DUBBED PLACID, KING's MILITANT VOICE IS REVEALED By Maynard Eaton All too often the media, political leaders and too many historians miscast and misrepresent Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as merely a placid, non confrontational civil rights advocate who was content to focus on integration. The world has been duped into believing that the essence of Dr. King's message and mission is embodied in his "I Have A Dream" speech. While that marketing ploy and characterization of Dr. King's work and wizardry has made him a palatable folk hero, it has also skewed the substance of the King saga. That personification fails to recognize how this charismatic leader emerged as such a threat to America's economic interests he had to be eliminated. Those who worked with and marched with Dr. King say image-makers are attempting to sanitize this African American icon. "Dr. King was a radical revolutionary," opines Georgia State Representative Tyrone Brooks, formerly the national field director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "White America is trying to change the image of King so that our children and unborn generations will not view the real King that we knew. Dr. King was not someone who walked around dreaming all the time. Dr. King was an activist and a true revolutionary." "He was always militant," says former SCLC President Dr. Joseph Lowery of King. "Anybody who talks about staying off the buses and challenging folk to walk is militant. Talking about public accommodations and the denial of the voting rights; all that is militant. He was dynamically and actively militantly non-violent." Brooks contends that Dr. King was assassinated because he was about to redirect the civil rights movement into another dimension ? economic parity. "White America decided that this man has certainly been a catalyst in bring about social change in terms of desegregation and voting rights, but now this man is talking about altering the way America does business and talking about a redistribution of American wealth to the poor and the disenfranchised," Brooks said. "It really upset America." Says Dr. Lowery of the discernable shift in Dr. King's thinking and leadership; "The movement moved away from the customer side of the lunch counter to the cash register side. People who were willing to deal with segregation and busing and lunch counters were not quite ready to deal with economic integration. And so he died. They didn't care about niggas riding the bus, but when you talk about owning the banks and dividing the pie up, that's another proposition. You're talking about a seat at the economic table and even today there is pretty stiff resistance [to that]." During the first decade of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been hesitant to become involved in other political issues, for fear of weakening the cause for racial justice. By 1967, however in a speech at Riverside Church in New York City that many considered momentous, he declared his opposition to the Vietnam War. That speech; that moment amounted to a paradigm shift for the movement and the man. "Peace and civil rights don't mix, [people]say," Dr. King said. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, although I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. "I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube," Dr. King continued. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such? We were taking the young Black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia, which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem." Both Lowery and Brooks say that after that controversial speech, Black and White America to take a different view of King. "The war was about economics as well as humanness," Dr. Lowery argues. "Martin said 'the bombs that explode in Vietnam in the '60s will explode in our economy in the '70s and '80s.' And, it did." "[Dr. King] was roundly criticized by all the establishment Black leadership. They all condemned Dr. King for that speech," Rep. Brooks recalls. "They said he'd gone too far and that the movement ought not get involved with foreign affairs. King said look at the amount of money that is coming out the American taxpayers' pocket ? including Black people ? that's financing this war. After that speech, you saw the anti-war movement really grow ? young, White liberals and other civil rights leaders got on board. So, the King speech at Riverside laid the foundation for that overwhelming American response which said the war must end now." Brooks said it is most important and ultimately tragic that people began to see Dr. King as just a civil rights leader who would focus on domestic policy, not as international, global leader. Hopefully future generations will recognize that his deeds and his direction include far more than just his dream of integration.
