The Radicalism & Relevance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is an iconic photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington D.C.. In that speech, King focuses on the struggle for racial equality and civil rights and relies heavily on the language of freedom and opportunity. Such language is central to American political discourse. And King's demands remain in crucial respects unfulfilled. But, as is regularly recognized, King soon enough shifted his language and demands in important ways and came to link the cause of domestic freedom and civil rights to broader claims for peace, equality and justice that fit less easily into the language and practices of American politics. These more radical themes remain relevant today as well.

Here is a passage from "Beyond Vietnam," the speech King delivered to Clergy & Laity Concerned in NYC in 1967. His words clearly resonate in multiple ways with our current circumstance.

"Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours."

Just over a year after that call for solidarity, in early April 1968, King was assassinated. The night before he was shot he delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech in support of striking Sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. And he was quite clear at that moment that "The issue is injustice." King did not abandon the language of freedom, but he placed it in a considerably broader context.

"The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding--something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya: Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee--the cry is always the same--'We want to be free.'"

In effect, King was translating his own call for solidarity into action. He urged his audience to set aside fear and cultivate instead a "kind of dangerous unselfishness." And he identified just how we ought to use such a disposition.

"It's alright to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's alright to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's alright to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do."

King continued to recognize the importance of various freedoms - speech, assembly, press; but he also insists that "the greatness of America is the right to protest for right." His was a call to activism and opposition and dissent in the name not just of freedom and opportunity, but of equality and economic justice and democracy.