Published on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 by the Boston Globe
The King They Still Won't Talk About
by Derrick Jackson
PRESIDENTS AND presidential hopefuls delivered a kitchen sink of a
Martin Luther King Jr. over the weekend. Democratic candidates talked
about King in the context of Trent Lott, Judge Charles Pickering,
Michigan's affirmative action case, AIDS, criminal justice, schools,
economic disparities, voting, the Confederate flag, and Africa.
Senator John Kerry of Masschusetts said, ''It's time for all of us to
apply the same sense of consciousness, the same guts, the same
determination, and the same impatience to change America for the
better.'' Senator John Edwards of North Carolina said, ''Leadership is
more than photo ops with black children.'' Senator Joseph Lieberman of
Connecticut called King a ''modern-day Moses.''
On the Republican side, President Bush, fresh from throwing bricks at
African-Americans with his stance against affirmative action and his
renomination of Pickering, the softie for a cross burner, found a
forgiving black church in suburban Washington from which to speak in
tongues, issuing such snoozers as, ''There is still a need for us to
hear the words of Martin Luther King.''
By keeping things very black and very parochial (neither Kerry nor
Gephardt reportedly spoke about affirmative action in Iowa last
weekend), some of the universal and universally challenging words of
King were easily passed over by Bush and trod over lightly by most of
his potential Democratic rivals. All the issues they raised are
important, but the chances of addressing any of them will dwindle
precipitously if the nation launches a resource-draining war against
Iraq. Bush is rushing toward it. The majority of the announced
Democratic candidates, including Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, and Dick
Gephardt, voted for Bush's war.
It is no surprise that none of them had the courage to quote the King
who opposed the Vietnam War. Perhaps they cannot, because that is the
King who risked bitter disfavor from the White House.
King spoke out against the war because he decided that ''silence is
betrayal.'' He said he could not be silent as Vietnam drained resources
from the antipoverty programs of President Johnson. He said he could not
be silent over 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.'' He said he could no longer
tolerate the hypocrisy of the America that wanted angry black men to put
down their Molotov cocktails but unleashed untold violence on the
Vietnamese.
''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,''
King said.
He also said: ''I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as
anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to
in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war
where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism
to the process of death, for they must know after a short period that
none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.
Before long, they must know that their government has sent them into a
struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize
that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a
hell for the poor...
''Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation
has taken - the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investment. I am convinced that if we are to
get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must
undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift
from a `thing-oriented' society to a `person-oriented' society. When
machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are
considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered....
''This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our
nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of
hate into veins of peoples normally humane ... cannot be reconciled with
wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to
spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death.... Our only hope today lies in our
ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a
sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism,
and militarism.''
When we see our presidential candidates quoting this King, then we know
that they really share King's guts, determination, impatience. When this
part of King becomes as much a part of the holiday as ''I Have a
Dream,'' then we know that our leaders truly share his sense of
consciousness.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company
###
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