A Knocking at Midnight: Who
Will Answer the Door?
By
Johnie H. Scott,
M.A., M.F.A.
(WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, February 9, 2000)
Called the “Boys Town of the West,” Rancho San Antonio sits in the western San Fernando Valley suburb of Chatsworth on Plummer Street. It is an open facility featuring trees, well-kept grounds that are spacious and attractive bungalows. Rancho San Antonio takes in one hundred boys ranging from14-18 years of age from all races, nationalities, and religions. With a staff of 30 that includes trained professionals and college students majoring in the social sciences, Rancho San Antonio is a safe haven for youth that have seen more than enough darkness in their lives. As Brother John, one of the facility’s senior administrators describes it, “More than twenty-five percent of the youth here have fathers who are incarcerated themselves.”
It was a Monday night in January of 2,000 -- Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to be exact. The night was cold and raining. I drove out to Rancho San Antonio, with the facility having invited me to come out that night to speak to these young people and the staff as well about Dr. King’s legacy. That was not my first visit to Rancho San Antonio. I made a similar visit the year before, on the same date, speaking to and with youth largely forgotten by society even while making one of the bravest struggles imaginable today: attempting to reclaim life, their own, given up for dead long ago by those ordinarily considered near and dear.
“Which
of You Has a Friend?”
I spent a few minutes reviewing notes I had prepared earlier that same day. Thinking about the King Celebrations taking place nationwide with parades, memorials and film festivals, I reflected on what might be the best way of talking to these young folk about a man whose entire life was dedicated to giving hope to the hopeless, bringing light to those who lived for so long in the shadows. It occurred to me that the best way to proceed would be by going to the source: those magnificent sermons Dr. King used in stirring the masses into movement and action.
“Which of you has
a friend and
Will go to him at
midnight and say
To him, ‘Friend,
lend me three loaves;
For a friend of
mine has arrived on a
Journey and I have nothing to set before him?’”
-- Luke 11:5-6
The scripture is a familiar one. It served as the basis for one of King’s greatest sermons, “A Knock at Midnight.” The year was 1963. Martin Luther King was 35 years old at the time he gave this sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church. As I read through the text, it dawned on me that so much of what was said by the Nobel Prize Winner that year was relevant not only for the Civil Rights Movement, it also spoke directly to our time, and certainly to these young life-hardened men.
At the same time, I couldn’t help reaching another conclusion: that the audience I’d soon be speaking to had no idea whatsoever of the revolutionary messages King brought to the world. They had no way of knowing that it had been children just like themselves who sparked a movement that changed history as we know it.
The Motion
Picture Has Yet to Be Made
That they had no idea was no fault of their own. As I said earlier, there are plenty of King Day Parades, Observances and streets named after the Civil Rights leader and martyr. The problem, the lack of recognition, becomes a failure on the part of those older generations to teach, passing down to our youth the nature of the Dream that inspired millions in around and, yes, around the world. The fact is that the motion picture has yet to be made and reach the silver screen showing King as the great teacher that he was; the emphasis, instead, has been on the man’s oratorical abilities and admittedly charismatic presence.
Looking out at those black, brown, red and white faces seated before me in the spacious dining hall where they would soon begin to eat, I started out by giving King’s opening lines from “A Knock at Midnight.” I carefully pointed out how King said, “It is midnight in the social order” which he quickly followed up by observing how “Two world wars have been fought within a generation, and the clouds of another are dangerously low.”
“The Most
Dangerous Man in America”
Letting them know that this “other war” King alluded to was the Vietnam Conflict – one in which twenty-two percent of the battlefield casualties were African Americans who made up, at that time, only eleven percent of the nation’s population – I told those young men sitting there at Rancho San Antonio how Dr. King, speaking out against Vietnam, incurred the wrath of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
More than that, I noted how, in the time that has passed since Dr. King was assasinated, the nation has engaged in conflicts in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq and, most recently, the Serbian-Croatian Conflict. I quoted from that “Knocking at Midnight” sermon where King warned against nuclear testing facing humankind “with the grim prospect that the very air we breathe will be poisoned by radioactive fallout” before I ended with King’s question to the audience: “Will these circumstances and weapons bring about the annihilation of the human race?”
A Manmade
Killing Machine And No Help In Sight
In bringing that up, I was very aware we don’t hear much on the evening news nor do we read very much in the newspapers about nuclear testing any longer. Realizing my listeners were young people with reading levels ranging from the fourth to the seventh grades – again, products of dysfunctional school systems – I provided them with yet another parallel to their own lives by pointing out how the threat today does not come not nuclear testing.
That threat, I let them know, comes from the chemical and biological warfare with a prime example the creation of the HIV/AIDS virus that has wiped out millions, threatens the very future of the African continent where it has already claimed more than 20 million lives, and how it presently threatens to affect one of every fourteen Americans with no help in sight against this manmade killing machine.
“The Second
Midnight”
The lessons King taught, the truths he brought to light were often hard and painful to bear. I made note of this while teaching these young people about the “Second Midnight” mentioned in that same sermon, the one King referred to as “midnight within the moral order.” Well aware that the moral crisis our nation is facing from the highest echelons of government on down to the streets of our cities, I gave them King’s very own words: “Midnight is the hour when men desperately seek to obey the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught.’”
Hoping to speak directly to their concerns, I paused and said, “I have to believe that Dr. King, who would be 71 years old were he alive today, without question would be speaking to a group much like yourselves this evening. After all, he was assasinated in Memphis, Tennessee where he had gone to give hope and leadership to the garbage collectors of that city.” This is the same man who once observed that “Sometimes on her knees Aunt Jane can get more truth than the philosopher on his tiptoes” was very much aware and respectful of those masses of Black men and women who put generations of kids through high school and college while taking in the white folks’ laundry, scrubbing floors and sharecropping.
Midnight Has
Only Grown Darker
Which is why I thought it important to share the following thoughts with these young people on that cold, rainy night:
Sad to say, the midnight has only grown darker in your time. In the place of hard work and paying one’s dues, we have young people brought up believing in easy answers and free lunches; not aware these no longer exist. We see that same belief present in the increasing numbers of students dropping out of school, thinking they’re ready for the so-called real world and singing careers where they, too, can sign a $100 million recording deal like Whitney Houston when the reality is our young people can’t get through a seventh grade reader, write a simple paragraph, or do basic math.
We see our youth conned into thinking themselves fully capable of writing that magical rhyme, that rap tune that’s going to make them the next incarnation of DMX, Juvenile, Eminem, Master P, Puff Daddy, Busta Rhymes, Eve, or Dre while dropping out of school as ninth, tenth and eleventh graders – New Millennium drive-by victims and, in their own words, “not even knowing it,” unable to fill out a job application, not knowing what a job resume is, scared to take drug tests where getting a job is seriously at stake, talking about how they “won’t, straight out refuse to work for minimum wage” even though, at the same time, they’re overcrowding the jails and penitentiaries, making going up the river the fastest-growing industry in America today, going to those penal institutions where “a good job” for any inmate is one paying a dollar a day, where a felony conviction takes away those same civil and human rights the Civil Rights Movement was all about – and where “three strikes” insures there will always be a slave labor workforce which is what prison labor really amounts to.
Faith, Hope and
Love
That “Knock at Midnight,” I tried pointing out to the boys at Rancho San Antonio that January night, is the challenge that Dr. King gave to all of us who cared to listen and take heed. And just as the Dreamer tried leaving people with something positive and uplifting, I looked at how Dr. King identified those three loaves of bread – faith, hope, and love – which can make all the difference in a person’s life. And so it was that I left Rancho San Antonio that evening of Dr. King’s birthday with this closing thought:
I know it would be too easy saying there is no one I can turn to and no place I can go in hopes of finding those three loaves of bread. That no one cares and that, if the truth were to be told, there are many who would not only be glad to know of the hard times you young people have fallen on but disturbed, yes, that I would come here tonight and talk to you, raise these questions, or bring forward such memories of the Dreamer and what he fought for, stood for, his entire life. To all that would raise those objections I have only this to say in reply:
Someone
must hear the knocking. Someone has to answer the door.
(Edited
from its original version in the WAVE Newspapers, this version of “A Knocking
at Midnight” has also been embedded by the author with updated websites for
more a more in-depth consideration of the issues raised herein – JS)