Martin Luther King Jr. and the power that we, and our language, hold

Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1993, was about the power of language.

Morrison offered a parable about an old woman known to be clairvoyant. Blind, wise, and the daughter of enslaved people, the woman lived alone. One day she was paid a visit by a group of children bent on proving her difference from them by virtue of her blindness. One of them said, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” The old woman could not see her visitors or what was in their hands. Were they ridiculing her? What was their intention? Eventually, she answered, “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

The words we use hold power. They can uplift, do harm, be suppressed, be vile, or give comfort. They offer a measure of our beliefs and our lives. We celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., honoring his use of words to lift the moral consciousness of a nation and world. King managed to find the words to challenge Americans from all corners of society.

King’s call for peace feels especially important now. On Christmas Eve in 1967 at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, he began with a declaration: “We are,” he said, “a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we see its ominous possibilities.”

From the pulpit, he placed responsibility for peace in the hands of the congregation and invited them to move beyond their old beliefs and narrow-mindedness. “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world … We must either learn to live together as brothers . . or we are all going to perish together as fools.” That choice was in our hands.

King used this sermon to address the necessity of love and compassion in the struggle for equality. We can choose words and language that inspire and comfort, or we can use language that is disturbing and provocative, words that escalate violence and distrust. I come from African ancestry, an oral tradition. An oral tradition requires great care with our language, so King’s message resonates with me. Stories passed down in my grandmother’s kitchen, my mother’s bedside or in my auntie’s car nourished my imagination and shaped my beliefs.

We can turn to King’s words for inspiration, but what we say now and what we do now are in our hands, the hands of everyday people, citizens, neighbors, friends, elders. At dinner tables, in classes, in neighborhoods, many wonder about our future as a nation and world. We must communicate, tell our stories, give each other hope. We all have stories to tell. And we can tell the stories of those with whom we differ, so that we can find ways to bridge the chasms that divide us in the struggle for justice and equality.

To paraphrase peace activist William Sloane Coffin, our world is now too small for anything but the language of truth and too dangerous for anything that doesn’t lead us to the language of love.