
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in NYC, April 4, 1967
…Dawned cold and clear in New Mexico. With only a small percentage of African Americans in the state, most living in Albuquerque because of the long-ago train connections there, there is little notice paid to this enormously important holiday. And yet, when I listened to Dr. King’s speech on NPR Sunday night, I was moved by the great power of his church-trained voice as well as by his revolutionary message. This is the speech where he connected racism in the U.S. to the War in Vietnam, a speech that caused Washington to view him as a major threat and certainly made him a prominent target for assassination.
None of our public speakers today possess his voice or his moral authority, or the courage to link our domestic problems to our always-escalating wars. As long as our aims are limited rather than universal, piece-meal rather than revolutionary, we are safe—safe from retribution, safe from the consequences of action.
Dr. King spoke as a child of God. No politician today makes such a claim, even by our president who acknowledges faith as part of his background and his present. We have become so antagonistic to any form of organized religion that any mention of God, let alone of being a child of God, provokes a backlash. Only Jews, practicing or not, seem to be free to announce their faith, and that may be the reason their interests are always in ascendency.
And to call on love as the only real hope of change, as Dr. King did at the end of this speech, provokes cynical refusal. Love as a romantic notion fuels most of our entertainment even though many of us have experienced its devastating failures on a personal level, but love as an instrument of policy, as lying at the root of non-violence, seems beyond us. To love our neighbors as ourselves is a platitude seldom acted on, and to love our enemies an impossibility. Now that we face those we call enemies on every side—whether we call them Israelis, Hamas, or other groups we have demonized, the idea of disarming them with love provokes a chuckle of disbelief. If I can’t love the neighbor who leaves his garbage cans out in our shared street rather than cozily lodged on the sidewalk, how can I love an armed aggressor?
And yet what other hope do we have? Is there a white male politician of either party who could bring himself to admit the terrible mistakes of our escalating wars? Or who would dare to claim that he loves even the seven thousand murdered children in Gaza?
Listen to one of Dr. King’s speeches today and reflect on how comfortable it is to feel powerless.
Above, I’m including the speech I heard on Sunday, entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” You may also listen or download at archive.org.
The Wikipedia entry for MLK has his brother saying “..he was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town.” Thus, in addition to sharing mid-January birthdays, you seem to have had the same love of dance. The studocu.com entry for Susan Sontag has this mini-review of her essay on dancing: “Dancer and the Dance” is a short essay of poetic intensity that captures the struggles and transfiguration of the dancer and the ultimate magic of dance.