In celebration of MLK’s Day, APAG January 14th
January 14th will be remembered as a fruitful, mind-enrichingevening with APAG.The venue was LaCasa del Tango (info@ , courtesy of the place’s manager, Jacky Dahomay. Past President Tony Toumson delivered brilliantly and convincingly on Martin Luther King Junior (1929-1968). MLK, Jr Day is a US federal holiday in memory of the great Civil rights leader observed on the third Monday of January each year.
Tonystarted by refreshing the captivated audience on King’s basics: King as mind-blowing preacher, King as crisscrossing traveller, King as nonviolentantiracist activist, King as soul-searching prisoner, culminating in King as martyr with a cause. But he also insisted on the complex links between religion, spirituality andfaith, with the terms’ permutations adding new meanings.
He then went on to show how King’s family Baptist Church-based education had groomed him for predication but also how the Reverend had come to realize early on that preaching had to rely on emotion but also on intellect to be effective in spreading the Gospel of liberation. This particular point sheds light on his unique ability to express his views in biblical similes and metaphors as illustrated by this excerpt from the sermon delivered on April 3rd 1968, the night before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee: ”I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I might not get there with you but I know that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
King had been a brilliant student at Morehouse College and his world-renowned eloquence can be traced back both to his communal inheritance (hailing partly from Africa and partly from the genuinely American heritage of itinerant Bible-thumping self-proclaimed backdoor preachers) and his idiosyncratic talent.
The evening was enhanced by the presence and contributions to the ensuing discussion of Professor Roger Toumson who highlighted a major challenge to MLK’s latter-day worldview: the necessary shift from the religious to the political. In other words King’s late stands,which had grown to include a criticism of universal poverty in an ocean of wealth together with American involvement in Vietnam (which had estranged those followers who had a hard time separating national interest from justice), cannot be accounted for outside the Nobel Peace Prize recipient’s realization that religion could not encompass the entire political experience and that one needed broader, bigger tools to tackle society’s evils.