The following
article appears in the January issue of Sojourners
Magazine.
Martin Luther King
Jr. made his first public statements against the Vietnam
War in the summer of 1965. But harsh attacks from the White
House and the press, coupled with lack of support from most
of the civil rights community, initially led King to downplay
his anti-war stance. After nearly two years of wrestling
with the issue, however, King could no longer stay quiet,
and he plunged deep into the difficult and controversial
work of drawing out the connections between war, racism,
and poverty. This excerpt from the forthcoming book To
the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sacred Mission
to Save America, gives a glimpse of King’s transformative
journey.
The stormy spring
of 1967 marked a turning point not only for Martin King, the
anti-war movement, and Lyndon Johnson, but for the nation and
the world. Vietnam was the axis around which the whole planet
seemed to be seeking new directions, new ways out of darkness.
The coming 12 months would draw a dividing line in world history
as critical as any in the 20th century.
Amid the vertigo of
events, King may not have known whether he wanted one movement
or two, or what their relationship ought to be. His double
consciousness allowed him to see the peace and justice movements
as both separate and combined; it depended partly on the audience
he was speaking to. For several weeks in April and May he felt
called to lead both movements. The dramatic entrance of the
most prominent American to oppose the war had energized the
movement like nothing else. Many thousands marched in New York
because King was there.
Yet
though he was used to the quarrelsome civil rights movement,
he was not prepared
for the chaotic new movement whose divisions made the civil
rights community look harmonious. Unlike the latter, anti-war
leaders desired King’s symbolic might as much as they spurned
his calling the shots. The peace train did not hanker for a
new Gandhi.
But
during the weeks that he stood front and center, he focused
on charting a viable
strategy to end the war. Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) organizer James Bevel and key white activists had threatened
mass civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., as the next step.
King insisted that he was not ready to support civil disobedience.
Nor at the other extreme would he heed pressure to run for
president in 1968 as a peace candidate. He considered meeting
with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris, but decided it would
not be prudent. He gave guarded support to the "Dump Johnson" effort
while promoting grassroots pressure for "negotiations
now." He proposed a march on Washington, like the one
in 1963, that would link the war with poverty-program cuts.
That sounded too tame for most anti-war leaders, who wanted
to escalate their tactics – but were not sure how.
He joined with famed
baby doctor Benjamin Spock in launching Vietnam Summer, an
effort to mobilize thousands of students to go door-to-door
and educate their communities about the war, to build the mainstream
opposition that he felt essential to stopping the war. And
he took a further step toward advocating outright resistance
to the draft.
In
February 1964, when young Cassius Clay won the world heavyweight
boxing title,
he announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam (he had
secretly joined in 1961) and changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
Three years later, now a Black Muslim minister and a captain
of Elijah Muhammad’s elite guard, he professed to be a conscientious
objector to the Vietnam War. His white draft board denied his
conscientious objector claim and ordered him into the army.
After his lawyers exhausted all appeals up to the Supreme Court,
he refused induction on April 28, 1967, in Houston.
"I’ll never wear
the uniform of the United States military forces," he
told the press in Chicago. "I am not going 10,000 miles
from here to help murder and kill and burn another poor people
simply to help continue the domination of white slave masters
over the darker people the world over." At the induction
center, the champion asserted, "I will meet them head-on,
and I’ll be looking right into their pale blue eyes." The
government swiftly indicted him for induction refusal. He was
convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The boxing
associations stripped him of his title. Whatever their opinion
of Black Muslims, African Americans felt the assault on their
hero as an assault on them all.
In
a major sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church spelling out his
Vietnam stand – Stokely
Carmichael tapping his feet in the front pew – King congratulated
Ali for his moral courage. "Here is a young man willing
to give up fame, if necessary, willing to give up millions
of dollars in order to stand up for what conscience tells him
is right. It seems that I can hear the voice crying out through
all the eternities saying to him this morning, ‘Blessed are
ye when men shall persecute you and shall call you all manner
of evil for righteousness’ sake.’"
As
for himself, he declared, "I answered a call, and when God speaks, who
can but prophesy?" He called for Americans to repent. "The
kingdom of God is at hand." He heard God saying to America,
you are too arrogant. "If you don’t change your ways,
I will rise up and break the backbone of your power." Ali
was showing the way. Americans must take up the cross. "Before
the crown we wear there is the cross that we must bear."
Ten
days later, at an open-housing protest in Louisville, Kentucky,
King was hit
in the head by a rock after trying to reason with white teenagers
menacing his car. "We’ve got to learn to live together
as brothers," he had told them. That night he gripped
the rock in his hand as he spoke at a rally. Soon after, he
and Coretta picketed the White House with other activists in
their first joint anti-war action. She had been protesting
the war for years, quietly urging her husband along. Finally
he was following her example. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate
who was used to talking with presidents face-to-face was now
joining ordinary citizens who had to shout their peace chants
through the wrought-iron White House gates.
At the end of May
1967, the SCLC held a staff retreat at a Quaker center on St.
Helena Island off the coast of South Carolina. The center was
originally one of the first schools for freed slaves. For three
centuries black people slaving in the rice plantations had
held tight to African customs on the Sea Islands, a cultural
way station between West Africa and mainland America. The balmy
seaside setting hardly distracted participants from the crisis
they faced.
SCLC
staff, mostly men with large egos, had always fought each
other for King’s
favor. He encouraged among his subordinates the verbal sparring
he was unable to engage in himself. Much of the internal conflict
was healthy and productive. But since the stymied Chicago campaign,
infighting had swung out of control.
King
was a harried chief wearing three heavy hats—Ebenezer pastor, prophetic voice,
and SCLC executive. Yet he had been unable to bring in a strong
manager to handle the chaos, unwilling to give up the illusion
of control. Morale had plummeted with confusion over SCLC’s
mission and funding cuts that resulted partly from King’s Vietnam
stand. The staff had to downsize. Except in Grenada, Mississippi,
SCLC’s fieldwork in the South had virtually dissolved. Was
the civil rights movement over? Did SCLC have a future?
He
answered yes to both questions at the retreat in a lengthy
talk, "To Chart
Our Course for the Future." King had often turned to oratory
as an arbiter of or an escape from conflict, as if the power
of his words could transcend the sticky wickets of human impasse,
lifting himself and others to their higher selves, if only
long enough to change the subject.
"It is necessary
for us to realize," he explained, "that we have moved
from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. When
you deal with human rights you are not dealing with something
clearly defined in the Constitution. They are rights that are
clearly defined by the mandates of a humanitarian concern."
During
the previous two years, when it became evident that the historic
civil rights
laws would not sweep away racism or poverty, he had come to
see the inadequacy of individual rights. He grasped that "civil
rights" carried too much baggage of the dominant tradition
of American individualism and not enough counterweight from
a tradition of communitarian impulses, collective striving,
and common good. This subterranean tradition had been kept
alive by peoples of color, especially blacks and American Indians.
The polar strains of individualism and collectivism needed
to be reconciled, as he strove to reconcile other opposites.
His conception of rights shifted to a richer, comprehensive
meaning that reflected his underlying biblical values.
By
1967 King seemed to be following the example of Malcolm X,
who near the end
of his life stressed the need to "expand the civil-rights
struggle to a higher level – to the level of human rights." If
the two leaders had been able to compare notes during Malcolm’s
last year, they would have discovered that each was drawing
similar conclusions about the necessity to go beyond constitutional
rights.
Both
Martin and Malcolm were reconstructing the legacy of their
forebears, such as
Gabriel Prosser, Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston,
Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois. From the end of the 18th
century, African-American leaders had grounded their interpretation
of rights in black spirituality and in what they saw as the
divinely authorized Declaration of Independence, with its "amazing
universalism," in King’s words. Many African Americans
had perceived their human rights, no matter how poorly fulfilled,
as a covenant with their personal God intervening in history
on the side of justice. "Blacks always believed in rights
in some larger, mythologic sense – as a pantheon of possibility," legal
scholar Patricia Williams noted.
According
to this deeper view that King took on, rights were more than
private
possessions. They were a moral imperative that transcended
individual needs. He was rehabilitating the old pre-industrial
meaning of right: something that was right or just (righteous),
that one therefore had a "right" to. Rights rightly
understood were not whatever a person claimed as his or her
due, with no boundaries; but what was required for all people,
and thus for each, by the higher laws of justice and love.
They were those entitlements that constituted the moral foundation
of the beloved community.
Proper rights were
limited by the same moral laws. Rights and responsibility were
not a dichotomy but interwoven. Individuals had a moral responsibility
to secure just rights for themselves and others. That was why,
rooted in biblical faith, many African Americans experienced
rights as shared resources. And why many have felt a duty to
realize them not just on an individual basis, but for their
people as a community or nation. This perspective diverged
sharply from the classic liberal ideology of unbounded rights,
owned by isolated, unencumbered selves devoid of community
ties. King came to have hardly more affinity for such individualistic
rights than he had for unbounded freedom or democracy, coins
of the same realm.
"The great glory
of American democracy," King said many times, "is
the right to protest for right." The right to protest
was authorized by the rightness or justice of the moral aim,
not simply as a constitutional right justified in and of itself. "It
is morally right," he wrote in his last book, "to
insist that every person have a decent house, an adequate education,
and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family." Rights
could no longer be traded off or compartmentalized. They were
a body, indivisible, as illustrated by the U.N. Declaration
of Human Rights, which Malcolm had tied his kite to.
On
the sunny sea island, he was calling for a full-blown human
rights movement, a "human
rights revolution" that would place economic justice at
the center. The aim of the human rights movement would be to
achieve genuine integration – meaning shared power – and genuine
equality, requiring a "radical redistribution of economic
and political power."
"For the last
12 years we have been in a reform movement." But "after
Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era,
which must be an era of revolution. We must see the great distinction
between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement. We
are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the
whole society." The rules must be changed. There must
be a revolution of values. Only by reallocating and redefining
power would it be possible to wipe out the triple interlocking
evils of racism, exploitation, and militarism.
"You really can’t
get rid of one without getting rid of the others," he
said. "Jesus confronted this problem of the interrelatedness
of evil one day." In the gospel of John a rich man named
Nicodemus came to Jesus and asked, What must I do to be saved?
"Jesus didn’t
get bogged down in a specific evil. He didn’t say, now Nicodemus
you must not drink liquor. He didn’t say, Nicodemus you must
not commit adultery. He didn’t say, Nicodemus you must not
lie. He didn’t say, Nicodemus you must not steal. He said,
Nicodemus you must be born again. Nicodemus, the whole structure
of your life must be changed.
"What
America must be told today is that she must be born again.
The whole
structure of American life must be changed."
When
he finished his talk the gathering sang a rousing "Ain’t Gonna Study War
No More," King’s lovely baritone clear as a bell.
Stewart Burns
is the author of To
the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sacred Mission
to Save America, which will be published by HarperSanFrancisco
in January 2004, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of
King’s birth. He was an editor of the King papers at Stanford
University and currently teaches at the College of the Redwoods
in northern California.
‘An
Escalation of Humanity’
Author Stewart Burns
talks with Sojourners’ Julie
Polter on King’s relevance for America today.
Sojourners:
What about Martin Luther King has America tried to forget?
Stewart Burns: Many
like to honor King only as he stood at the Lincoln Memorial
in August 1963, frozen in time, talking about his dream of
justice. But King lived for five more years, during which he
deepened his understanding of American society, especially
what was needed in terms of solutions.
King
had to come to grips with urban rebellions in cities across
the United States
that resulted from desperate poverty and dashed expectations.
People in the ghettos were saying, Well, if we’re supposed
to have freedom now, where is it? We don’t have jobs, we’re
massively unemployed, rats are attacking our babies. King,
who had grown up middle class, really didn’t understand poverty
until the Watts revolt of 1965, when he went and talked to
people there. He then took leadership in focusing the civil
rights movement on economic justice and on a broad range of
human rights. And he came to oppose the Vietnam War very strongly
and bravely.
All of this had terrific
repercussions on his credibility as a civil rights leader.
He had been a genius at what I call radical moderation, but
it got to the point where his radicalism won out and he could
no longer be a moderate leader. He became a nonviolent revolutionary
in the sense of deep adherence to the American creed of freedom,
equality, and democracy and dedication to making it real for
all.
Sojourners: Why
do we need another book on King?
Burns: This
nation is in the kind of desperate condition, the soul sickness,
that King prophesied about in the late 1960s. When he prophesied
that America would be doomed unless we solved these interwoven
problems of racism, exploitation, and militarism, it was as
if he was really talking about the 21st century.
There
have been a number of excellent books about King, but they
tend to present
certain dimensions of his life and leadership without showing
the integrated whole. I attempt to tie together King’s civil
rights and human rights leadership with his fundamental spiritual
journey.
Sojourners: What
could today’s activists learn from King?
Burns: He
clearly escalated his militancy in the last year of his life – he
talked about the need to do massive civil disobedience that
would dislocate the functioning of American cities. But as
he became increasingly militant in his tactics, he also escalated
his humanity. He became more and more fiercely dedicated to nonviolent tactics.
It’s rather phenomenal
to see how he could be so passionately committed to eliminating
poverty, his final great crusade, yet at the same time be almost
a fanatic about the need to adhere to nonviolence principles.
Many activists today are doing magnificent things in terms
of the global justice movement, very creative nonviolent actions.
But they’re not escalating their human concern for their adversary.
They’re escalating their commitment to justice, but not their
compassion. King was a remarkable example of doing both at
once.
From 'America,
You Must Be Born Again’ by Stewart Burns. Sojourners
Magazine, January 2004 (Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 14). Cover.