The Lesson I learned on April 4, 1968

This has become a bit of an annual event for me on April 4... to remember what that tragic day in 1968 did to an-almost-eleven year old Montana boy...

Read about it here.

Incandescently Clear: Why the Mainstream Media Loathed Martin Luther King on Viet Nam

I'm treating myself to another exploration on God damning America, what is "correct" critique of a nation vs. "incorrect" critique, and why so many find it necessary to react as they have -- largely in ignorance of either history or theology -- to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Folks expect Wright to be Obama's biggest "burden" as far as reaching mainstream America. By "folks," what I really mean is the media. And that pretty much frosts my cookies, especially the more I think and read about Dr. Martin Luther King and the media.

For a little context, let's see what the media was saying about Martin Luther King in 1967, just months before he would be gunned down in Memphis... and why they said it.

King had seen his biggest victories in the Civil Rights movement already. While those victories were being achieved, he'd felt that commenting on the building Viet Nam war was a bad idea. His advisors tended to agree with that sentiment.

But King could not remain silent any longer. April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King spoke at New York's Riverside Church, entitling his comments "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence."

Life Magazine labeled it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi" and that Rev. King had moved "beyond his personal right to dissent." [1] (That an American could move "beyond his personal right to dissent" is a horribly fascinating idea -- and perhaps a sign that then and now are not as far apart as we might imagine.)

The Washington Post wrote about this same speech, "Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people." [2] King had become acceptable to mainstream media, if in part because his non-violent approach to achieving social justice was definitely preferable to increasing violence rooted directly in racial tensions.

So what did Martin say? He drew attention to the fact that pursuing "civil rights" within a nation involved in committing international violence against the poor worldwide was a self-defeating proposition. He pointed to the fact that his insistence upon non-violence in pursuing civil rights was in fact something he could not in good conscience promote as only the right of those within his own country. He underscored the unjust nature of the war in Vietnam as a war against a people who'd fought for their independence for decades. And finally, he called upon the power of love against violence (italics and bolding mine):

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

And MLK's remarks were blunt:

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It [America] can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

Of course the media objected to all this. The uppity black man King had stepped out of his proper place. Time Magazine's April 28, 1967 issue, carried "The Dilemma of Dissent," in which King was criticized for his comments two weeks earlier as well as new comments he made while speaking to the United Nations:

[King in his U. N. speech] called the U.S. "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and compared its use of new weapons in Viet Nam to Nazi medical experiments. Bunche and the N.A.A.C.P. had already criticized King's shift as a "serious tactical mistake." The Urban League's Whitney Young warned that "limited resources and personnel should not be diverted into other channels."

Bayard Rustin, who organized the successful March on Washington, voiced a disappointment felt by many Negroes. "There is not going to be a tremendous rush of Negroes into the peace movement," said Rustin. In fact, many Negroes have found service in Viet Nam valuable in proving their courage—a quantity whose fierce abundance has never before been tapped in American armed combat quite so effectively.

Long the nation's most respected advocate of Negro advancement, King—a Nobel Peace Prizewinner—had held himself aloof from such demagogic "Black Power" advocates as S.N.C.C.'s Stokely Carmichael and CORE's Floyd McKissick. Indeed, King once vowed never to stand on the same platform with Carmichael as long as he spouted an anti-white line. By joining the Spring Mobilization, King reneged on that vow —and possibly on the entire cause of nonviolent Negro advancement.

At the U.N., King admitted that 10 million Americans at most "explicitly oppose the war," but said that they included many of "our deepest thinkers in the academic and intellectual community." Building to a sonorous peroration, he cried: "Let us save our national honor—stop the bombing. Let us save American lives and Vietnamese lives-stop the bombing. Let us take a single instantaneous step to the peace table—stop the bombing. Let our voices ring out across the land to say the American people are not vainglorious conquerors —stop the bombing." Through it all ran the theme that America, "which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world," is now "an arch counter-revolutionary nation."

King, despite the media critique, did not stop. He did not stop his fight against the Viet Nam War. He did not stop with his plans for a poor people's march on Washington, that would have enlarged the Civil Rights vision to include what has always undergirded racism in America: economics. He did not stop until on April 4, 1968, he was stopped forever by one bullet.

Today, Martin Luther King has become an American icon, and justly so. But in making him an icon we also have white-washed his critique of America, of our adventurism and Imperialism, of our forgetfulness of the poor and dispossessed. We have forgotten just how harshly he was treated by our nation -- the majority of us and majority of our media -- while alive.

Martin Luther King told us things we did not want to hear, and right when we'd half-swallowed down his message (which was spoken in truth but also love), he'd enlarge the message to include more painful things we didn't want to hear.

Only a month or so before his death, Martin Luther King gave another speech, more like a sermon really. It was called "The Drum Major Instinct," and is a profoundly Christian speech. But -- again -- he spoke to our nation's coming judgement before the Lord:

But this is why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. "I must be first." "I must be supreme." "Our nation must rule the world." (Preach it cries someone from the audience.) And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.

God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. (Preach it, preach it) God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.

But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. (Amen) The God that I worship has a way of saying, "Don't play with me." (Yes) He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, "Don’t play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. (Yes) Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power." (Yes) And that can happen to America. (Yes) Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening.

I'm frightened, too, Dr. King, these forty years after your death. I'm saddened and disheartened. I see in the Jeremiah Wright controversy -- and especially the media's treatment of that controversy -- the same sort of wide-eyed, dangerous naivety being exhibited by the mainstream media as was exhibited forty years ago. I live in a country where an unjust war kills American soldiers by the thousands and Iraqi civilians by the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands. I do know God is not mocked, as the Word says, and whatever a man or nation of men sows, that shall they also reap. Will we not be judged, and harshly, for these crimes, which had nothing to do with others attacking us on 9/11?

No, I do not think Jeremiah Wright is on the level of greatness Martin Luther King was. But neither do I think King was the simple, meek-and-mild man we've turned him into via the American mythos. Martin Luther King's last few years were years of increasing depression and realization that the civil rights marches had only begun a process rooted in realities far deeper and more pernicious than his younger, more optomistic self had imagined.

Why are the Jeremiah Wrights still angry? Why, for that matter, are white blue collar workers in Pennsylvania angry and even "bitter" about what has happened to them? Why are young people in this nation so energized against a self-professed Evangelical Christian President? Because of his faith... or because of the lack of his faith? Perhaps it all goes back to President Bush stating, not long after 9/11, that America was going to destroy Evil. That manifestly non-christian concept, that evil lies outside of us, somewhere else, became the cornerstone of the so-called "War on Terror," a war in which many Iraqi mothers of dead children, dead husbands, and dead hope view as a war on humanity. Or perhaps it is the same deafness Washington and much of the media display toward true poverty and marginalization of people of all colors, those whom Martin wanted to march on Washington all those years ago before he was cut down.

Martin Luther King and Jeremiah Wright rooted their comments in a biblical vision which ultimately critiques any and all nation-states. So, when we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, we must not celebrate him exclusively or even primarily as a comfortable, optomistic hero. The man was a man, and spoke words that -- except for the name of the war being "Viet Nam" instead of "Iraq" -- could be respoken today verbatim and carry nearly the same meaning and impact. Would he have said, "God damn America"? No. But Dr. King certainly would, and did, basically say that God will damn America if she does not turn. And the terrible truth is, we have not turned. We are still, as Dr. King charged then, "criminals in that war" and "the supreme culprit."

Can we hear this great prophet, and other lesser prophets who echo to us the same message we have yet to truly hear or heed? I pray so... otherwise, it won't matter much who is the President of our nation.

[I may or may not post further on this topic; it seems to have me by the short hairs, but there are some other things I need to blog -- and to do elsewhere.]

tag: Barack Obama, Barack obama iraq, Black History, Black History Month, black pastors, Black Writers, Jeremiah Wright, martin luther king, Viet Nam, nation-state, God's judgment, God Damn America,

"They Got Him!" What I Learned Forty Years Ago Today

Forty years ago today, I was four days short of my eleventh birthday, a young boy in an unusually loving family growing up in Fort Benton, Montana. Fort Benton was a beautiful tiny microcosm of rugged individualism and American middle-class values. It was also virtually an all-white town, as were most towns in Montana then.

The day I remember was cool but not coat weather; I stood in our front yard near a Box Elder tree, shading my eyes against the sunlight. My child heart knew perfection.

I stood, at that moment, in the heart of the American dream. Everything around me had meaning, and all that meaning was good. It was Springtime, the fresh scent of pollen and mown lawns in the air. There was peace, order, tranquility, the quiet morning streets and bright houses mirroring back to me my own place in things. The bright sky spoke of a God who Loved me, loved me by default because I was me and existed in this throbbing good heart of my family, my town, my country.

And then I heard a door slam open, saw a man -- our neighbor -- run into his side yard. "They got him!" he screamed, hands upraised in obvious joy. "They shot that commie nigger Martin Luther King!"

My eyes took in this event, trying to understand it. Who was he talking to? He didn't even glance at me, it was as though he were in his own rapturous world. I stood, still as a deer in the woods, while he slowed his dance and then re-entered his home.

This was not a thing I could categorize. Why would Mr. Corman* be glad that someone had been shot? I was not shocked; I was puzzled. This was an odd event, I decided, and needed decoding.

I had heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, and I had picked up from my mother that she thought he was a good man, but a bit too extreme, perhaps even being used by forces less naive than he was. And I again went to her to discuss what I had seen. I do not remember what she said about Mr. Corman. I remember, though vaguely, her saying that what had happened was sad and wrong.

I felt nothing, but replayed over and over in my mind's eye the leaping, springing body of our neighbor, his mouth shrieking in joy. "They got him!" and "commie nigger" and the dance of ecstasy.

There was no sorrow for me then, only curiosity. I did not actually weep over this incident until over two decades later, while recounting it in a church service.

That day I was a child, on the verge of awakening to sex, death, and all the deep things that torment and break a human heart. And when I remember that day, April 4, 1968, I remember it as the day when I had my innocence taken away, the dangerous innocence of a child raised in a nation that denies its own tortured past and present.

I mourn the child, and mourn the racial hate and ignorance that wounded him that day. I mourn the man who was both purveyor and victim of his own hatred. And I mourn the man who, even in his death, started me on a journey into the complexities, horrors, and suffering of encountering the wounds and sins of America. Sins, I slowly discovered, that I shared in, benefited from, and helped maintain by my unexamined assumptions.

Today I honor Martin Luther King in my own heart not primarily for what he did for the nation or for black people or even for white people. I honor him for taking away my innocence and for becoming the catalyst of a quest that led me back in history and forward toward belief in a meaning beyond the American dream, which I discovered was terribly deficient at its heart. I discovered Christianity, and through King and others like him, also discovered (and am still discovering) how to untwine Christian belief from American mythology.

My innocence I began to lose that April day had been based upon the idea that America was God's Chosen Nation, and that God loved America by default and smiled upon the choices made by our leaders. All I had to do, I thought as a child, was to embrace the goodness of the world I had been gifted.

What I had not realized was that my white skin, my gender, even the language I happened to speak, served as tickets for me while simultaneously excluding Americans who did not have these characteristics. I had never seriously thought of race until that day; I did not have to think of it, because I was its beneficiary.

Today, I realize we all think about race. But I am less sure we really understand our racial history. To understand it, we need to study our history together, and for white people in particular it will break our hearts.

I personally do not believe that any white person can say they are free of racial naivety. I do not think I am free of it, after all these years and all the reading, praying, thinking, dialogging I have done.

I have wept over what happened that day, wept for the child I was and for the dreamer whose love was snuffed out in a moment. You see, I thought as a child that love was what we all wanted and that the world was a good, safe place. But what I learned that day was that love and suffering are bound together, while hate is always with us, always working its poisonous way, and always finding a way to destroy love's messengers. Though not love itself...

The Christian message is that love rises up again, just as it literally -- literally being very important! -- rose from the grave on that first Easter. Martin Luther King was a man, a suffering, imperfect, but called out by love man. He paid the price for daring to love a world which did not want to be confronted by love.

And I, the 10 year old going on 11, did not want to be confronted by the cost of love. I wanted love but did not comprehend the truth about love. A child that young could not have been expected to carry such a burden; it would have crushed me. (Yet thousands of black children had that burden forced upon them from the day of their birth! Think on that!) That day, I learned the truth. Each day, I must choose again whether or not I will embrace the cross of truth and do my tiny tasks on its behalf.

I most likely will never be used by God as Dr. King was. I will almost certainly not be shot because I loved. But I was injured that day, forty years ago. I am still bleeding from the injury. And I will continue bleeding until the day I die, and am healed at last in Love's Presence.

I stood in that yard, and I heard the hateful rantings of a demonic joy that was and is a part of America. And, also a part of me. There are sins we have sinned for which we cannot atone, cannot expect forgiveness as though it is a right or privilege. To think we can expect such forgiveness is to mock not only history, but also to mock Christian theology and the meaning of the Cross. As Kierkegaard reminds us in his "Training in Christianity," to embrace the Word of God is also to embrace the offense to others that Word embodies. That is why Martin Luther King died. His message of love carried the offense of the cross with it, the offense that making visible the oppressed, dispossessed, and marginalized always creates in an unjust society in an unjust world. Better for one man to die...

We are without excuse. The sooner we realize we are without excuse, the sooner healing can begin. Will we ever admit that the death of Martin Luther King was intrinsically part of the American Dream, that the two were woven together in a way that too many of us still want to hang onto?

I do not know the answer. All I know is that, as much as I loved that child, as much as I remember his cool and analytical reaction to what he experienced, I also know I cannot and would not return to the world from which he came. I am awake, and I am awakening. Love demands I stay vigilant. Tears are good; confession cleanses the soul. But deeply dwelling upon and considering these things is better. And acting on them is better yet. There is still so much work to be done, as the recent lack of comprehension over the Jeremiah Wright sermons illustrates.

I do not hate Mr. Corman. Rather, the older I get the more I realize just how hard it is for a single person to battle his or her culture's wisdom, its preconceptions and self-protective blindness. I do not hate myself for my naivety. But I do hate the naivety itself, and I pray that Love continues to strip it from me so that I might be at least a mildly adequate container for a drop or two of love in this broken and terrified world.

God bless you, Dr. Martin Luther King. I miss you every day of my life.


* Not his real name

tag: jon trott, martin luther king, civil rights, i have a dream, april 4 1968, Fort Benton, montana, racial issues, assassination, racism, healing race,