Martin Luther King, Jr.: Beyond the Dreamer
There is very little I enjoy as much as teaching or writing about Martin Luther King, Jr.–for three reasons, I think. First, students don’t know much about him other than the “I Have a Dream” speech, which they’ve rarely read all the way through. Second, I nearly always learn more from him by spending even a few minutes reading a speech or a sermon. Finally, it’s a privilege to show people the tough-minded, sharp-tongued, prophetic Martin Luther King before he became sanctified and domesticated into a less interesting icon.
Here’s a piece I published in the Hartford Courant yesterday, with some added links. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!
King’s Vision Forged Out Of Ugly Realities
By WARREN GOLDSTEIN
January 14 2007
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is an American icon. That an Atlanta-born, African American Baptist preacher could rise to the pantheon of national heroes, that rarified realm populated mostly by presidents and generals, witnesses to the best American traditions: We can change; we can make democracy live up to its ideals.
Like heroic statues, however, icons get disconnected from their times. Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial warmongering, for example, and his pleas that white women have more babies lest their race be overwhelmed by more fertile black and brown folks, do not appear at Mount Rushmore.
Similarly, in the flood of Martin Luther King Jr. events, you hear much about his dream of equality - motherhood and apple pie, anyone? - but little of his anger, his biting criticism, his occasional confusion or of his anguish over the war in Vietnam.
So here’s another Martin Luther King Jr., the prophet who, frustrated in his 1963 anti-segregation campaign in Birmingham, changed from his pastor’s blue suit into a pair of jeans and led a demonstration that landed him in jail on Good Friday, of all days. There, responding to a group of white clergy who publicly called the demonstrations “unwise and untimely,” King wrote his remarkable “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” a wide-ranging defense.
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor,” King wrote. “It must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was `well-timed’” according to “those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation.”
The demand was justified when “you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters at brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity … when your first name becomes `nigger’ and your middle name becomes `boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes `John.’” These words will not show up on many King Day programs Monday, but they were the ugly realities that fueled his civil rights work.
And how did he propose to overcome them? By targeted nonviolent action (not passive resistance to authority), which “seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”
Make no mistake: King was a troublemaker. He called out fellow clergy who were “more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of the stained-glass windows.”
Now in the middle of another failing war halfway across the globe, newly escalated by another desperate president, let’s listen to King on Vietnam.
“A Time to Break Silence” (you can read and listen to the speech here) was delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination. King had hesitated until then to assail the war. He had feared that civil rights would suffer if he confronted President Lyndon B. Johnson. But that January, over breakfast, he saw magazine photos of Vietnamese children injured and killed by American napalm. According to his biographer David Garrow, he pushed his plate away and said, “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.”
He acknowledged the difficulty of opposing the “government’s policy, especially in time of war.” And when issues are so complex, “we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.” Are you listening, Congress?
King had been talking nonviolence to “desperate, rejected and angry young men” in Northern ghettoes who asked about Vietnam, where our nation was using “massive doses of violence to … bring about the changes it wanted.”
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.” And so he did, challenging “churches and synagogues” to “urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment” and be “prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest available.”
His prophetic stand earned him what most prophets receive in their own land: thundering disapproval from friends, colleagues, supporters and the press. It may even have gotten him killed. But he was right.
That’s the Martin Luther King Jr. I’m still learning from and celebrating this weekend. Happy holiday.
Warren Goldstein, the author, most recently, of “William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience,” is chairman of the history department at the University of Hartford.
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-commentaryking0114.artjan14,0,3150600.story?coll=hc-headlines-commentary