This commentary is by John Steen of South Burlington, who began as a scholar and teacher of philosophy, had a 20-year career in health planning, health regulation and public health, was a professor of health policy, and is immediate past president of the American Health Planning Association. He is now retired.
In a 1965 sermon, Martin Luther King Jr. explained that the “majestic words” of the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson, that “all men are created equal,” were the cornerstone of the civil rights movement.
On April 4, 1967, he delivered a speech in Riverside Church in Manhattan of a kind never heard before from any American political leader. It was addressed to the American people, not the government. It called upon us to open our eyes and our minds to evils inherent in the American capitalist hegemonic system.
He denounced the United States government, stating, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.” That speech is Beyond Vietnam, A Time to Break Silence.
I’ve always seen the speech as the finest political speech in America since the Gettysburg Address. He began that speech in Riverside Church with the words, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” In it, he called out the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism,” asserting that, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
This must now be seen as judgment of our foreign policy and a plea for social justice.
His legacy is being hidden from us
Since his assassination, his vision of social justice has been replaced in the media by the 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech in which he expressed a vision for a world where content of character matters more than skin color.
But he devoted the final 18 months of his life to making his greater message explicit, one that promoted the solidarity of all mankind. Fifty-five years have passed now since he delivered that visionary speech at Riverside Church. Will the nation let another year pass without acknowledging his true legacy, his best thinking?
Our nation is caught up in a maelstrom of polarized conflict over issues in racial justice, and Dr. King surely devoted his life to that. But he did so much more than that. In this era of the commodification of protest, I think it is our responsibility to ensure that his being made a saint of civil rights doesn’t obscure his devotion to America and to human rights. Let his true epitaph be known.
Let us recall one of the best-known messages he left us: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” We must no longer allow his greatest message to be silenced in our media, one that insisted that all lives matter.
What I want America to realize today is how the legacy of Martin Luther King’s life and thinking is being hidden from us and expunged from our history. MLK’s teachings enraged those who have reason to hate truth, so they were not satisfied with his death. They sought the death of his thinking too.
Ensuring that his life matters
This year, we celebrate the 27th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Or, do we? It encourages people to make the day one of national service, a “day on, not a day off.”
The most appropriate way to do that would be to honor and reinforce King’s protest of our immoral system of racial and economic injustice, and nonviolently resist the American hegemonic warfare state. That takes such “service” out of being mere propaganda and into truth.
Political truth and moral courage were what he lived and died for, so our service should honor his life by realizing the moral revolution of values he envisioned, and avoiding our spiritual death.
Like Socrates, King’s life was devoted to teaching the citizenry to think clearly, especially about the democracy that was first established in Socrates’s Athens and was at risk here on Jan. 6. He had a radical democratic vision committed to trying “to make America what it ought to be.” (Final Speech, Memphis, April 3, 1968.)
King knew that democracy dies in darkness, so he shone great light wherever greed, prejudice, inequality and hypocrisy were to be found. I don’t know of a better epitaph for King’s life than to celebrate how he taught us all to be the kind of citizens a democracy needs to flourish, and a world needs to survive.
After his death, it took Congress 15 years just to establish MLK Day in 1983. Sen. Jesse Helms criticized his opposition to the Vietnam War and accused him of espousing “action-oriented Marxism.” I’ve not heard a greater tribute to King than that.
