There were many events yesterday to commemorate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. I attended one of those gatherings, which focused on King’s broader political advocacy highlighted by his 1967 anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time To Break The Silence”. Readings from Charles Marsh’s new book, Wayward Christian Soldiers, were juxtaposed to dramatic readings of King’s speech. Martin Luther King, Jr. will remain for many the principal figure in modern US history whose actions and oratory irrevocably altered the perspective of race in America. When W E B DuBois wrote “for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” in his groundbreaking book, The Souls of Black Folk, he was not uttering prophesy; he was offering an analysis of this country as he saw its ungainly steps from its founding to the current events of DuBois’ life, a haven for freedom, a country of unlimited promise which somehow lost its way in the dark descent to participate in human slavery, to direct a tragic diaspora of innocent lives for a bankrupt economic strategy. While there are always accomplices in such acts, naming them, doesn’t doesn’t go far enough to assuage the guilt or to rectify the crime. What DuBois saw was there for all to see, and as remarkable a man as he was, the scope of this American tragedy was so great, its elucidation was the responsibility of every citizen. What DuBois uttered so succinctly in 1903 incubated –it would be 26 more years before Martin Luther King, Jr was born and nearly two decades later before the fire in his soul burned with the purpose most recognize today.
It would have been understandable if King had stopped with the issue of race; it was, after all, as unavoidable as the color of his skin. But by 1967 the United States’ role in Vietnam had refocused King’s activism; while the issues presented by slavery and subsequent years of racism, remained an integral part of his ministry, he realized that valuation had become solely an economic measure and was entirely emptied of any moral content. It wasn’t just a matter of the rich getting richer, an embarrassing indiscretion where the intoxication might wear off and be forgiven; it was decidedly less Victorian than a matter of manners. Race alone was too easy to overlook. We had years of experience at defining coded words to elude justice, to guarantee that the promise made at the founding of our republic was, in practice, extended to a privileged minority and thereby effectively withholding the exercise of those noble ideas through a maze of caveats imbedded in our legal system from the masses who were unschooled in the exotic handshakes which opened doors of opportunity.
King learned a hard lesson in the steamy tenements of Chicago when he brought his southern Christian movement north. The traditional conviviality of the all-embracing, mother church lost its voice in the cramped living quarters and teeming streets of a big city walled off from itself by social and economic class and race. The failure that MLK discerned was not the principle of non-violence and love that he saw at the heart of Jesus’ teachings but the cultural alterations society had adopted in spite of the essential truth of those teachings: the spirit was alive but the body was decaying. To his credit, King also recognized that it would be cavalier to abandon those who suffered with a simple call to wait for a better time and place when the individual soul was free of its broken temple. The promise land that King proclaimed he had seen was not a procrastinator’s panacea, a piece of rhetoric to forestall the attainment of what already should have been enjoyed by every living citizen of this country; it was not meant to calm the ire of denial that inflamed some to bitterness and distrust; it was meant to redirect all of that pent up energy to reconstruct America with the ideals of its original blueprints. As unseemly as the structures had become, the exteriors only indicated the existence of an offense which lay deeper: there was a spiritual corruption so entrenched and intractable that it defiled everyone, and with it all that this great nation had proclaimed that it was.
One of the great lies of war is that it is a solution; another prevarication of war is that it is necessary, that if choice were possible war would simply atrophy according to Darwinian precepts and we would be free of its thrall, its seduction of security and self-preservation. What MLK learned from the insufferable fragmentation of Chicago tenements was that the life draining conditions of poverty and segregation debauch the vitality of hope, destroy the will to succeed, and, ultimately, even deplete one’s strength to endure. War is a theater for the powerful, the well-placed, the privileged; however, for those who are sacrificed to feed its ravenous appetite, it is the great slaughterer of the uninitiated; it clears cities of its poor and uneducated, it deludes the easy patriots trumped up with flags and glib shibboleths, it indulges the spiritually indigent and it cajoles those whose ideals are so impoverished that their children’s ruination is a way to provide honor and meaning to life that they stoically perpetuate that falsehood.
Last night was bittersweet. The reader conjured up just enough of the mellifluous voice of Martin King to make one marvel at the strength and power of his words. Were he present, the Reverend King might have flashed his infectious smile as he led the congregation in a chorus of that Negro spiritual “Study War No More”.
I’m going to lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Going to lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Ain’t going to study war no moreAin’t going to study war no more
Ain’t going to study war no more
Ain’t going to study war no more
Ain’t going to study war no more
Ain’t going to study war no more
Ain’t going to study war no moreI’m going to put on my long white robe
Down by the riverside
Down by the riversideDown by the riverside
I’m going to put on my long white robe
Down by the riverside
Ain’t going to study war no more
I’m going to talk with the Prince of Peace
But I think that his quick rejoinder to us when the music stopped would have been: we do need to study war. We need to look at it from all sides, in all lights, because if we truly look we cannot fail to recognize how distorted and skewed a perspective it is. I share King’s pacifism, his non-violent ideals, and served as a conscientious objector although I confess that as a young man I felt disappointed after reading the Bhagavad Gita. Youth demands answers and not multiple choice selections, it requires definitive, concrete, inescapably obvious methods to achieve the desired result. Youth eschews conundrums so the elevated dialog which takes place between the warrior Prince Arjuna and Krishna, an avatar of god, on the battlefield before the start of the Kurukshetra war did not offer the certainty that I thought I would find in the text. Life is very much like the truth revealed in The Gita. Paths are infrequently straight and choices are never without either sacrifice or consequence. I have never stopped believing that war is not an answer, an acceptable or appropriate response one human being makes to another. What I do know is that war exists because we want it to exist. There is a part of us that remains vigilant for the opportunity to destroy life rather than to preserve it, to ennoble it. If Martin King had been there last night he would have basked in the sweetness of the praises he received, the inspiration his words still provided 40 years after his passing. He might also have wept, for the bitter reality is that his words are the hallow echoes that remain of his vibrant life, and are still the most powerful replies to the injustice we face. It is not time to put the greatness of Martin Luther King to rest, but it is time for new voices to speak, time to author messages which reflect the present and not be content to recite the glories of the past. George Fox’s penetrating question uttered to Margret Fell near the end of the fifteenth century transcends its archaic phrasing to get at the root of responsibility with unmatched clarity: What canst thou say?
