What if the facts are that somebody blew up my house when my wife and baby daughter were in it? Could I hate then?

By which I mean, SHOULD I hate then?

Martin did not think so. On January 30th, 1956 Martin Luther King was at a meeting for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. As he relates is starting on page 135 of Stride Toward Freedom, he was told by Ralph Abernathy.

"'Your house has been bombed.'

I asked if my wife and baby were all right.

They said, 'We are checking on that now.'"

He continues on page 139

"I could feel the anger rising when I realized that my wife and baby could have been killed. I thought about the city commissioners and all the statements that they had made about me and the Negro generally. I was once more on the verge of corroding hatred. And once more I caught myself and said: 'You must not allow yourself to become bitter.'"


Of course, now we on the left, some of us, perhaps most of us, honor MLK with our lips, but are ignorant of his teachings, or flat out reject them. Martin writes on page 103

"A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. THe nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent be he also refuses to hate him. At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives."