A National Tragedy and an Invaluable Lesson - the Museum That Hides Truth
BY John Steen
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.
I write to object to continuation of a moral and political tragedy, the failure to include Dr. Martin Luther King's greatest speech and his antiwar advocacy in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The conspiracy of silence that blinds us to so outrageous an omission ought to open our eyes to how commemorations of the 1960s antiwar movement are absent from American history.
Objections to war like Dr. King's and the many others from the public of his era are necessary to counter the moral corruption of those nations like ours that engage in war. The most important of the lessons Dr. King left for us is our blindness to ourselves.
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 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." In its political acumen, it was in keeping with Karl Marx's, "But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present... I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be." (Letter to Arnold Ruge, September, 1843.) King read a bit of Marx and Gandhi at Boston University while studying for his Ph.D. He was devoted to nonviolence, but he saw all the violence we were perpetrating throughout the world.
In this speech, he asserted that there was "no meaningful solution" to the Vietnam War without taking into account the Vietnamese people, who were "the voiceless ones." Here he addressed neither blacks nor Americans, not civil rights but social justice, reaching the level of concern for humanity shown by Malcolm X years earlier. He traced America's involvement in Southeast Asia since 1945, history about which Americans knew little, and decried the Vietnam War (aptly known in Vietnam as the American War) and its effect on the people of Southeast Asia as well as on our own soldiers, "taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem," war that corrupted our nation.
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