By Tom H. Hastings
On 4 April 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most comprehensive, brave, ethical, compassionate, eloquent speeches of his life, Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence. Some say it was the speech that moved enough Americans against the war so that it made it impossible for that war to continue except as one opposed by most Americans, especially important politically because there was conscription.
Some say that speech, delivered at the Riverside Church in New York city, was the moment that triggered plans to assassinate MLK. Indeed, President Lyndon Johnson was enraged at King for stepping out of his Civil Rights lane and into the peace movement that was gathering energy and numbers. With one speech, King created a new, very large, and increasingly powerful coalition.
And so, one year to the day later, 4 April 1968, Dr. King was in fact assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and Black communities across the US erupted into riots big and small in some 100 US cities and towns. King was simply regarded as the favorite son, the hero who spoke overriding ethical truths no matter the risk to himself, and always to the benefit of Black people who had suffered centuries of kidnapping, inhuman treatment, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, lynching, discrimination, police brutality, redlining, over incarceration, medical research victimization, voter suppression, lower access to health care, and much more. King, more than anyone, kept Black communities far less violent in their social movement struggles.
King’s assassination–the violent ending of a young life of such remarkable achievement, the hero of his people–lifted the proscription against violence for many who simply could not stand this ultimate act of profound cruelty and disrespect of an entire persecuted race. While some serious rioting had broken out in the three years before his murder, all that had been in northern US cities, where MLK did not hold as much moral sway.
After his killing, the gut punch to an entire people symbolized by that act seemed to simply erase barriers to a highly emotional violent uprising, a fiery catharsis for centuries of horrific abuse based on virulent racism, objectification, and moral depravity.
King’s Beyond Vietnam speech did indeed add powerful weight to the growing opposition to the war, but also awareness of, and opposition to, the racist greed behind the war.
Racist? Hell, yes. The entire Cold War was a racist project. During it–that is from the end of World War II until the dissolution of the Soviet Union–every war except one (the 1956 uprising in Hungary) was waged on the soil of people of color, from Korea to Algeria to Chile and beyond, chronicled especially well by journalist Patrick Brogan in his remarkable 1990 collection of cases, The Fighting Never Stopped: A Comprehensive Guide to World Conflict Since 1945.
The common refrain from nuclear weapons apologists is, “Well, they have kept the peace between the superpowers.” But MLK pointed to the lie and to the truth, that the primary victims of war and the nuclear “peace” were millions of people of color.
Greed? Double hell yes. The hardworking citizens of the US at almost every economic and social level have lost enormous amounts of the fruits of their labor to the war profiteers, the contracting $billions that go to the owners and stockholders of Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and other corporate beneficiaries of Pentagon contracting. With a Pentagon budget of close to a $trillion, that means multiple $billions every single day.
And now, of course, Trump is telling his team of operatives that federal funding for frills like daycare need to end in favor of his record-smashing Pentagon budget proposal of more than $1.5trillion. He starts a war of choice–which is exactly what the Vietnam debacle was too–with Iran and, once again, the poorest Americans will join people of color in another country in paying the hardest prices for it all.
The wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has never been more relevant and is what we still need.
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs at Portland State University. His views, however, are not those of any institution.
