Religion

He was not chatty in the pulpit. He rarely talked about himself. He had big themes: deliverance, the Exodus story, the importance of love, what it means to be made in the image of God. He didn’t go off on tangents. The images he used were public metaphors. They weren’t personal. He talked of mountaintops and deep valleys, light and hope.

He had the gift of seeing rather bleak Southern towns like Selma or Albany, Georgia, as theaters of God’s redemption. He lifted up poverty-stricken towns as places where God was at work transforming the situation. When he talked of the police he said, "We’re tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression." And when he said it, you could see jackboots coming down.

As he got older and became more angry, he became more of a "puncher" in his preaching. One of his last sermons, which I love very much, is called ‘Why I Must March.” He was in Chicago.
It ends on, "I march because I must, and because I’m a man. And because I’m a child of God." It’s really powerful. In the book, I transcribe it in poetic form, because it is poetry.