In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr. marched in Chicago in support of fair housing. As about seven hundred people joined him, the march was threatened by angry white people, one of whom threw a rock at King, hitting him in the head. He dropped to his knees, got up, and resumed marching. I heard this story from Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America, a nonprofit organization promoting interfaith leadership on college campuses. In Patel’s Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise (Princeton University Press, 2018) he recalls visiting monument to the march fifty years later in Chicago’s Marquette Park.
In America, Not of America?
IMAN, a local nonprofit founded in 1997 by sociologist and activist Rami Nashashibi sponsored the monument. In Arabic, iman means “faith.” In Chicago, it means Inner-City Muslim Action Network. In the years before 9/11, immigrants from older Muslim communities in the Middle East often considered black American Muslims “less” Muslim. Many immigrants, Patel writes, while embracing the American notion of financial success in a meritocracy, rejected what they considered America’s “cesspool of cultural filth.” Black American Muslims were just too American.
But especially after 9/11, immigrant Muslims felt an urgent need to demonstrate their “Americanness.” Young people like Nashashibi, whose family is Palestinian/Jordanian American, felt very at home with American popular culture while also being devout Muslims. He saw the need to build a bridge between various Muslim communities, including black Americans, and this prompted the founding of IMAN. As the community service organization grew, local Pentecostal Christians and Jews helped them expand their awareness of the community’s needs and injustices. Today, IMAN manages a multi-million-dollar budget.
One side of the King monument includes tiles decorated by students, including two by Patel’s children.
Celebrating Cooperation Between People of the Book
As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, People of the Book can rejoice that IMAN erected the first permanent King memorial in Chicago. Fifty years after a stone thrown by a white person struck a young Christian pastor, Patel’s young Muslim children left a mark on the memorial that includes this quotation from Rabbi Robert Marx:
I saw Catholic priests reviled and nuns spat upon. I found myself—a Rabbi—standing guard like a policeman, over a pile of rocks, for fear that grown men and mothers dragging little children with them, would seize those rocks and throw them at the demonstrators. I saw teenage boys and girls ready to kill. I was on the wrong side of the street. I should have been with the marchers. … This afternoon I will join Dr. King and others who will be going back into the area. This time, I will be on the right side of the street (Patel, 102).
Rabbi Marx went on to found the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, which later supported IMAN in its first years.
Next week I will tell you more about Patel’s book.
Thanks so much for this inspiring “mini-history” of interfaith around MLK. Looking forward to this coming week’s post.