It is a wonderful thing that MLK's monument on the National Mall in Washington DC has been dedicated, and that every year, the closest monday to his birthdate, 15 JAN, is a federal holiday. Yet in all the "official" recognition his legacy (for his role in this country's civil rights struggles) receives, the other half is ignored.
The last year of his life, before he was murdered for speaking out against the war in Vietnam, and US militarism in general, he was involved in what he felt was his most urgent campaign. And which of course, cost him his life. A campaign not just for ending the Vietnam War, but for true social and economic justice and equality for all people and races in the US, and throughout the World.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2010/01/remembering-what-he-died-for.html
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009_01_11_archive.html
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009_01_11_archive.html
It is this legacy that we so urgently need to remember and reflect upon in these uncertain times, when more war clouds are already gathering. As the "corporatocracy"/military-industrial complex sets its sights on fomenting war with Iran, a country which has never threatened or invaded it's neighbours. With the illegal/immoral invasion/occupation of Iraq winding down, and a slow trend toward the same in Afghanistan, the powers that be, feel they need another to keep up their corporate profit margins. And politically, it is thought that this will also help distract attention from the other pressing problems this and all other countries are facing, with their economies, and the global environment.
These speeches MLK gave are some of the most powerful, and so very sadly still relevant ones any prominent figure in this country has ever given.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
"...It is with such activity in
mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five
years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful
revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
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
investments. 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...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, extreme
materialism, and militarism are incapable of being
conquered...
...A true revolution of values
will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and
present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on
life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to
see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will
not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's
highway. True compassion is more than flinging
a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring.
A true
revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty
and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see
individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa,
and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social
betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our
alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just."
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and
nothing to learn from them is not just.
A
true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This
way of settling differences is not just." 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 the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending
men home from dark and bloody 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...
America, the richest and most
powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of
values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from
reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over
the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant
status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a
brotherhood.
This kind of positive
revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the
answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear
weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided
passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United
Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We
must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for
democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take
offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to
remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the
fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
...These are revolutionary
times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation
and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice
and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are
rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great
light. We in the West must support these revolutions.
It is a sad fact that because
of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust
to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary
spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This
has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore,
communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow
through on the revolutions that we initiated. 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.
With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and
unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and
every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made
straight, and the rough places plain."
...A genuine revolution of
values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical
rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to
mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual
societies.
This
call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's
tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and
unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft
misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a
weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival
of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak
response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am
speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme
unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which
leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief
about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint
John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is
born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is
love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in
us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the
day.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).
We are now faced with the
fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce
urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a
thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often
leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide
in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out
desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea
and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible
book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam
is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."
3 April, 1968
You
know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that
I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black
woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther
King?" And I was looking down writing, and I said, "Yes." And the next minute I
felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this
demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday
afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip
of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's
punctured, your drowned in your own blood -- that's the end of you.
It
came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had merely
sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after
the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out,
to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some
of the mail that came in, and from all over the states and the world, kind
letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had
received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what
those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New
York, but I've forgotten what that letter said. But there was another letter
that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains
High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said
simply,
Dear Dr. King,
I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School."
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