Column: Railey imagines the Rev. King writing a most unlikely friend

What if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive? Here's one supposition.

On a recent day, Sen. Martin Luther King Jr. sat down in his home office to write a letter to an old friend, the man the world was shocked he'd embraced several years before.

King rubbed his old bullet scar and started to put pen to paper. He is, after all, old-school, and has never taken up emailing.

But before he started to write, the old preacher's mind wandered, as sometimes happens with people his age. After all, he turned 83 today. He thought back on the amazing trajectory his life had taken since he almost died after James Earl Ray shot him in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

King shook his head slowly, thinking about how hate-filled his heart had been during his long recovery process. And he was the preacher who'd talked so much about love and forgiveness.

What a terrible year 1968 had been. He'd emerged after weeks in a hospital to immerse himself in politics like he'd never done before. He reached out to President Johnson, finding common ground with him on the fight against poverty, but disagreeing with him vehemently on the war in Vietnam. After Johnson said he wouldn't seek re-election, King had gotten solidly behind Bobby Kennedy's presidential bid.

King, who'd seen too many friends beaten and killed in the civil-rights fight, had a special understanding of what Bobby had gone through after the assassination of his brother, President John Kennedy. King loved the way Bobby had somehow put aside hate in the years after that horrible day in Dallas. Bobby had grown in his grief. King had watched closely as Bobby, a white son of privilege, had developed a real heart for the poor, and underdogs in general.

Bobby and other friends helped King resolve his feelings about the man who shot him, James Earl Ray. At first, King wanted Ray to live the rest of his life behind bars. The more King thought about it, the more he realized that hating Ray would eat at him like a cancer, both literally and physically. But King thought that Ray definitely needed to serve a long sentence. As the Scripture says, act justly, but love mercy.

King stumped for Bobby at several campaign stops, including the one in California. He'd been standing near that strange little man, Sirhan Sirhan, when he started shooting. For just a moment, King thought he might be able to somehow stop it. He reached out, but was too late. He sank to the floor in tears, thinking he'd failed Bobby and the world, remembering all too well when he'd been shot in Memphis just months before.

For months after Bobby's assassination, King sank into himself, sitting in silence in the darkened office of his home, ignoring the phone ringing off the hook, the stacks of mail coming in, and even pleas from his wife, Coretta, to rejoin the fight.

Then Coretta read a letter from an 8-year-old white girl in Birmingham, a letter she knew her husband had to read, too. She made him do so:

Dear Mr. King,

My Daddy has been standing behind you, even though he has lost business as a white man for doing so. All I know is that I cried when I heard about the colored girls who were bombed to death in the Birmingham church. My Daddy says you are trying to create a better world. Please keep up the fight.

Sincerely,

Ginny May

Martin King read the letter and wept, and read other letters that made him cry as well. He wrote Ginny a letter back, promising to rejoin the fight. He moved his family to New York, won Bobby Kennedy's Senate seat, and played a major role in bringing the Vietnam War to an end in 1969, mainly by organizing the mothers of troops in the fight. He also successfully organized mothers and others to help stop wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He recently lost his Senate seat, beaten by a warmonger. But Martin King never stopped fighting or caring, or believing in the potential for beneficial change, for forgiveness and redemption. So on that recent day, he returned to the letter to his old friend, a man who'd changed in prison and was now speaking out against racism:

"Dear James Earl Ray … ."