- What Kind of Man Is He? -

Amelia Boynton Robinson

Vice Chairwoman, Schiller Institute

April 4, 2008

April 4, 2008, forty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. This death was a shock to the world. Why? Martin was a human being who walked with kings and beggars, and never lost the human touch. He was an ordinary looking man, with an extraordinary mission, ordained by God to touch the very souls of men, changing their ways of life.

Every one of us is placed on this Earth for a specific purpose. Our system needed to be reformed within people, beginning with loving people regardless of their race, believing in equal rights and the general welfare. Martin taught people how to love (agape) everybody, to forgive in their own hearts.

When Dr. King was living, he was against man's inhumanity to man, but working with him, I could understand some of his attitudes, meditations, and his moods (perhaps because I had gone through it with my late husband, S.W. Boynton).

On one occasion, on the 50th anniversary of the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom, I was asked to go to the train station to escort Dr. King to the meeting, to deliver the main address. The WILPF president had told me to "please ask him to speak against the Vietnam War." When I put the request to him, Dr. King put his chin in his hand and never uttered a word for a long 30 seconds. He then looked up, and told me, "The time is not right yet." However, when he did speak out against that war, on April 4, 1967, that marked the enemy's time to kill him. He was politically too powerful. The rich, the poor, the haves, and have-nots all believed in him and the world would have been different politically, morally, spiritually, if he had lived.

God was tired of the slanders and the traps set for Dr. King's death: So when a scuffle broke out on April 3, 1968, at the end of the striking Nashville garbage workers march, this was an occasion to discredit Dr. King's work. But instead, God opened His servant's great heart to deliver his "I Have Been to the
Mountaintop" sermon, and released him of all his troubles, and
took him to His Heavenly home.