Martin Luther King Jr. Archives - Page 5 of 9

50 years ago: the MLK Jr assassination

The Lorraine Motel, where MLK was killed. It is now a civil rights museum.

If I were a believer in conspiracy theories, I would wonder about this coincidence: on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech against the US involvement in Vietnam, an address that most civil rights leaders opposed because it could threaten his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson. And on April 4, 1968, he was dead.

It was that speech, which I read only after the assassination, that really fueled my own antiwar sentiment, that U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia was imperialistic and that the war diverted resources from domestic programs created to aid the black poor. Further, “we were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

One could note that the struggle in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 wasn’t the mere bigotry in public accommodations, which prompted the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955/56, but about government injustice that provided sanitation workers, all black men, with substandard wages and unsafe working conditions. And that was the city in which MLK died.

I vividly remember the I AM A MAN signs on the nightly news. The strike began on February 12, but it was King’s presence starting on March 18 that really attracted attention. The labor action didn’t end until April 16, 12 days after MLK’s murder.

I was home when I heard the awful news, and almost immediately my father, the late Les Green, went downtown to try to “keep the peace.” He had been involved with something called the Interracial Center at 45 Carroll Street in Binghamton.

In answer to a Facebook query I posted, someone wrote that my dad “was very involved with the kids who hung out there, talking to them, and a little counseling if needed.” Whatever his role might have been, Binghamton did NOT have any “rioting” that night, as many US cities did in that painful period.

In 1970, I got to go by the Lorraine Motel where MLK was killed. It is now a civil rights museum.

While the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. had an effect on me, his death may have had the greater impact.
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Fort Wayne, IN tribute to MLK, April 7, 1968

In search of a blue tsunami

Just counting on disdain for the guy occasionally at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to translate into Congressional victory is a terrible plan.

My friend Carla, who I’ve known since high school choir, suggested:

I have an idea for your blog… or maybe just a title…. something like “keep it up Mr. President and the tsunami in November is going to be very, very blue”

What she means is that there could be be far more Democrats in Congress after the November 2018 election than after the 2016 vote.

My immediate reaction is that I’m not so sure that it’s true. Sure the Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has allowed drilling along all the coastline of the United States. And then excluded Florida because 1) Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, is probably running for the US Senate and Floridians HATE looking at off-shore rigs, like the rest of us do, and 2) Mar-a-lago, where Agent Orange likes to spend time, is in Florida.

And sure The Tweeter-in-Chief says stupid stuff on a wide swath of issues, from marijuana to immigration – I need to write on these more extensively – and I feel he makes the US a laughing stock all over the world.

He lies so much that I don’t think he’s even fully aware of it. When his trip to the UK was canceled, he blamed it on the Obama administration’s design of the new embassy even though it was arraigned by George W. Bush.

In short, he is an embarrassment.

Yet, if the stock market is up, and the tax bill cuts people’s taxes in the short term, and unemployment, which fell sharply under Obama, continues to do so, and stores such as Walmart raise wages (from $9 to $11 per hour, even as they slash jobs at Sam’s Club outlets), then some people will be satisfied with the status quo.

It is true that in the generic electoral ballots, Democrats are doing quite well. But one does not vote for a generic candidate, but for specific individuals. I’m pleased that over 30 Republicans have deigned not to run for reelection. An “open” seat is much easier to win rather than running against an incumbent.

Nevertheless, unless people go out and work these elections, getting people registered and then get out to vote, Democrats will not automatically win. It can happen, as it did in Alabama in December 2017, when Doug Jones beat Roy Moore for the US Senate seat that had not been blue in a quarter century.

Just counting on disdain for the guy occasionally at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to translate into Congressional victory is a terrible plan. But the blue tsunami IS possible.

Oh, I love this picture above. Read the story about its creation.

MLK, Jr.: The Role of the Behavioral Scientist

“I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted.”

Here’s my annual repudiation of the notion “If Martin Luther King Were alive, he’d be a Republican,” from his own words. This is an excerpt (900 out of 4000 words) of The Role of the Behavioral Scientist, an address to the American Psychology Association’s annual convention on 1 September 1967. You can find the whole speech here or here.

If the Negro needs social sciences for direction and for self-understanding, the white society is in even more urgent need. White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject…

A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’

The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society…

I believe we will have to find the militant middle between riots on the one hand and weak and timid supplication for justice on the other hand. That middle ground, I believe, is civil disobedience. It can be aggressive but nonviolent; it can dislocate but not destroy…

Negroes today are experiencing an inner transformation that is liberating them from ideological dependence on the white majority. What has penetrated substantially all strata of Negro life is the revolutionary idea that the philosophy and morals of the dominant white society are not holy or sacred but in all too many respects are degenerate and profane…

The worst aspect of their oppression was their inability to question and defy the fundamental precepts of the larger society. Negroes have been loath in the past to hurl any fundamental challenges because they were coerced and conditioned into thinking within the context of the dominant white ideology. This is changing and new radical trends are appearing in Negro thought. I use radical in its broad sense to refer to reaching into roots…

The slashing blows of backlash and frontlash have hurt the Negro, but they have also awakened him and revealed the nature of the oppressor. To lose illusions is to gain truth. Negroes have grown wiser and more mature and they are hearing more clearly those who are raising fundamental questions about our society whether the critics be Negro or white. When this process of awareness and independence crystallizes, every rebuke, every evasion, become hammer blows on the wedge that splits the Negro from the larger society.

Social science is needed to explain where this development is going to take us. Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction…

And may I say together, we must solve the problems right here in America. As I have said time and time again, Negroes still have faith in America. Black people still have faith in a dream that we will all live together as brothers in this country of plenty one day…

And I assert at this time that once again we must reaffirm our belief in building a democratic society, in which blacks and whites can live together as brothers, where we will all come to see that integration is not a problem, but an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

The problem is deep. It is gigantic in extent, and chaotic in detail. And I do not believe that it will be solved until there is a kind of cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will all over this nation…

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted… We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream’; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free… And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.

Martin Luther King: Millions in his firing squad

“Every two-bit politician or incompetent editorial writer found in him, not themselves, the cause of our racial problems.”

Mike Royko was a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, and later, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. His column was syndicated, for I remember reading him, even as a child.

His 1997 obit in the New York Times – he died at age 64 of an aneurysm – called the 1972 Pulitzer Prize winner the “Voice of the Working Class.”

“In his column of Sept. 23, 1981, Mr. Royko sought to explain President Ronald Reagan’s policies of ‘hacking away’ at Federal programs for the poor ‘while spending more and more on the military.’ ‘Contrary to popular belief,’ Mr. Royko wrote, ‘it’s much wiser to take money from the poor than the rich.'”

He published “Millions in his firing squad,” this column of April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Read the whole thing here.

It’s useful because it speaks to today’s conservatives who seek to co-opt Dr. King’s message:
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Millions in his firing squad

FBI agents are looking for the man who pulled the trigger and surely they will find him.

But it doesn’t matter if they do or they don’t. They can’t catch everybody, and Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions.

They took part, from all over the country, pouring words of hate into the ear of the assassin.

The man with the gun did what he was told. Millions of bigots, subtle and obvious, put it in his hand and assured him he was doing the right thing.

It would be easy to point at the Southern redneck and say he did it. But what of the Northern disk-jockey-turned-commentator, with his slippery words of hate every morning?

What about the Northern mayor who steps all over every poverty program advancement, thinking only of political expediency, until riots fester, whites react with more hate and the gap between the races grows bigger?

Toss in the congressman with the stupid arguments against busing. And the pathetic women who turn out with eggs in their hands to throw at children…

They all took their place in King’s firing squad.

And behind them were the subtle ones, those who never say anything bad but just nod when the bigot throws out his strong opinions.

He is actually the worst, the nodder is, because sometimes he believes differently but he says nothing. He doesn’t want to cause trouble. For Pete’s sake, don’t cause trouble!

So when his brother-in-law or his card-playing buddy from across the alley spews out the racial filth, he nods…

The bullet that hit King came from all directions. Every two-bit politician or incompetent editorial writer found in him, not themselves, the cause of our racial problems.

It was almost ludicrous. The man came on the American scene preaching nonviolence from the first day he sat at the wrong end of a bus. He preached it in the North and was hit with rocks. He talked it the day he was murdered.

Hypocrites all over this country would kneel every Sunday morning and mouth messages to Jesus Christ. Then they would come out and tell each other, after reading the papers, that somebody should string up King, who was living Christianity like few Americans ever have.

Maybe it was the simplicity of his goal that confused people or the way he dramatized it.

He wanted only that black Americans have their constitutional rights, that they get an equal shot at this country’s benefits, the same thing we give to the last guy who jumped off the boat.

So we killed him…

Last Sunday night the President said he was quitting after this term. He said this country is so filled with hate it might help if he got out. Four days later we killed a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

We have pointed a gun at our own head and we are squeezing the trigger. And nobody we elect is going to help us. It is our head and our finger.

Martin Luther King: Nobel Peace Prize speech

Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.

Three years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the Daily Beast called it an Often Ignored Masterpiece.

“If you watch a tape of the proceedings, you will be struck by the speaker’s somber reserve. There are no verbal crescendos; there is very little emotion and no drama at all. The template for most of King’s speeches was the sermon, but this is not a sermon. Quiet and reflective, it is more like a prayer.”

King won the award after the March on Washington, after several successful actions such as the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. Yet he wondered whether he was worthy of the designation At his acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway on December 10 of that year, he mused:

I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when 22 million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice. I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death…

Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize.

He decided to accept the honor, but not for himself.

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

In recent years, I have debated people who believe that King’s tactics are “old-fashioned” and “out of date. I disagree. Here are a couple of paragraphs for those of us who have been feeling distraught over the events of the past few months should read.

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him… I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

…I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality… I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered build up… “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.” I still believe that We Shall overcome!

That we STILL have so far to go is difficult to accept, and sometimes we feel as though we are moving backward. And yet we rise.