It was in the sweet Auburn district of Atlanta and I was sitting at a heavy scared oak conference room table. The chairs were heavy oak too but the red leather cushions were cracked and ripped with the white stuffing poking through. Sitting in one, I wore blue jeans, sneakers, white shirt, tie and blue blazer. My hair was long and I was a baby minister representing the Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel.
The room reeked of the past. A faded framed photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. hung on the wall above table. A cross hung at the other end. On the side walls were hundreds of framed newspaper clippings of stories about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Dr. Joseph Lowery sat at the head of the table and was talking about something but I wasn't hearing him. I was taking it all in.
Suddenly it hit me!
"Holy Shit!" I thought to myself.
It's the same as it was when Martin Luther King sat here planning what to do next.
I may as well have been visiting the Israel and sitting in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ... or Golgotha ... where Jesus was crucified and buried ... then raised from the dead.
I no longer remember what Joseph Lowery was saying to us. Honestly, I don't really remember who else was there. It seems like Ken Sehested was representing Oakhurst Baptist Church. Guy Sayles may have been there too but I really don't remember. There were only a couple of us who were white though.
I do recall being touched by it ... incredibly touched.
It was probably Will Campbell who got me invited. I was a recent inductee of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, a group of white clergy who had been active during the Civil Rights Movement. Will was a good friend of Clarence Jordan (the only prophet Southern Baptist have ever produced) who was a good friend of Martin's. Martin often hid out at Clarence's commune Koininea in Americus, Georgia. Will was the representative of the National Council of Churches to the Civil Rights Movement.
My friend Father Vernon Robertson, a Catholic Priest, was an original member of the Committee of Southern Churchmen and when they were all old, and I was in my 20s, he put me up for membership. I was instructed to place a collect phone call to Will Campbell's house. If he accepted the charges I was in.
I called. He accepted then immediately hung up without saying a word.
I called Vernon and told him.
"That's great!" he said. "You're in!"
Will and I went on to become good friends and he wrote the Preface to my first book which probably was the reason it sold more copies than anything I wrote.
Later that day we went to Ebenezer Baptist Church which was Martin's Church when he was assassinated. Coretta came in and we chatted for a while. I remember we had coffee in a little side room and thinking to myself that I shouldn't have worn jeans. Everyone else was so formal.
That was all a long time ago.
For the life of me, I couldn't tell you why I was there ... or if Guy and Ken were actually with me ... I do remember a lot of young black men hovering around as through they were protecting somebody from something.
But I do remember the holiness of it all. Sitting in a chair that Martin likely sat in. Meeting Coretta for the first time. Touching the stuff on his desk. Touching things that had been Martin's.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin? Can you tell me where he's gone?
I know the answer.
Some people never really die. They have have been killed but they hang around somehow, still working ... still making things better than they were ... so I know where's he's at.
He's right here.
