Yesterday, we gathered together again to pay our annual homage to a great man whose life dedicated to lifting up the lives of others is still an inspiration to us today — Martin Luther King, Jr.
On Martin Luther King Day, politicians and other notables give speeches about King and his words. Of course, the most cited are those from the 1963 speech given in Washington, D.C., on the Mall, his “I Have a Dream” speech. The one thing he was able to do in his lifetime was dominate the national conversation by talking frankly about injustice in our society. This conversation was a constant source of irritation to those in power in this country.
This irritation caused King to be surveilled by the FBI as the power structure tried to discredit his ideas by exposing flaws in his very human makeup. He was called a Communist, in the effort to discredit him with mainstream white society, whose consciences were pricked by his calls for justice and freedom in a society supposedly constructed on a foundation made up of those principles.
For me it is interesting that on the day set aside to honor him, most folks don’t talk about King, who demanded significant and revolutionary change and was murdered five years later. Is this on purpose, to not change the conversation in our country, because the social and economic ills of King’s time have been so amplified in the present?
The Martin King of Aug. 28, 1963 and April 4, 1968 (the day King was assassinated) was a different person in the way he looked at how society could be made a better place. In 1963, King talked about a world where children, black and white, played together to be created by the actions of lawmakers. On the day he was murdered, King had moved to the point where he knew there had to be a major redistribution of the wealth in our nation in order for there to be true equality.
He and others had struggled to see the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but came to understand these laws would do nothing to correct the basic economic inequities experienced by millions of all colors and caused by a spiritual corruptness from the war mentality.
On April 4, 1967, King gave a landmark speech on the war in Vietnam, saying, “This business of … filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows … sending men home from … battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, 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.”
A year later, King was helping the Memphis Sanitation Workers fight a battle for human dignity. On March 18, he spoke to them, saying, “I will hear America through her historians … saying, We built gigantic buildings … through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance … through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths.
“But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, ‘Even though you’ve done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn’t provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.’ This may well be the indictment on America that says to the … power structure, ‘If you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me.'”
These words that spoke truth to power over 40 years ago still resonate as loudly today as then. All you have to do is look around.
Respond to Pat at [email protected]
