Essay: Deferring the Dream - 1/15/07
Shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his wife, thinking aloud, said to an interviewer, “Now he is a myth, when he would have preferred to be a man.”
That is probably even more true of Martin Luther King, Jr., the now officially sanctioned, universally revered martyr of the Civil Rights movement. These days, he is too often used as a convenient vessel and an empty icon into which anyone can pour anything.
Newspapers which reviled King as an agitator and a Communist when he was alive now hold him up as the example of a good, responsible civil rights leader, unlike the bad Malcolm X, and all these grasping people who want something for nothing today.
Martin Luther King, as the popular myth goes, was against church bombings, setting attack dogs on children, and believed black folks should be able to eat at lunch counters. He also fought for the right of people to be able to sit in any empty seat on the bus.
And he wanted to let black kids with really good grades attend state universities. That’s an agenda we are comfortable with today, We would likely be a lot less comfortable with the real Martin Luther King had the assassin’s bullet not gotten him.
Hard to imagine now, but if MLK were still alive, he would be only three years older than Teddy Kennedy. And I suspect he would be as active as ever, and not very popular with many of the establishment figures laying wreaths in his memory today.
Towards the end of his life, King became more and more outspoken about his unhappiness with the Vietnam War, which he saw as draining resources and energy needed to fight poverty.
He said this:‘I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that . . . we are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.”
He wasn’t talking about weapons of mass destruction, or Iraq, but he could have been. In his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” King told a somewhat stunned nation that “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. He called on Americans to press their government to stop it.
The reaction was swift. The media almost universally denounced it. The Washington Post said that by attacking the Vietnam War King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
A year to the day after making that speech, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Nobody listens to his Vietnam speech any more, though maybe they should. Just before the end, he quoted a poem by Langston Hughes:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
Hopefully, we’ll keep trying till we get it right.
Happy Birthday, Dr. King.
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