Benjamin Mays '20 and the Rev. Martin Luther King promised each other: He who outlived the other would deliver his friend's last eulogy. On April 9, 1968, Mays made good on the promise.
After funeral services at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King's mahogany coffin was born to Morehouse College on a rickety farm wagon pulled by two mules. There, Mays, the school's 70-year-old president emeritus, delivered a final eulogy that also renounced what many saw coming: a turn toward violence for the black movement. King was "more courageous than those who advocate violence as a way out," Mays told the estimated 150,000 mourners. "Martin Luther faced the dogs, the police, jail, heavy criticism, and finally death; and he never carried a gun, not even a knife to defend himself. He had only his faith in a just God to rely on."
Indeed, King's assassination by James Earl Ray left many questioning the future of nonviolent protest in the late 1960s. Quoted in Time magazine a week after King's funeral, Floyd McKissick, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, offered this sober judgment: "The way things are today, not even Christ could come back and preach nonviolence."
Benjamin Mays '20 eulogy for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Morehouse College, April 9, 1968:
To be honored by being requested to give the eulogy at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is like asking one to eulogize his deceased son — so close and so precious was he to me. Our friendship goes back to his student days at Morehouse. It is not an easy task; nevertheless I accept it, with a sad heart and with full knowledge of my inadequacy to do justice to this man. It was my desire that if I predeceased Dr. King, he would pay tribute to me on my final day. It was his wish that if he predeceased me, I would deliver the homily at his funeral. Fate has decreed that I eulogize him. I wish it might have been otherwise; for, after all I am years and 10 and Martin Luther is dead at 39.
Although there are some who rejoice in his death, there are millions across the length and breadth of this world who are smitten with grief that this friend of mankind — all mankind — has been cut down in the flower of his youth. So, multitudes here and in foreign lands, queens, kings, heads of governments, the clergy of the world, and the common man everywhere, are praying that God will be with the family, the American people, and the president of the United States in this tragic hour. We hope that this universal concern will bring comfort to the family — for grief is like a heavy load: when shared it is easier to bear. We come today to help the family carry the load.
We have assembled here from every section of this great nation and from other parts of the world to give thanks to God that He gave to America, at this moment in history, Martin Luther King Jr. Truly God is no respecter of persons. How strange! God called the grandson of a slave on his father's side, and the grandson of a man born during the Civil War on his mother's side, and said to him: Martin Luther, speak to America about war and peace; about social justice and racial discrimination; about its obligation to the poor; and about nonviolence as a way of perfecting social change in a world of brutality and war.
Here was a man who believed with all of his might that the pursuit of violence at any time is ethically and morally wrong; that God and the moral weight of the universe are against it; that violence is self-defeating; and that only love and forgiveness can break the vicious circle of revenge. He believed that nonviolence would prove effective in the abolition of injustice in politics, in economics, in education, and in race relations. He was convinced, also, that people could not be moved to abolish voluntarily the inhumanity of man to man by mere persuasion and pleading, but that they could be moved to do so by dramatizing the evil through massive nonviolent resistance. He believed that nonviolent direct action was necessary to supplement the nonviolent victories won in federal courts. He believed that the nonviolent approach to solving social problems would ultimately prove to be redemptive.
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