America's Prophet (27 page)

“Part of the appeal of Exodus is that the story was often enacted in our church plays and vacation Bible schools,” he continued. “The drama of the pharaoh, of Egypt and all of its political might, just represented for us America. You had leaders, like northern mayor Richard Daley or southern governor George Wallace, who represented for us these pharaoh-like, hard-hearted, unflinching symbols of the biblical text. So when we acted out the story, we brought to it a contemporary emotion.

“And of course the big question,” he added, “was who would get to play Moses, because we all wanted to be him. Number one, that imperfect figure. And number two, that reluctant figure who finally gets pushed onto the stage and says, ‘Okay, dammit, I’ll do this.’”

“So did you ever get to play Moses?” I asked.

“I never played Moses,” he said forlornly. “They were always the older guys who were taller and better-looking!” And with that he laughed a huge Santa Claus laugh.

“But what about Jesus?” I asked. “What role did he play in your worldview?”

“Moses and Jesus were costars in our salvation story,” Franklin said. “Jesus had his highlights—Easter and Christmas. But the rest of the year, we’re in this struggle, and Jesus wasn’t leading people to challenge political authority. Yeah, we need Jesus for personal salvation, and for comforting our pain. He was the suffering servant. But the idea of God coming to the aid of the
entire
people was a more powerful idea for us, so the rest of the year belonged to Moses.”

“Were you ever concerned that the Exodus happened thirty-two hundred years ago and you were in a struggle now?” I asked. “What if the parallels weren’t true?”

“Yeah, we understood that,” he said. “But there’s no way you can limit this story to one historical era. Charles Long, the great African American scholar, talks about the hundred-year cycle of history, that there’s a great revolution and cataclysm every century—1776, 1861, the 1960s. In this cyclical sense of time, we can reach down into the trove of memories and experiences of our ancestors. And we think of the figures in the biblical story as our ancestors. That is our story. The fact that it’s a Jewish story is kind of irrelevant. It’s our book. Our people. And they’re echoing through the annals of time, trying to offer us lessons.”

That sense of drawing the past into the present was memorably displayed during the March on Washington in August 1963. The stated purpose of the event was to press for civil rights legislation in Congress, but the result was the largest gathering to date in the nation’s capital. It culminated in a series of performances in front of the Lincoln Memorial by Marian Anderson, Bob Dylan, and others,
as well as a speech by James Baldwin read by Charlton Heston. (Asked why he was chosen to lead the Hollywood contingent, Heston said it was probably because of his service to the Screen Actors Guild, “or maybe just because I’d gotten all those folks through the Red Sea.”) Describing the crowd of 250,000 people, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson said the scene looked like another Exodus. “It was like the vision of Moses that the children of Israel would march into Canaan.” Organizers distributed song sheets for “Go Down, Moses” and other spirituals.

King’s late-afternoon speech was the highlight of the event. Seven years after he spoke at Saint John the Divine and a few months after his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the thirty-four-year-old preacher had become the voice of civil rights. His talk wove together many of the iconic themes from the 350-year merger of the Hebrew Bible and America. He evoked the Pilgrims: “Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride.” He paid tribute to Lincoln and his use of Psalm 90: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” He linked blacks with the Mother of Exiles: “One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.” He even echoed Lincoln’s phrase that America was “an almost-chosen people” by suggesting that America was a broken-promised land. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution represented “a promise,” King said, “that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note.”

But the climax echoes America’s preeminent symbol of freedom and one of its greatest tributes to the Exodus: the Liberty Bell.

In what is arguably the most famous speech by an American since the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King fused together Jefferson and Lincoln, Pilgrim and slave, Emma Lazarus and the Old State House bell, to set up his defining message from that “old Negro spiritual” that Zora Neale Hurston had put into the mouths of the Israelites as they set out for the Promised Land: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

I asked Robert Franklin whether he viewed the King era as a sacred time.

“Without a doubt,” he said. “There was enormous optimism, that grew week by week. And on those occasions when the Supreme Court acted, or a local magistrate, we saw that as validation. As God in history, pushing us on, saying, ‘Keep struggling. Don’t lose hope. You’re making progress and I am with you.’ Time was infused with a sense of sacred presence in the air. That we should be good and prepare ourselves for new life, because we were moving toward the Promised Land.

“And the fact that we weren’t sitting behind desks,” he said, “but were walking, making a claim on public space, was important. We were reenacting the Exodus on a smaller scale. But we flipped the script. Whereas many people saw America as the New Israel and the Old World as Egypt, we said, ‘No, America is Egypt, and blacks are the New Israel. We are the Jews.’”

“So if you take your experience and turn it toward the Bible,” I asked, “what theme is most important from Moses’ life?”

“It would be leadership,” he said. “As C. L. Franklin used to say: Absent leadership, people can go on as slaves. You accommodate yourselves. You find those narrow spaces where you experience some measure of liberation. We were doing that, and along came these leaders, like Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and others. Impatient. Angry. Yet not so consumed with anger that they don’t offer a sense of reconciliation. The kind of leader who says, ‘God is not happy with the arrangement. It must change, and God is on the side of those who are going to change it.’

“A leader,” he continued, “has to articulate that vision, then get people to vote with their feet and start marching. For while the Moses figure embodies the collective aspirations of the whole, he can’t do it alone. For me, the Exodus is a story about how a leader describes the possibility of a better community, then mobilizes the people to achieve it.”

ANDREW YOUNG WORKS
today at the top of a bank building in the heart of the city he served as a congressman, a mayor, and a secret weapon behind Atlanta’s securing the 1996 Summer Olympics. Born in New Orleans in 1932, Young graduated from Howard University and later earned a divinity degree from Hartford Theological
Seminary. In a nod to his rudderless early years, he describes his graduation from Howard as “not magna cum laude but ‘Oh, thank you, Lordy.’”

While serving as a minister in Alabama in 1957, he read Gandhi and was invited to meet the young star of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Young expected long hours of philosophical and strategic conversations. In his memoir,
An Easy Burden,
he describes the meeting as an “extreme disappointment”: “Martin was not inclined to discuss anything philosophical. He was more interested in talking about [his new baby]…. He was moody and into his more private self, and he didn’t feel like acting out the role of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Young later realized he had been expecting too much from a casual meeting and learned to appreciate King’s sometimes brooding, sometimes clownish, private side. Eventually Young moved to Atlanta and became one of King’s chief deputies. He was jesting with his friend from the parking lot of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the night King was assassinated in April 1968.

I wanted to know what Young thought about the role Moses played in the civil rights movement and the fascinating, if fragile, alliance between blacks and Jews that was built in part on their shared use of the Exodus. I began by asking what role the Bible played in his early life.

“My grandmother was blind from the time I was eight years old, and every night she had me read the Bible to her,” he said. “I also learned the stories in chorus. But I went through a period in college when I pretty much abandoned religion. We used to say as Congregationalists, ‘You can’t get to heaven unless your subject and verb agree.’ The emphasis was so much on learning and proper speech that they forgot the spirit.”

In his late seventies now and involved in international charitable work inspired by his years as U.N. ambassador, Young was dressed
crisply in white shirt and tie. He spoke deliberately and was noticeably heavier than the former track star who marched alongside King, a reminder that the carefully scrutinized leaders of the civil rights movement were merely young men at the time—in their late twenties and early thirties.

“But all that Sunday-school training came back to help me in the movement,” he continued. “All the songs we sang were about the Old Testament.
‘When Israel was in Egypt land, Let my people go.’ ‘Joshua fit de battle of Jericho, and the walls came a-tumblin’ down.’ ‘There’s a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.’
Martin used to say that black men and women took Jeremiah’s question ‘Is there a balm in Gilead?’ and straightened out the question mark into an exclamation point. ‘There
is
a balm in Gilead to heal the wounded whole!’”

“Did you know that singing those songs would lead to revolution?”

“Absolutely. Because in addition to being born into that biblical environment, fifty yards from where I was born was the German American Bund. From my porch I could hear people heiling Hitler. Plus, a lot of my father’s dental suppliers were Jewish, so the talk in my house was constantly about these Nazis on the corner. And my father’s mantra was ‘Don’t get mad, get smart.’ He took me to see newsreels of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics where Hitler refused to shake his hand. ‘See, that’s the way to deal with white supremacy. Jesse Owens didn’t get angry. He just went out and beat them.’”

In recent years, Young has come under attack by some Jews for remarks he made about Jewish merchants taking advantage of blacks. It was another wound in two decades of deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews over such issues as Louis Farrakhan, Israel, Palestine, economic development, and anti-Semitism. But in the fifties and sixties, Jews were among the staunchest supporters of civil
rights. A number of the founders of the NAACP were Jewish. Two-thirds of the Freedom Riders in 1961 were Jewish, as were 50 percent of the Mississippi Summer volunteers of 1964. Half of the lawyers who brought civil rights cases to trial were Jews, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were both drafted in the conference room of the Reform Jewish movement in Washington. When I asked Ambassador Young, whose grandmother was half Jewish, whether a shared allegiance to the Exodus was a factor in this relationship, he said, “Always.” Then he cited the example of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Beyond sharing grand, operatic names, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr., formed one of the more unusual partnerships in twentieth-century American history. One was a Baptist preacher with roots that stretched into slavery, the other a Polish rabbi and émigré from Hitler’s Europe whose ancestors were among the founders of Hasidism. The former was colorful and rousing, the latter pious and earnest. But Heschel, whose hair looked like Einstein’s and beard like Freud’s, shared with King a common interest in the overlapping narratives of Judaism and Christianity. At a time when few others were saying it, King wrote openly about the Jewish roots of Jesus: “The Christian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, but the fact is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine.” As America’s leading Jewish theologian, Heschel wrote openly that Jews ought to acknowledge the “eminent role” that Christianity plays in God’s plan for human redemption.

But the foundation of Heschel and King’s partnership rested on mutual respect for a different story. “The preference King gives to the Exodus motif over the figure of Jesus certainly played a major role in linking the two men intellectually and religiously,” explains Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, a scholar of Jewish thought at Dartmouth. “For Heschel, the primacy of the Exodus in the civil rights
movement was a major step in the history of Christian-Jewish relations.”

The two men met in early 1963 at the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, an unprecedented ecumenical gathering of one thousand religious leaders. Heschel opened his speech by comparing modern America with ancient Egypt. “At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses,” he said. “The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.”