Dr. King’s Global Vision: Today’s Missing Ingredient

Click to view entire MLK cartoon tribute

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the star among many heroes in the demise of Jim Crow, the century-long twilight between slavery and the achievement of full Black U.S. citizenship rights. This leap out of purgatory – an incredible, decade and a half rush of political adrenaline – began with the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools. It promised to usher in the New Black Man and Woman: confident, self-aware, ready to take their places among the proud peoples of the world. Ready, like Dr. King, to use their newly equal legal status to change history.

Every January 15 we should be humbled to confront the reality that we, African Americans, have not fulfilled the promise. “Dream” words will rain down like confetti during the week of Dr. King’s birthday – much of it rote, empty incantations divorced from any semblance of vision or even the most tentative intentions towards action. A minority of celebrants will realize, with a sudden shudder, that it is not Dr. King who is stuck in time by death, but African Americans of the present, through their own inaction.

Dr. King saw the power of people in motion, and assumed the awesome responsibility and risk of attempting to guide the flow to its ultimate destination: universal human freedom. His vision was the product of the collective Black experience, and his own – starting with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, when Blacks through their own efforts cracked the White Wall. King’s disciplined intellect allowed him to assess these experiences, and measure them against the backdrop of the larger, human mural.

“Dreams” were things that were actually possible, based on the particulars of one’s circumstances, conditions in the larger environment, and the exertion of human will. King thanked his God for these personal insights, and allowed the rest of us into his musings with the Deity – a way of sharing the vision, so as to strengthen our will.

The man who led the “movement” was able to do so because he saw clearly his – and our – place in human history. In Memphis on the night before his death, during the same sermon in which he so famously told of having “looked over” the mountain to see the “promised land,” Dr. King let the congregation know why he set out on his journey in the first place.

But I wouldn’t stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding – something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya: Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee – the cry is always the same – “We want to be free.”

Dr. King lifted his audiences out of Jim Crow’s sunken domain, set them in the company of struggling humankind the world over, and called upon African Americans to respond as global citizens to the way that “God” was “working in this period….”

By 1968 the legal barriers that had confined Blacks for 100 years were reduced to rubble. Now was the time for African Americans to assume the responsibilities of full-grown men and women, to definitively throw off the mental shackles of Jim Crow by confronting the larger forces that had created it. “When I say questioning the whole society,” King said in his speech, “Where Do We Go from Here,” August 16, 1967, “it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”

The “promised land” was not a green pasture just over the hill, but a new field of struggle in which African Americans would add their voices and unique experiences to the arsenals of human resistance to evil. This was the prize and the path. Not only was it morally right to oppose the “triple evils,” it was also the intelligent, civilized course for all of humanity. “The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just,” said King in his historic anti-Vietnam War speech at New York’s Riverside Church, exactly one year before his assassination. “A true revolution of values will lay hands 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 veins of people 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.”

King’s April 4, 1967 Riverside Church speech is widely considered to mark his definitive break with President Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. The above passage also appears, word-for-word, in “The World House” chapter of King’s 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

Nothing could be more tragic than for men to live in these revolutionary times and fail to achieve the new attitudes and the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. In Washington Irving’s familiar story of Rip Van Winkle, the one thing that we usually remember is that Rip slept twenty years. There is another important point, however, that is almost always overlooked. It was the sign on the inn in the little town on the Hudson from which Rip departed and scaled the mountain for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, twenty years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington. As he looked at the picture of the first President of the United States, Rip was confused, flustered and lost. He knew not who Washington was. The most striking thing about this story is not that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution that would alter the course of human history.