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.