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James Skillen
In Celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Creative Justice
By Joo Eun Kim
News Editor
FILE PHOTO
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On Monday, Jan. 19.on Monday, Jan. 19, January Series attendees found out how arts and justice tie together. James Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C., spoke on “Creative Justice” in celebration of Martin Luther King Day.
Skillen, public speaker and author of many books, began his talk by playing three pieces of African-American music: “Black Beauty” by Duke Ellington, “Lazy River” by Louie Armstrong and “Elijah Rock” by Mahalia Jackson.
The reason for starting off with these musicians was to convey to the audience the segregation and discrimination they went through even though they were renown artists. Ellington and Armstrong, like African-Americans, Skillen said, could not appear publicly or stay in white hotels.
“[They were] segregated, humiliated, and sometimes endangered, even when Americans of every color went wild over their music,” Skillen said.
Finally, when Ellington met an enthusiastic crowd in Europe, he said, “For the first time in my life, I had the feeling of being accepted as an artist, as a gentleman, and as the member of the human race.”
Skillen expanded on African-American music. He mentioned jazz, old Negro work songs and spirituals. He said they were “almost all overwhelmingly Christian” and there was an “ambiguous relationship between Christianity [and] slavery.”
To justify slavery, Biblical passages were used. “Both defenders and opponents of slavery appealed to the Bible for divine authorization,” Skillen said. For example, church leaders authorized slave trade and the branding of slaves on their chests to identify them.
Slavery became the “world’s first system of multinational production for a mass market,” Skillen said.
While Chrsitianity was used to justify slavery, it was also used to protest slavery. Late in the 18th century, protest against slavery arose. According to Skillen, Christianity became “fuel” and “criteria” for abolition movement.
Christianity seemed to be contradicting itself, and Frederick Douglass saw clearly how to resolve that contradiction. He distinguished between slaveholder’s religion and the Christianity of Christ. What the slaveholders were using to justify slavery was not Christianity of Christ.
Like Douglass, slaves believed in God and “heard God’s condemnation of oppression and relished liberation,” Skillen said. “The power of God in Christ is not a pillar of the slave institution but a torch that exposes and undermines it.”
Skillen incorporated music and literary works from various African-American artists such as Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King Jr. to demonstrate African-American art. African-Americans' creative expression thrived, and so many black colleges and universities were built soon after the Civil War.
In the 1960s, King wrote from Birmingham of the “vitality of people.” So many African-Americans contributed to intellectual outcome and still do today, Skillen said.
“These are the shapers and leaders of our society,” Skillen said. “[They] preached, taught and sang the love of God.” These were people who knew they were created in the image of God, he said.
Skillen offered a path that Christians should take. It was the power of the Biblical story that commanded the end of slavery, he said. Thus, Christians today need to acknowledge that they are “creatures made in the image of God and commissioned by God’s purposes.”
The end of legalized discrimination did not solve the problem of racism. The right path to take, according to Skillen, is for Christians of every color to “embrace one another as image of God and disciples of Jesus.”
The future depends on what story people tell. People should not tell of the story of natural selection but of God’s creation. They should believe that they are created in the image of God. “The way we go about these practices depends on what we believe ourselves to be,” he said.
Therefore, the solution depends on whether the story “unites and empowers our creativity in music and politics, family and church, sports and the market place,” Skillen said.
“Far too many Americans have given up any hope of justice and reconciled harmony,” he said.
The story of creation and the grace of God is too big for one person to tell, he said. “The big story, which God has been and is still writing, calls us out of our offense back to our true identity.”
Skillen ended with Martin Luther King Jr.’s words during his imprisonment: “The glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together.”
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