In the film Boycott, about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, there’s a scene in which Martin Luther King Jr. and local civil rights leader E. D. Nixon are standing outside Nixon’s house as it burns to the ground. Nixon knows that white supremacists are behind the arson, but he also seems to know that they will go unpunished. Adding fuel to the fire, the fire department has arrived at the burning house, but the white firefighters elect simply to lean against their trucks and look on while it burns.
King arrives and stands beside Nixon, both of them helpless as the house goes up in flames. Nixon asks King how he can stick to his nonviolent principles—or if he even should—as he and his family are physically threatened and attacked by the powers opposing them. King doesn’t answer him directly. Instead, speaking slowly as though it pains him to do so, he quotes from the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 39: “But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved” (NIV).
King is remembered as a great leader, a great speaker, a man of great moral courage. It is worth remembering that he was also a man of great faith—that he took his faith seriously, and its role in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. King worked for civil rights because he believed that the rights and privileges of Americans should actually apply to all Americans, but also because he believed in upholding the God-given dignity of blacks in America, even if whites and their accompanying power structure refused to acknowledge it. He hoped for a day when racism would be eradicated and the world would be safe for African Americans, safe for the poor, safe for everyone.
