American hell
In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr.’s confidence in the politics of progressivism dimmed. Judgment became his refrain.
Century illustration
On April 4, 1968, hours before his assassination, from room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. phoned the office at Ebenezer Baptist Church back home in Atlanta. It was a Thursday, and he had to let the church secretary know his sermon title for Sunday’s service: “Why America May Go to Hell.”
He never had a chance to preach that sermon, but his title comes to mind whenever the injustices of this country feel overwhelming—when things go from bad to worse, from ordinary cruelties to unhinged brutality: Abu Ghraib, Trayvon Martin, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Mother Emanuel AME, Obama’s clandestine drone warfare, Trump’s caging of immigrant children, Stoneman Douglas High School, the Tree of Life Congregation, George Floyd, Uvalde, Guantanamo Bay, Biden’s contribution of US money and weapons to Israel’s mass slaughter of Gazans. Too many horrors. And there are others, local horrors—unique to your life, unique to mine, countless names and events and places.
I want to know the force of the word may in King’s sermon title. “America may go to hell”—did he mean that damnation was a possibility, that the destiny of the United States was at stake if the situation didn’t soon change? Or maybe he thought that a hellish fate was becoming more and more probable, a likely outcome given the social violence spiraling into wider spheres of life—the racism and economic exploitation at home and the carnage abroad in Vietnam, a war that had become a focus of his preaching and organizing since his “Beyond Vietnam” speech in New York City, exactly a year before his death.
