In the spirit of the holiday, I thought I would put up some excerpts from the speeches and writings of Dr. (or “the Rev.” if you prefer) Martin Luther King, Jr. We have probably already been bombarded by sound bites of the "I Have A Dream" speech, but these tend to present a tame, watered-down representation of the prophetic, global, and sometimes subversive nature of what King stood for.
There’s a passage in James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” in which he writes about the “emasculation of acceptance.” He references great figures he reveres that were each a “fury” in their own time – people like Beethoven, James Joyce, and of course, Jesus Christ. Somehow, after receiving official acceptance, the edges get softened and the things that make great people revolutionary is replaced by something more palatable for those with a vested interest in keeping things the same. I fear this is happening to Dr. Martin Luther King.
Dr. King was cursed by presidents, governors, clergy, black entrepreneurs, and other civil rights leaders. In his final years, many in the American press were devoting massive energy toward portraying him as an unpatriotic, communist sympathizer. The early ‘80s campaign to make his birthday a federal holiday was opposed by people like Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Trent Lott. (Reagan only relented and signed the holiday into law after both houses of Congress passed it with a veto-proof majority.)
He was not universally loved in his own time, and some the things he stood for – like the peace movement, the labor movement, and affirmative action – continue to be touchy subjects now.
So today, let’s remember some of the things King said that are more challenging and revolutionary – things that might make us more uncomfortable.
“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
- Taken from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963)
“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
- Taken from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1964)
“A true revolution of values will lay hand 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.”
- Taken from “Beyond Vietnam,” a speech delivered at Riverside Church in New York City (4 April 1967)
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
- Taken from “Beyond Vietnam,” a speech delivered at Riverside Church in New York City (4 April 1967)
“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, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.”
- Taken from “Beyond Vietnam,” a speech delivered at Riverside Church in New York City (4 April 1967)
“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 South America and say, ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”
- Taken from “Beyond Vietnam,” a speech delivered at Riverside Church in New York City (4 April 1967)
~Geoffrey Dobbins
Vice President, UCABJ
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