Jonathan Rieder

King established a Pan-African frame for what was to follow. He harkened back to a night in West Africa in 1957 when he stood with Ralph Bunche and the black congressmen Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs and witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s installation as the first president of the new nation of Ghana. Being there had called up the most primal associations, linking him, present-day Africans, and his own slave forebears in an intimate embrace. He had strolled the streets of Accra and wept with joy as he heard both young and old Ghanaians calling out “free-doom!

— Jonathan Rieder

We are gravely mistaken if we feel that Christianity is a religion to protect us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that there is a Good Friday before every Easter, and that the cross we bear always precedes the crown we wear.

— Jonathan Rieder

Racism is very deep in this country,” he said. “Do you know that in America the white man sought to annihilate the Indian, literally to wipe him out, and he made a national policy that said in substance, the only good Indian is a dead Indian? Now a nation that got started like that has a lot of repentin’ to do.” His antiwar oratory acquired the same quality of jeremiad. “God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war … But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying ‘Don’t play with me’ … Be still and know that I’m God. And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.

— Jonathan Rieder