THE RE-ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
THE RE-ASSASSINATION OF
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
©Wendell Griffen, 2022
This year, the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Education, has invited an un-reconstructed Southern Baptist preacher, right wing politician, and Fox News pundit named Mike Huckabee to deliver a "keynote address" during what it terms an "inter-faith prayer breakfast" on the King holiday (January 17). Attendance will be by invitation only. The event will be held at the Arkansas Governor's Mansion (https://arkingdream.org/events).
A year to the day before he was assassinated Martin
Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, publicly defined the war in Vietnam as a civil
rights issue on April 4, 1967, in an address titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break
Silence to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at
Riverside Church in New York City. In
doing so, King uttered the following prescient statement.
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far
deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering
reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and laymen-concerned
committees for the next generation. … In 1957 a sensitive American official
overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a
world revolution. … I am convinced that
if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must
undergo a radical revolution of values.
We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented"
society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives
and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant
triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us
to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present
policies. On the one hand we are called
to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial
act. One day we must come to see that
the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be
constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin
to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which
produces beggars needs restructuring. A
true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of
poverty and wealth. With righteous
indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the
West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to
take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the
countries, and say: "This is not
just." It will look at our alliance
with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." … A true revolution of values will lay hands
on the world order and say of war:
"This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with
napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting
poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men
home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and
love. A nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation
in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish,
to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will
take precedence over the pursuit of war.
There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with
bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.[1]
Public reaction to King's message was swift and
hostile. A number of editorial writers
attacked him for connecting Vietnam to the civil rights movement. The New
York Times issued an editorial claiming that King had damaged the peace
movement as well as the civil rights movement.
Life magazine assailed the
speech as "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio
Hanoi." The Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American publication, charged King
with "tragically misleading" black people. And at the White House, President Lyndon
Johnson was quoted as saying, "What is that goddamned nigger preacher
doing to me? We gave him the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the
War on Poverty. What more does he
want?"[2]
Nine years after his death King was
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by another Baptist from
Georgia, President Jimmy Carter. A
federal holiday has been established to honor his birthday. His statue has been placed in Washington,
DC. Numerous cities and towns have
re-named major traffic arteries for him in the United States, and he is revered
throughout the world as one of the most prophetic souls of the twentieth
century, if not the modern era. When President
Barack Obama took the oath of office to begin his second term, he placed his
hand on a Bible that belonged to King and alluded to him during his inaugural
address.
After U.S. forces finally withdrew from Afghanistan last year I wrote: In total, 2,448 U.S. service members have died. Tens of thousands more were injured. The U.S. spent more than $2.26 trillion — including more than $500 billion for interest — for the military effort in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan since 2001.
The result of those sacrifices is more than disappointing to
U.S. families who lost loved ones, to veterans who lost comrades, to veterans
who are permanently maimed and scarred in ways that only war can cause, and to
people who care for them. The sorrow and anguish felt by men, women and
children in Afghanistan who hoped the U.S.-led war would defeat the Taliban
goes beyond disappointment. For those persons, the outcome of the war in
Afghanistan is so heartbreaking that we will never have enough money and words
to tally and talk about it.[5]
At the same time U.S. leaders—including
Baptist and other religious leaders—are venerating King's memory they have ignored
or rejected his call for the United States to use its wealth and prestige to
lead the world in a radical revolution of values that rejects war as the
preferred means of resolving differences.
Former President Barack Obama could not have been guided by the vision
of the Baptist preacher whose Bible he used for his second inauguration. Although Obama could not persuade U.S.
officials and global allies to embrace a military response to Syria the way George
W. Bush did concerning Iraq, U.S. militarism continues to cast an ominous cloud
over the world and hinder efforts to address glaring problems at home.
Insensitivity to the insidious racism that poisoned the United States when King was killed has not changed. Trayvon Martin,[8] Oscar Grant,[9] and Amadou Diallo,[10] like Martin Luther King, Jr., were black men shot to death by people who claimed the moral and legal right to take their lives. The racism and militarism King deplored in 1967 were major factors in causing the August 9, 2014, death of Michael Brown, Jr., an 18-year-old un-armed black teenager shot to death by Darren Wilson, formerly of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department. That racism and militarism also accounted for the killing of Eric Garner, who was choked to death on July 23, 2014, by Daniel Pantaleo while other New York Police Department officers pressed their knees on Garner’s torso despite his repeated statement “I can’t breathe!”
The world has since then suffered the trauma of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis Police Officer who pressed his full kneeling weight against Floyd’s head and neck as the helpless man died pleading for his mother. Do not forget how Elijah McClain died at the hands of Aurora, Colorado police. Plainly, the United States has not become more informed about or responsive to racial injustice since King died. We have simply militarized the injustice in brazen ways.
The painful truth is that political, commercial, and even religious leaders are comfortable bestowing platitudes on King's life and ministry while actively and deliberately disregarding his warnings and call for repentance. Our leaders play on (some would say pimp) King's moral authority for their own benefit at every opportunity. However, they question the relevancy of his teachings and warnings for our time.
King is re-murdered by fiscal policies that promote the corporate interests of investment bankers over the lives and fortunes of workers, homeowners, retirees, and needy people (materialism).
King's dedication to attack and eliminate the causes of systemic poverty is currently being re-assassinated by policies that widen the glaring income inequality between the super-wealthy and the poor (classism).
King's righteous indignation against injustice is murdered by proponents of the so-called "prosperity gospel" and those who use religion as a weapon to deny civil rights to people who are LGBTQI, poor, immigrants, women, or otherwise vulnerable (racism and sexism).
King’s call for a radical revolution of values is murdered when we profess to honor his memory while bowing to the techno-centrism responsible for poisoning community aquifers through fracking for natural gas. Thanks to capitalist greed and political incompetence, devotion to techno-centrism has produced melting polar ice, rising oceans, climate change, global warming, growing deserts, dying coral reefs, raging wildfires, and ever worsening weather patterns.
When we honestly assess the mood and conduct of U.S. leaders and the public at large—including religious leaders—since King was assassinated in Memphis, it becomes clear that we have not chosen to embrace the "radical revolution of values" King articulated. We have not weakened the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism. We have nourished, bred, and multiplied them. Religious leaders such as Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. who followed King's model of prophetic criticism and congregational leadership have been rejected and condemned in much the same way President Johnson responded to King.
King was correct when he observed, "America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities…" Sadly, we seem unable to realize that by rejecting his call to reorder our values and priorities—in other words to engage in the Biblical imperative of repentance—we not only "re-assassinate" King. By rejecting his values while pretending to venerate King as our greatest prophet we are destroying ourselves and risk losing any moral authority we claim as agents for peace, justice, and truth in the world.
Sooner or later, those who feed a death wish find a way to destroy themselves. Over the course of the past three generations we have watched and heard the death rattle of the society that rejected Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime, killed him, and has re-assassinated him since the day he died.
Now that the State of Arkansas has proudly announced its intention to "re-assassinate King" by having an un-reconstructed Southern Baptist preacher and right wing politician named Mike Huckabee deliver a "keynote address" on the King holiday at the Arkansas Governor's Mansion at the invitation of the state agency that bears King's name, we should be clear what its conduct means.
A society that behaves this way has gone beyond a death rattle. It is already morally and ethically dead.
We are attending the visitation.
This analysis is revised from my March 24, 2015, T.B. Matson lecture at the now closed Logsdon Seminary on the campus of Hardin-Simmons University in Waco, Texas. Another version of this commentary appears at chapter 5 of The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope (Judson Press, 2017).
[1]
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence is
among the writings of Dr. King compiled by James Melvin Washington and
published under the title A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin
Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1986).
[2]
For reactions to Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence see
http://www.milestonedocuments.com/documents/view/martin-luther-king-jr-beyond-vietnam-a-time-to-break-silence/impact.
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/vincent-harding-civil-rights-author-and-associate-of-dr-king-dies-at-82.html?_r=0
[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314.
[5] https://baptistnews.com/article/afghanistan-and-america-bloodlust-and-the-failure-of-prophetic-imagination/#.YdfsYWjMK8U
[6]
JONATHAN TRAN, Obama, War, and
Christianity: The Audacity of Hope and
the Violence of Peace (Christian Ethics Today, Spring 2012).
[7]
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Color-Blindness, (New York: The New Press, 2010).
[8]
Trayvon Martin was a seventeen year-old black male who was shot to death by
George Zimmerman as Martin was returning to his father's residence from a
convenience store in Sanford, Florida the night of February 26, 2012. Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury on the
charge of manslaughter.
[9]
Oscar Grant III was fatally shot in the back at point blank range by Bay Area
Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle during the early hours of
New Year’s Day of 2009 in Oakland, California.
Mehserle was eventually convicted by a jury of involuntary manslaughter,
served two years in the Los Angeles County Jail, minus time served.
[10]
Amadou Diallo was a twenty-three year old Guinean immigrant who was shot and
killed by four New York City Police officers who fired 41 bullets, 19 of which
struck Diallo, outside his apartment in the Bronx. All four police officers were later acquitted
of criminal charges related to Diallo's death.
As usual on point and many points. I agree and I too am horrified of this travesty and disrespect of Dr. King and of the people who admired and revere him. Deborah Springer Suttlar
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