Viewpoint Which King will emerge in new
memorial?
By COLMAN McCARTHY
When and if enough money is raised,
a design approved and enough earth bulldozed away, a memorial to Martin Luther
King Jr., will be dedicated in a few years at the Tidal Basin in Washington. In
early December, the National Capital Planning Commission approved a four-acre
site that rests in a direct line between the Lincoln and Jefferson
memorials.
As with these, and including one nearby honoring Franklin D.
Roosevelt, the King memorial will carry chiseled excerpts from speeches and
writings. But which words will be chosen? Which King will visitors to the
memorial connect with?
Since Kings death in 1968, he has been monopolized by those
who see him as a civil rights leader. And only a civil rights leader. Every
January around the time of the King holiday, much of the media replay still
again the I Have A Dream oration -- the stump speech.
Politicians of all or no stripes portray King as a champion of
integration who organized blacks to win voting rights. For those whose vocal
chords can always use another workout, there is remembering Brother Martin with
We Shall Overcome.
Undeniably, King, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said in a 1983 floor
debate on whether to create a national holiday for the slain leader,
worked tirelessly to remove the stain of discrimination from our
nation. But King the integrationist is the tame, safe and sanitized King.
Except for fringe white supremacists and confederate flag wavers, who overtly
favors racism?
Pushed aside -- dumped, really -- is the troublesome and
troublemaking King whose commitment to nonviolence and pacifism meant that he
was much, much more than a civil rights leader. He was a fiercely
uncompromising critic of American militarism who said in New York on April 4,
1967 -- a year to the day before his assassination -- that the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today (is) my own government.
Has that changed? The evidence says no. The same ethic of violence
and the same drives to world domination that dispatched U.S. soldiers to kill
people in Vietnam as a way to solve a political dispute is the one that sent
U.S. soldiers in the 1980s and 90s to kill people in Grenada, Libya,
Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq. Each is a nation of poor people,
and nearly all are populated by people of color. What would King be saying
today about a U.S. foreign policy habitually directed at killing people of dark
skin?
Will Kings statement on the violence-purveying U.S.
government be carved in stone at the Tidal Basin?
And will the designers be instructed to carve into stone
Kings 1967 assessment of the nations spending: A nation that
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
According to the War Resisters League and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, nearly 50 percent of the federal discretionary budget is for
military programs. Congress lavishes on the Pentagon an average of $700 million
a day, a sum three times more than the Peace Corps gets in a year and twice the
annual Americorps budget. Seven hundred million dollars a day comes to $500,000
a minute or about $8,000 a second. A governments values are revealed by
where its money goes.
If Kings views on money make it into marble, perhaps it can
be footnoted with his comment in 1968 when the House and Senate were doing what
they are doing today, penny-pinching on social programs and splurging on the
Pentagons: The Congress is sick.
An entire generation of American students has gone through schools
whose texts ignore Kings memorable antiwar thinking. In Lies My
Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James
Loewen of the University of Vermont examined the 12 most commonly used high
school level U.S. history textbooks. He reports that King, the first
major leader to come out against the (Vietnam) war, opposed it in his trademark
cadences: We have destroyed (Vietnams) two most treasured
institutions -- the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and
their crops.
We have corrupted their women and children and killed their
men. No textbook quotes King.
All of them did, for sure, carry excerpts from the I Have a
Dream speech.
After three decades of being sentimentalized into a historical
relic mummified by the formaldehyde of nostalgia, King has been marginalized in
ways that were never possible while he lived. For one thing, he was around to
defend himself. Near the end of his life, he summed up his mission: Our
only hope today lies in our ability to capture the revolutionary spirit and go
out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty,
racism and militarism.
What hostile world? In the mid-1980s, a major part of it was the
corporate media whose reporters and editorial writers dismissed King as being
far out of his depth with his anti-military views. The New York Times and The
Washington Post instructed King to stick to racial issues, and leave weighty
foreign policy matters to sophisticated people who know something -- like
pro-Vietnam war editorial writers at the Times and Post.
To King critics Carl Rowan and J. Edgar Hoover, antiwar equaled
anti-American. Rowan, a courtier to the war making Lyndon Johnson, accused King
of being duped by people more interested in embarrassing the United
States than anything else, while Hoover smeared King as an instrument in
the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.
Others piled on. These included some blacks who posed questions on
why King was fragmenting himself by mixing peace and civil rights: Doesnt
he understand that racism is his issue, they asked, and nothing else?
King was ready for that one: When I hear such questions, I
have been greatly saddened, for they mean that the inquirers have never really
known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, that question suggests that they
do not know the world in which they live.
Then and now, it is a world dominated by governments and economic
powers whose reliance on violence to solve conflicts has made the 20th century
historys bloodiest. Any memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. that
doesnt forcefully remind us of his militant opposition to war making
ought to be in Disneyland. It will get plenty of laughs.
Colman McCarthy writes from Washington.
National Catholic Reporter, January 21,
2000
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