Schoolchildren memorize quotes from Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” White preachers quote him from the pulpit and forget to whom the letter was addressed. King’s letter from jail was a response to another missive. A group of clergy leaders, including two Episcopal bishops from Alabama, wrote to him first. They sought to persuade the civil rights leader to leave their state. They asked him, as an outsider, to stay away. Leaders of my own denomination signed a letter asking Dr. King to let Alabama take its own time. In response, he wrote that the greatest stumbling block to the work for civil rights was not the Klu Klux Klan but
the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.6
Like Jesus, Dr. King made a distinction about peace. He refused to define peace negatively. He steadfastly refused calls from civic leaders, from his fellow clergy, to allow the civil unrest to quiet down. Dr. King wasn’t looking for quiet. He was looking for change. He was looking for justice. Dr. King knew his dream could not be achieved unless the nightmares of segregation and violent oppression were addressed. He was done waiting. He was going to turn over the soil and plant seeds of a peace the world was not able to give.
1 Willis Johnson, Holding Up Your Corner (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2017), xv–xvi.
2 The Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 355.
3 Expenditure Data, St. Louis, MO.gov, accessed May 19, 2020, https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/budget/transparency/expenditure/index.cfm.
4 Episcopal Church. 1985. The Hymnal, 1982: service music : according to the use of the Episcopal Church. New York: Church Hymnal Corp.
5 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. “Nobel Lecture.” 11 Dec. 1964 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/lecture/
6 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 16 Apr. 1963 https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
2 
I first heard the name Michael Brown from the pulpit of Christ Church Cathedral the day after he was killed. The Very Rev. Mike Kinman told the congregation he had to throw out his original sermon the night before, after he had heard about the young man who had been shot by a police officer. Michael Brown’s body had been left in the street for five hours in the hot August sun. Rumor had it that Michael’s hands were up in surrender when he was shot.
That morning, the news of a young Black man killed by a police officer struck me as an unusual reason to rewrite a sermon. Black men were killed by police officers with frequency. (I hadn’t yet registered the problematic nature of my own surprise.) As I heard Dean Kinman preach, as I heard the anger in his voice, I didn’t yet know that his anger reflected the emotion in the streets. The dean had lived in St. Louis much longer than I. He was a priest with deep roots in the community. Before he rewrote his sermon, Kinman went up to Ferguson and gathered with the young activists who were planning action in response to Michael Brown’s death.
I mentioned parenthetically my surprise at the sermon. I want to pause a moment in that surprise. By the time I moved to St. Louis, I thought of myself as reasonably aware of dynamics around race and power. As you’ll read in a later section, I had done work around listening to the fears of my friends who were Black. The thing about unconscious bias is that it is unconscious; it requires uncovering. My in-built assumptions about policing and power were going to be challenged.
Until I heard Dean Kinman’s sermon on that hot August morning, until I had gone with my fellow clergy to “pray with our feet,” as the Rev. Traci Blackmon said of our first march, I didn’t really understand the systemic dynamic. I knew intellectually that more people of color were incarcerated. I knew the courts often failed to hold folks accountable for racial violence. But I grew up with the assumption that you could trust police officers. My limited interactions with the police before Ferguson had reinforced my impression, that the police were folks who chose a career to serve and protect. I was initially surprised that my neighbors could not make similar assumptions. I discovered I could make two responses to my surprise: I could resist the new information, and explain that I had only known good and kind police officers, or I could listen to my neighbors and believe their fear was credible.
For many of those first months my new Midwestern city felt sleepy, especially after the relentless news cycles of Washington. The sleepiness obviously didn’t last. At the time, I was working on the staff of the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church as Missioner for Young Adult and Campus Ministries. Dean Kinman had also invited me to serve as a volunteer priest associate at the St. Louis Cathedral. August 10 was a Sunday when I did not have duties to preach or to celebrate, which is why I sat in the pew with my spouse to hear the dean’s angry rewrite, to hear him reflect the discontent growing in the streets of Ferguson. Later that week, I traveled with the Cathedral clergy just a few miles up the highway to my first protest in my new city.
National news reporters I recognized from Washington started showing up in Ferguson. As I had done in the capital, I found myself asking, “What does it mean to do ministry at the center of the nation’s attention?” I figured, like in most ministry, you start by showing up. I accepted the invitations of colleagues, lay and ordained, to come to Ferguson to pray and to march. I wasn’t the only one. People started turning up from around the country to march in the streets of my new city.
“If we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no peace.” I had heard the chant in protests in other cities. Before I came to St. Louis, I had marched with young Black activists in Washington after the killing of Trayvon Martin, and again after the acquittal of his killer. But I had never heard as many voices shouting the words. I had never heard the words chanted with such conviction, such a sense that the stakes were so immediate. Something changed in Ferguson. Something was uncovered. The words were spoken with new urgency.
I’ve preached sermons about the poetic possibilities I find in this chant. The shortened version of “If we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no peace” is simply “No justice; no peace.” I have said from the pulpit, more than once, that when I hear the words, “No justice; no peace,” I imagine an alternate spelling: “Know justice; know peace.” The threat