King, the Revolutionary

As today is Martin Luther King, Jr Day in the United States, people will pull out the quotes and speeches of the popular civil rights leader. Over the years, there has been a great whitewashing of his image to make his memory more acceptable to whites and the upper classes. But Dr. King was a revolutionary -- a visionary. If we are to learn from his example, we must remember his moral fortitude in its entirety.

One of the aspects of King's legacy that too often is swept under the rug is his adamant opposition to the Vietnam War, long before it become popular to be so. When King started speaking out on this issue, his approval rating in various Gallup Polls began to take a nosedive. Undeterred, he continued to speak out.

The following is an excerpt from a speech he delivered about one year before he was assassinated:

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Some may point out that King was a devout Christian and that I'm not a big supporter of Christianity or any religion. While I believe religion often does more harm than good, I also recognize that men and women of conscience come from all walks of life and belief systems. For me, King was such a man of conscience.

I believe that his words from 1967 still apply today. As long as the US continues to wage war in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, we can never hope to remedy the serious problems within our society today.