March 19: Summoned by Dr. King

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel received a telegram from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on this date in 1965, inviting him to participate in the third Selma-to-Montgomery march for civil rights two days hence. The first march, on March 7, had met with murderous police violence; the second, on the 9th, had backed down from a police phalanx on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma; the third march was joined by thousands of protestors from around the country (only 300 were permitted by court order to make the whole march), including Rabbi Heschel, who was photographed walking in the front row with Dr. King, Ralph Bunche, and Ralph Abernathy, each wearing Hawaiian flower leis. Heschel and King had a friendship going back their meeting at the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Chicago in January, 1963. “As King encouraged Heschel’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement,” writes Susannah Heschel, his daughter, “Heschel encouraged King to take a public stance against the war in Vietnam. When the Conservative rabbis of America gathered in 1968 to celebrate Heschel’s sixtieth birthday, the keynote speaker they invited was King. When King was assassinated, Heschel was the rabbi Mrs. King invited to speak at his funeral.”

“For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.” —Abraham Joshua Heschel