Dr. King: Man of peace, time of war
Today, April 4, is the 41st anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. Exactly a year before he was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel, Dr. King delivered a scathing speech titled Beyond Vietnam that outlined his opposition to that immoral war.
Read these words from his speech and substitute Iraqi for “Vietcong” and you’ll realize things haven’t changed much, except there was no moral leader of Dr. King’s standing to confront George W. Bush with these charges:
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
A year after indicting America for its presence in Vietnam, Dr. King was shot by an ex-con whom the King family doesn’t believe was fully responsible. Opposing the empire’s wars can be a deadly choice.
When I was a kid in the late 1960s, there was an afternoon talk/variety show hosted by Mike Douglas, an affable entertainer that I usually confused with Merv Griffin, another singer/talk show host on the air.
In November 1967, Mike Douglas hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the height of the hysteria that led to the assassinations and mayhem of 1968. Instead of lobbing his usual softballs, Douglas tag-teamed with singer and conservative Tony Martin to grill Dr. King about his antiwar stance. (The interview is included in a documentary titled King: Man of Peace in a Time of War. Click here for a brief excerpt.)
When Douglas took a break from suggesting that Dr. King was urging troops to rebel or that his opposition to the war was hurting the civil rights movement, Martin took over as Dr. King sat sandwiched between them. Dr. King was asked if he was Communist and whether his opposition to the war wasn’t hurting the families of the “boys” fighting over there.
Dr. King sat cool, poised and confident as Douglas and Martin peppered him with questions that were obviously prepared. (How many times does a talk show guest get to interview another guest live?) Dr. King’s message of nonviolence never changed. He was asked whether he approved of riots as protest and what he thought of prominent African-Americans who approached the struggle for civil rights with other tactics. Didn’t his opposition to the war undermine his loyalty to the White House? Dr. King answered that he was loyal to the message and not to the person sitting in the White House.
The character of Dr. King, his tremendous adherence to the Gospel and to nonviolence and, yes, his poise are all evident in this TV interview. Watch it for a demonstration of moral force. Forty-one years after his death, Dr. King is still alive with us and yet we miss his powerful voice.
