Comment: Why Martin Luther King Jr. embraced his enemies
By Eboo Patel / Special to the Chicago Tribune
This year’s celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day comes less than two weeks after a violent white mob, inspired by entrenched racism and dressed up in Christian symbolism, attacked American democracy, leaving five people dead.
As a Black Christian minister leading a nonviolent movement for civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. came to know such mobs well. He faced them across the American South, and also right here in Chicago.
What might we learn from how King dealt with such mobs in his own time? It is reasonable to believe that King would support holding people accountable for crimes committed, but King also held a higher hope for at least some of those who were part of the mob. Namely, that they might be changed, and then included in the beloved community of American democracy.
It was toward the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, after enduring a year of death threats, false arrests and firebombings from white mobs, that King spoke of “the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.”
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-why-martin-luther-king-jr-embraced-his-enemies/