonomous identity and isolation in the sense of differentiation from whites:

noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail. (Make it plain) We will go in those jails and transform them from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half-dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. (Amen) Somehow go around the country and use your propaganda agents to make it appear that we are not fit culturally, morally, or otherwise for integration, and we will still love you. (Yes) Threaten our children and bomb our homes, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. (Yeah). (King 1965: par. 22) 147 PERIPHERIES OF VIOLENCE

By identifying Ku Klux Klan crime as representative of the whole white community and even accusing it of willfully siding with the Klan, King embraces white images prevailing in the African American community (the sermon was delivered in an all-black church in the South) and thus creates/maintains the distance between the two groups. Stereotyping does not only refer to simplifying the scope of white action, but theologizing about character as in “Loving Your Enemies”:

There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. (King 1957: par. 23)

King’s evaluation of white conduct cannot, by any means, be identified as reverse racism and dismissed as a “paranoid outlook on life” (Rokeach 1960: 76) – a typical characteristic of isolation – as, unlike Black Muslim rigid classification of whites, he foresees change in the opposing group and urges acceptance and convergence:

There must be recognition of the sacredness human personality. Deeply rooted in our political and religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. [. . .] This idea of the dignity and worth of human personality is expressed eloquently and unequivocably in the Declaration of Independence. (King 1986b: 118-9)

He does, however, present the Black Church and the African American community in general as a moral community – a tactics that Black Muslims also make use of - through the setting up of a moral binary and positioning himself and blacks on the moral side of it. King establishes, in this way, a space in which an autonomous black self can dwell and employs thereby a politics of distancing to contrast the two races morally. The peculiar combination signifies a particular “compartmentalization” (Rokeach 1960: 36), which, in the first place, builds on the “coexistence of logically contradictory beliefs” (1960: 36) to establish homogeneity of self- affirmation and thus enable continuation of self by forcing “magical” leaps over possible inconsistencies in the reasoning stemming from the incompleteness of the trauma work – a phenomenon often underlying absolutisation or authoritarianism from a content point of view (1960: 77); and the “accentuation of differences and minimization of similarities” (1960: 37), which relates contentwise to isolation (1960: 78). B.A.S ., vol. XXIII, 2017 148

Black Christian along with Black Muslim articulation of separation and the quasi aggressive communicative separation in Orbe’s footstep serve purposes of isolation, primarily in the sense of categorization, of the Black self from the significant white other. The identificatory move proves of phenomenological importance as it serves as a precondition for possible subsequent intercultural dialogues. Eszter Pabis (2014: 26) refers to this aspect of categorization, “Borders emerge and are perceived as such only in that and as long as they can be transgressed” (my translation). Compartmentalization turns difference also into an epistemological means of self-recognition. As Andrea Horváth (2007: 42) argues, “Difference is no marker of outer borders, between center and peripheries, but an inevitable place right in the center” (my translation). For this purpose, isolation is indeed achieved in the Black Christian rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s through the dedifferentiation of ingroup varieties, i.e., the homogenization of the African American experience, through “self- aggrandizement” – much in line with what Rokeach (1960: 76) classifies as the “concern with power and status” and “moral self-righteousness”. Besides these central concerns of identificatory relevance, a simultaneous, general self- depreciating characterization of past and contemporary black life effects a pointedness toward the “uncertainty of the future” (1960: 75), which facilitates an urgency of action, thus resolving the seeming contradiction between inherent greatness and post-slavery trauma. With varying intensity, King, thus, pushes the white outgroup to the opposing side of the scale and works with this differentiation deliberately, without further stratifying the white image: as he insists along moral lines in his “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” that “racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame” (1986a: 270), or along social ones, when he refers in his “American Dream” to “twenty million of my brothers and sisters [. . .] still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in an affluent society” (1965: par. 12). He even employs outspoken irony in maintaining self-esteem and casting a verdict about white churches, as in “Guidelines for a Constructive Church”: “Now if you notice some churches, they never read this part. Some churches aren’t concerned about freeing anybody. Some white churches” (1966: par. 13). Whereas in sermons like the “American Dream” (1965), King uses history to instill a national memory in white America incorporating African Americans, in “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” (1986a), one of his last sermons, delivered days before his assassination, at the National Cathedral, Washington D.C. on March 31, 1968, King, by then “a fearless revolutionary” and “dangerous menace to the political status quo” (Mieder 2010: 100), reproaches whites with their sinful historical conduct in a powerful and intense way:

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they 149 PERIPHERIES OF VIOLENCE

owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years. [. . .] Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, “You’re free,” and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. (1986a: 271)

Reminiscent of Malcolm X’s constant chastising and even echoing his view of the African American case as a human rights case, the quote shows that intragroup communication often works toward strengthening group cohesion with the simultaneous result of maintaining barriers. Playing down on historical grievances does, on the one hand, congregate ingroup members in the framework of a common cultural trauma; on the other, naming the perpetrators outright on an unreconciliatory note indicates the employment of the communication practice of attacking in a co- cultural context. This is not to say, though, that King ruptures intercultural ties with white allies in this sermon, since he in fact builds on alliances with whites: as he exclaims, when greeting the congregation, he is happy to “discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of goodwill all over our nation. And certainly it is always a deep and meaningful experience to be in a worship service” (1986a: 268). Just like in the case of a previous version of the sermon delivered as a commencement at Oberlin College in 1965, here too King speaks to a predominantly white audience of about four thousand people (Wills 2008: par. 1) – a fact which may temper his subsequent vehemence toward non-assertiveness; but more likely, the identification of the concerned as friends and their incorporation in the same sacred space acknowledges intergroup ties and shared identity. The repeated revoking of martyrdom, often mediated through the appropriation of biblical texts, becomes a leitmotiv based on opposition and the means to construct a moral space resulting from biblical interference. As Wolfgang Mieder (2012: 40) also observes, King’s sermons reflect that he often “repeats certain biblical proverbs and literary quotes as leitmotivs” as well as recurringly relies on the “combined emphasis of biblical and folk proverbs” (2012: 41; my translation). The use of leitmotivs to structure his sermons thus forms part of a communication technique meant to specify a standpoint and contextualize him in a space, on moral, ethical, and cultural grounds. Fredrik Sunnemark (2004: 90) points out that the “allusions help to build and uphold the specific moral universe that King continually refers to as a precondition of the struggle”. From a somewhat modified perspective, however, the repeated articulation of martyrdom is similar to Black Muslim “self-proselytization,” as the “compulsive repetition” (Rokeach 1960: 75) serves for King too to position the African American self in contrast to the whites. Functioning both as a mnemotechnique working toward ingroup cohesion, and as a rhetorical device used to display the identity of the speaker, B.A.S ., vol. XXIII, 2017 150 self-proselytization holds yet the perhaps unanticipated residue to still maintain unfavorable stereotypical images in the speeches of an integrationist. In a discourse, it amounts to perspectivation, when “speakers express their involvement in discourse and position their point of view in the discursive flux” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 81) and may contribute to an intensifying strategy “to qualify and modify the epistemic status of a proposition” (ibidem). The martyred self-picture also reveals a firm perspective that may in fact effect distance in Vernon Johns’s sermons, too. In close parallel with the plight of biblical Israel at the time of the Egyptian slavery, Johns identifies, in his “Prophetic Interference in Old Testament Politics”, the African American community going through similar, but righteous ordeals, which contributed to the refinement of character and to a life close to God: “These laws learned in the wilderness wanderings were vastly superior in both ethics and idealism to the contemporary laws of nations” (Johns 1977a: 27). The geographical locale of the wilderness is identified as both a place elsewhere, an other-place – a place of seclusion and thus of separation - and also a place of difference, thus one of differentiation in favour of the oppressed. Liminality allows for the possibility to walk with God and to acquire a new, rewarding identity. In this way, the inversion of the place of oppression enables the people of Israel and the African Americans to create a moral community, which per definition casts a negative verdict on the other, oppressing group. The martyrdom of African American slaves gains a powerful expression in his sermon “The Men Who Let Us Drink”:

And for more than two centuries, the great American nation soiled its fair name and jeopardized its very existence by denying to a large portion of its population the right to be free. The slaves’ thirst for freedom expressed itself in insurrections that had no chance for success. It welled up in their prayers; it broke out in their sorrow songs; it went buried and silent in their souls. (Johns 1977b: 92)

The denouncing oppositionality toward the white outgroup clearly is pushed to the foreground, while Johns does not condemn America all together -“fair” suggests accommodative objectives, as he also announces blacks to be a part of the American nation. Yet the buzz words “freedom,” the emotionally laden “sorrow,” and mutedness indicate, beyond the circumstances of enslavement, the righteousness of the black ingroup creating a distance between themselves and the white outgroup. It is not separation that Johns seeks to pursue, but isolation in the sense of differentiation and so maintaining barriers becomes here a means of self- perception, while it is also clear that he defines the African American community as an integrated part of the American nation.

3. Conclusion

Both Black Muslim and Black Christian leaders employ the communication practice of separation widely, even if in significantly different ways and to various 151 PERIPHERIES OF VIOLENCE degrees. The underlying ideological incentive and different theological backgrounds facilitate the basic difference: the Black Muslims’ communication tool of separation strives to establish separation not only rhetorically, but also in identity politics, including physical separation, based on theologically entrenched black and white opposition, and as a form of mimicry, in Bhabha’s sense, meant to represent “a destabilizing force [. . .] the most evident form of resistance, bringing about the disruption of colonial authority” (Bökös 2007: 55); Black Christians rely on the tool of separation while maintaining their integrationist focus, supported by a concept of equality based on biblical understanding. The communication practice of separation becomes thus a tool reinvented for integrationist purposes. This is not to say, however, that all differences and oppositions cease to exist, since especially vehement argumentations reveal that grievances cannot be easily overridden and that distinct African American cultural identity, based also on opposition, remains intact. Communication targets both outgroup and ingroup members. The employment of the communicative means of separation serves to uphold subgroup uniformity even by apparently demolishing alliance with ingroup and subgroup members.

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