On this site, we are committed to celebrating the life and teaching of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 366 days a year. King represents what a radical, biblical Christian witness looks like in the context of empire. Dr. King broke rank with bogus Christianity. But he did not cast off the bible. He composted it. Dr. King knew secrets because he was inextricably tied to the long tradition of a biblical Black folk religion rooted in the spirit of the land, in the liberation struggle and in a love supreme. King was bound to a faith in Jesus that, in the words of Howard Thurman, redeemed a religion that white Christians profaned in their midst.

From the time they arrived on Turtle Island, enslaved Africans creatively counter-quoted the scriptures to call out white male preachers quoting the bible to support their destructive hierarchy of value. They transformed the sacred text into a liberation manifesto scripting hope in the midst of political, economic and social struggle. The bible proclaimed that Black people were beloved and that they belong – no matter what white folks said or did. They subverted supremacy and scripted Something Else.

In his book Conjuring Freedom, Johari Jabir, a cherished contributor to this site, wrote that enslaved Africans used the bible “to turn the toxic into the tonic.” In the same way that they salvaged remnants of cloth from garbage dumps and transformed them into quilts that kept their families warm – and in the same way that they kept hunger at bay by taking the intestines of pigs that plantation owners refused to eat and turning them into cooked chitlins. They made a way out of no way – and that way was abundant and beautiful.

Three weeks before he was assassinated, Dr. King turned the toxic into the tonic in a speech he gave at a suburban high school gymnasium east of Detroit. After white people interrupted him several times, he went off script, telling them that he had been struggling to discern what text he was going to preach the next day at Central United Methodist Church, and at that moment, he decided he would be drawing from “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Then, he spoke boldly of a faith that is able to hew a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair, a faith that is able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

In his Beyond Vietnam sermon in New York City, Dr. King turned the toxic into the tonic, prodding his people to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but to go further. King challenged that audience, in that moment, to shift their posture and practice from charity to solidarity. The next step in their spiritual journey was to grapple with the reality of structural oppression. If the whole Jericho Road wasn’t transformed, then people would continue to be robbed and beaten. King was a true “radical” who did not waver in his quest to dig deeper, all the way to the roots of America’s destructive and dehumanizing racial capitalist system:

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King turned the toxic into the tonic, assuring his critical white moderate readers that those committed to the Black freedom struggle were the ones playing the part of the original disciples of Jesus. Whenever the earliest Christians entered a town, they, too, were dubbed “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators” by powerful people. King wrote these words on the margins of a newspaper and then smuggled them out for publication:

In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Dr. King was an expert in what Obery Hendricks calls “guerrilla exegesis,” a strategy that frees up biblical interpretation to mean something beyond what is conventional and colonial. Guerilla exegesis is not so much a methodology, but a consciousness. To be truly “biblical” is to be conscious that the methodologies of pastors and politicians are always used to serve some sort of status quo supremacy story. To be truly “biblical” is to become, like King, conscious that the biblical interpretations of the privileged and powerful always enforce their ideologies. But the guerilla exegete also becomes conscious that, in the text, there is an alternative word that moves us towards the margins, towards the wilderness, so we can hear a word from God.

The revolutionary biblical legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lives on, all over God’s green earth, in courageous leaders like Rev. Roslyn Bouier, who runs an organic church out of a food pantry in the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit, one of the poorest zip codes in North America. As residents walk in for weekly portions of pasta, canned goods and bottled water, Rev. Roz “disrupts the text,” calling out pastors preaching about a sweet heaven by-and-by while billions of precious people – from the ghetto to Gaza – are catching hell on earth. Because she knows that any biblical interpretation used for the legitimation of oppression instead of the liberation of the oppressed must be disrupted – and then composted into Something Else.

Just a few days before King was assassinated, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel told a small gathering of fellow Jews for justice that the whole future of America would depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King. Today, we double-down on our commitment to join others on the North American continent, and all over the world, living out the redemptive, biblical witness of Dr. King and the historic Black church. May King’s impact and influence empower us with the courage and creativity to turn the toxic into the tonic – both in the biblical text and in the bold terrain of our day-to-day lives.  

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