Martin Luther King Jr. made his first public statements against the
Vietnam War in the summer of 1965. But harsh attacks from the White House and
the press, coupled with lack of support from most of the civil rights
community, initially led King to downplay his anti-war stance. After nearly two
years of wrestling with the issue, however, King could no longer stay quiet,
and he plunged deep into the difficult and controversial work of drawing out
the connections between war, racism, and poverty. This excerpt from the
forthcoming book To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.'s
Sacred Mission to Save America, gives a glimpse of
King's transformative journey.
The stormy spring of 1967 marked a turning point not only for Martin King,
the anti-war movement, and Lyndon Johnson, but for the nation and the world. Vietnam was the
axis around which the whole planet seemed to be seeking new directions, new
ways out of darkness. The coming 12 months would draw a dividing line in world
history as critical as any in the 20th century.
Amid the vertigo of events, King may not have known whether he wanted one
movement or two, or what their relationship ought to be. His double
consciousness allowed him to see the peace and justice movements as both
separate and combined; it depended partly on the audience he was speaking to.
For several weeks in April and May he felt called to lead both movements. The
dramatic entrance of the most prominent American to oppose the war had
energized the movement like nothing else. Many thousands marched in New York because King
was there.
Yet though he was used to the quarrelsome civil rights movement, he was not
prepared for the chaotic new movement whose divisions made the civil rights
community look harmonious. Unlike the latter, anti-war leaders desired King's
symbolic might as much as they spurned his calling the shots. The peace train
did not hanker for a new Gandhi.
But during the weeks that he stood front and center, he focused on charting
a viable strategy to end the war. Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) organizer James Bevel and key white activists had threatened mass civil
disobedience in Washington,
D.C., as the next step. King
insisted that he was not ready to support civil disobedience. Nor at the other
extreme would he heed pressure to run for president in 1968 as a peace
candidate. He considered meeting with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris, but decided it
would not be prudent. He gave guarded support to the "Dump Johnson"
effort while promoting grassroots pressure for "negotiations now." He
proposed a march on Washington,
like the one in 1963, that would link the war with
poverty-program cuts. That sounded too tame for most anti-war leaders, who
wanted to escalate their tactics—but were not sure how.
He joined with famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock in launching Vietnam Summer,
an effort to mobilize thousands of students to go door-to-door and educate
their communities about the war, to build the mainstream opposition that he
felt essential to stopping the war. And he took a further step toward
advocating outright resistance to the draft.
In February 1964, when young Cassius Clay won the world heavyweight boxing
title, he announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam (he had secretly joined
in 1961) and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Three years later, now a Black
Muslim minister and a captain of Elijah Muhammad's elite guard, he professed to
be a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. His white draft board denied
his conscientious objector claim and ordered him into the army. After his
lawyers exhausted all appeals up to the Supreme Court, he refused induction on
April 28, 1967, in Houston.
"I'll never wear the uniform of the United
States military forces," he told the press in Chicago. "I am not
going 10,000 miles from here to help murder and kill and burn another poor
people simply to help continue the domination of white slave masters over the
darker people the world over." At the induction center, the champion
asserted, "I will meet them head-on, and I'll be looking right into their
pale blue eyes." The government swiftly indicted him for induction
refusal. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The boxing
associations stripped him of his title. Whatever their opinion of Black
Muslims, African Americans felt the assault on their hero as an assault on them
all.
In a major sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church
spelling out his Vietnam
stand—Stokely Carmichael tapping his feet in
the front pew—King congratulated Ali for his moral courage. "Here is
a young man willing to give up fame, if necessary, willing to give up millions
of dollars in order to stand up for what conscience tells him is right. It
seems that I can hear the voice crying out through all the eternities saying to
him this morning, ‘Blessed are ye when men shall
persecute you and shall call you all manner of evil for righteousness'
sake.'"
As for himself, he declared, "I answered a call, and when God speaks,
who can but prophesy?" He called for Americans to repent. "The kingdom of God is at hand." He heard God
saying to America,
you are too arrogant. "If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and
break the backbone of your power." Ali was showing the way. Americans must
take up the cross. "Before the crown we wear there is the cross that we
must bear."
Ten days later, at an open-housing protest in Louisville, Kentucky,
King was hit in the head by a rock after trying to reason with white teenagers
menacing his car. "We've got to learn to live together as brothers,"
he had told them. That night he gripped the rock in his hand as he spoke at a
rally. Soon after, he and Coretta picketed the White
House with other activists in their first joint anti-war action. She had been
protesting the war for years, quietly urging her husband along. Finally he was
following her example. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was used to talking
with presidents face-to-face was now joining ordinary citizens who had to shout
their peace chants through the wrought-iron White House gates.
AT THE END of May 1967, the SCLC held a staff retreat at a Quaker center on St. Helena Island
off the coast of South Carolina.
The center was originally one of the first schools for freed slaves. For three
centuries black people slaving in the rice plantations had held tight to
African customs on the sea islands, a cultural way
station between West Africa and mainland America. The balmy seaside setting
hardly distracted participants from the crisis they faced.
SCLC staff, mostly men with large egos, had always fought each other for
King's favor. He encouraged among his subordinates the verbal sparring he was
unable to engage in himself. Much of the internal conflict was healthy and
productive. But since the stymied Chicago
campaign, infighting had swung out of control.
King was a harried chief wearing three heavy hats—Ebenezer pastor,
prophetic voice, and SCLC executive. Yet he had been unable to bring in a
strong manager to handle the chaos, unwilling to give up the illusion of
control. Morale had plummeted with confusion over SCLC's mission and funding
cuts that resulted partly from King's Vietnam stand. The staff had to
downsize. Except in Grenada,
Mississippi,
SCLC's fieldwork in the South had virtually dissolved. Was the civil rights
movement over? Did SCLC have a future?
He answered yes to both questions at the retreat in a lengthy talk, "To
Chart Our Course for the Future." King had often turned to oratory as an
arbiter of or an escape from conflict, as if the power of his words could
transcend the sticky wickets of human impasse, lifting himself and others to
their higher selves, if only long enough to change the subject.
"It is necessary for us to realize," he explained, "that we
have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. When you
deal with human rights you are not dealing with something clearly defined in
the Constitution. They are rights that are clearly defined by the mandates of a
humanitarian concern."
During the previous two years, when it became evident that the historic
civil rights laws would not sweep away racism or poverty, he had come to see
the inadequacy of individual rights. He grasped that "civil rights"
carried too much baggage of the dominant tradition of American individualism
and not enough counterweight from a tradition of communitarian impulses,
collective striving, and common good. This subterranean tradition had been kept
alive by peoples of color, especially blacks and American Indians. The polar
strains of individualism and collectivism needed to be reconciled, as he strove
to reconcile other opposites. His conception of rights shifted to a richer,
comprehensive meaning that reflected his underlying biblical values.
By 1967 King seemed to be following the example of Malcolm X, who near the
end of his life stressed the need to "expand the civil-rights struggle to
a higher level—to the level of human rights." If the two leaders had
been able to compare notes during Malcolm's last year, they would have
discovered that each was drawing similar conclusions about the necessity to go
beyond constitutional rights.
Both Martin and Malcolm were reconstructing the legacy of their forebears,
such as Gabriel Prosser, Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, Ida B.
Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois. From the end of the 18th century,
African-American leaders had grounded their interpretation of rights in black
spirituality and in what they saw as the divinely authorized Declaration of
Independence, with its "amazing universalism," in King's words. Many
African Americans had perceived their human rights, no matter how poorly
fulfilled, as a covenant with their personal God intervening in history on the
side of justice. "Blacks always believed in rights in some larger, mythologic sense—as a pantheon of possibility,"
legal scholar Patricia Williams noted.
According to this deeper view that King took on, rights were more than
private possessions. They were a moral imperative that transcended individual
needs. He was rehabilitating the old preindustrial
meaning of right: something that was right or just (righteous), that one
therefore had a "right" to. Rights rightly understood were not
whatever a person claimed as his or her due, with no boundaries; but what was
required for all people, and thus for each, by the higher laws of justice and
love. They were those entitlements that constituted the moral foundation of the
beloved community.
Proper rights were limited by the same moral laws. Rights and responsibility
were not a dichotomy but interwoven. Individuals had a moral responsibility to
secure just rights for themselves and others. That was why, rooted in biblical
faith, many African Americans experienced rights as shared resources. And why
many have felt a duty to realize them not just on an individual basis, but for
their people as a community or nation. This perspective diverged sharply from
the classic liberal ideology of unbounded rights, owned by isolated,
unencumbered selves devoid of community ties. King came to have hardly more
affinity for such individualistic rights than he had for unbounded freedom or
democracy, coins of the same realm.
"THE GREAT GLORY of American democracy," King said many times,
"is the right to protest for right." The right to protest was
authorized by the rightness or justice of the moral aim, not simply as a
constitutional right justified in and of itself. "It is morally
right," he wrote in his last book, "to insist that every person have
a decent house, an adequate education, and enough money to provide basic
necessities for one's family." Rights could no longer be traded off or
compartmentalized. They were a body, indivisible, as illustrated by the U.N.
Declaration of Human Rights, which Malcolm had tied his kite to.
On the sunny sea island, he was calling for a full-blown human rights
movement, a "human rights revolution" that would place economic
justice at the center. The aim of the human rights movement would be to achieve
genuine integration—meaning shared power—and genuine equality,
requiring a "radical redistribution of economic and political power."
"For the last 12 years we have been in a reform movement." But
"after Selma
and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of
revolution. We must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a
revolutionary movement. We are called upon to raise certain basic questions
about the whole society." The rules must be changed. There must be a
revolution of values. Only by reallocating and redefining power would it be
possible to wipe out the triple interlocking evils of racism, exploitation, and
militarism.
"You really can't get rid of one without getting rid of the
others," he said. "Jesus confronted this problem of the
interrelatedness of evil one day." In the gospel of John a rich man named
Nicodemus came to Jesus and asked, What must I do to
be saved?
"Jesus didn't get bogged down in a specific evil. He didn't say, now
Nicodemus you must not drink liquor. He didn't say, Nicodemus you must not
commit adultery. He didn't say, Nicodemus you must not lie.
He didn't say, Nicodemus you must not steal. He said, Nicodemus you must be
born again. Nicodemus, the whole structure of your life must be changed.
"What America
must be told today is that she must be born again. The whole structure of
American life must be changed."
When he finished his talk the gathering sang a rousing "Ain't Gonna Study War No
More," King's lovely baritone clear as a bell.
Stewart Burns had recently authored To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther
King Jr.'s Sacred Mission to Save America when this article appeared. He was an
editor of the King papers at Stanford
University.
|
Subscribe to Sojourners today at a special introductory price and save $10 off the basic rate! Click here for details.
WE WANT TO HEAR from you! Click here to share your views. Or write to "Letters," Sojourners, 3333 14th St. NW, Suite 200, Washington DC 20010; fax (202) 328-8757. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.
|
|
 |
Read More:
|
