Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everybody. I am writing to you today from an intersection of many identities, several of which I think bear presentation on a day like today in a time like the one we find ourselves currently confronted with. I am writing to you as a white person, a non-binary person, a bi/pansexual person, a Jewish person, a twenty-seven year old, and an artist. And today I’d like to talk about a phrase Dr. King used frequently in his writings, sermons, and speeches, which was this: the weapon of love. In the approach to this holiday I went to read and reread some of his words, and in chapter 8 of his autobiography, The Violence of Desperate Men, I found this quote, “It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.” The creative weapon of love.
Now, like I said, I am Jewish, so Jesus does not stir in me the same spiritual feeling he does in many Christians, like the Black community in Montgomery who elected Dr. King as their spokesperson for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but I am still a person, and so I have the capacity to connect to a greater spirit, and through my own experiences, religious and otherwise, I have come to understand the power in such a connection. And it can be a creative power. When I say creative here, I mean it in the radical sense, the root sense, which is having to do with the act of creation. This is what I believe Dr. King referred to when he spoke of the weapon of love.
When most people think of a weapon, though, they think of an item that causes destruction. Certainly in the United States today that is the case, as evidenced by the ongoing contention around guns, be it private gun ownership or the use of guns for the “enforcement” of law and public safety. On the one hand you have a group of people who see an object that enables the relatively easy killing of human beings and other animals, and therefore believe it should be strictly regulated, if allowed at all; while on the other you have a group of people who believe the right to such easy killing should be given to all citizens, either for the purpose of self-defence against individuals or oppressive institutions or the purpose of intimidating and oppressing their neighbors. Either way, a gun is a weapon, and it is an object of destruction. But Dr. King spoke of love as a weapon that could create. Dr. King himself owned a gun at one point, and he wrote the following about his decision to get rid of it, at the end of that same chapter of his autobiography:
Meanwhile I reconsidered. How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection? Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution. We decided then to get rid of the one weapon we owned. We tried to satisfy our friends by having floodlights mounted around the house, and hiring unarmed watchmen around the clock. I also promised that I would not travel around the city alone.
I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid.
Earlier, I mentioned my own spiritual experiences, and I wanted to return to that now with the context of Dr. King’s creative weapon of love, the weapon that allowed him to feel less fear and more conviction when he and Mrs. Coretta Scott King got rid of their gun.
One of the greatest facilitators of my own spiritual experiences has been developing my poetry practice. One of the lessons I have found is that in creating a poetry practice, meaning a practice that I continue to return to each new day, I have been engaging with the creative experience of love. In a time in which so much destruction is occurring under the banners of ICE, the Department of War, the new facets of the Trump administration that seem to pop up like dandelions every day, and being replayed (and often glorified) constantly on social mierda and in the various news medias, it is essential for people to have these creative experiences. They unlock in us a deeper connection to our shared humanity and our shared presence on the Earth. And in doing so, they become the weapons of love that Dr. King so often referred to. They become the active antidote to the power-hungry hate, ignorance, and fear-mongering that Dr. King worked to overcome in the 1950s and 60s and the versions of those ailments we must work to overcome now.
On March 18, 1956 Dr. King gave a sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL. In it, he spoke of a “brave young lady,” Autherine Lucy’s experience as the first Black student at the University of Alabama. How she was threatened, harassed, and assaulted by the “vanguards of the old order.”
The forces of evil began to congeal. As soon as Autherine Lucy walked on the campus, a group of spoiled students led by Leonard Wilson and a vicious group of criminals began threatening her on every hand. Crosses were burned. Eggs and bricks were thrown at her. The mob even jumped on top of the car in which she was riding.
In response, the administration of the university asked Autherine to leave, purportedly for her own safety and that of the university. The following day the newspaper reported, “…quiet in Tuscaloosa…” and “…peace on the campus…” Dr. King said:
Yes there was peace on the campus, but it was peace at a great price. It was peace that had been purchased at the exorbitant price of an inept trustee board succumbing to the whims and caprices of a vicious mob. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of allowing mobocracy to reign supreme over democracy. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of capitulating to the forces of darkness. This is the type of peace that all men of goodwill hate. It is the type of peace that is obnoxious. It is the type of peace that stinks in the nostrils of the almighty God.
Peace requires action, it requires creative thinking and deep engagement over long periods of time. And poetry can teach us these skills, which allow us to wield the weapon of love. Dr. King’s words ring as true today as I am sure they did 70 years ago. Today we see mobocracy reigning supreme over democracy. We see Walmart and Amazon branded “peace” on sale for the low low price of “capitulating to the forces of darkness.” We see inept leaders succumbing to the “whims and caprices of vicious mobs,” and even inept, capricious leaders encouraging vicious mobs. But there are those who still, through the creative weapon of love, practice an active peace. And we can turn to their examples, like Dr. King’s, when we feel a need for guidance.
In honor of Dr. King’s efforts to secure equal treatment and a “peace [that] is not merely the absence of…tension, but the presence of justice,” for Black people in the U.S., I’d like to end by providing some examples of Black poets whose current and/or recent poetic leadership can provide us all guidance for how to continue to move forward today. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope these poets can provide inspiration for you as they have for me.
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