Marginalizing MLK: Ignoring Dr. King's Still-Relevant Speech

“I have a dream” for peace in the Middle East
Martin Luther King Jr.’s special bond with Israel
by John Lewis

THE REV. MARTIN Luther King Jr. understood the meaning of discrimination and oppression. He sought ways to achieve liberation and peace, and he thus understood that a special relationship exists between African Americans and American Jews.

This message was true in his time and is true today.

He knew that both peoples were uprooted involuntarily from their homelands. He knew that both peoples were shaped by the tragic experience of slavery. He knew that both peoples were forced to live in ghettoes, victims of segregation.

He knew that both peoples were subject to laws passed with the particular intent of oppressing them simply because they were Jewish or black. He knew that both peoples have been subjected to oppression and genocide on a level unprecedented in history.

King understood how important it is not to stand by in the face of injustice. He understood the cry, “Let my people go.”

Long before the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union was on the front pages, he raised his voice. “I cannot stand idly by, even though I happen to live in the United States and even though I happen to be an American Negro and not be concerned about what happens to the Jews in Soviet Russia. For what happens to them happens to me and you, and we must be concerned.”

During his lifetime King witnessed the birth of Israel and the continuing struggle to build a nation. He consistently reiterated his stand on the Israeli-Arab conflict, stating “Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is uncontestable.” It was no accident that King emphasized “security” in his statements on the Middle East.

On March 25, 1968, less than two weeks before his tragic death, he spoke out with clarity and directness stating, “peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”

During the recent U.N. Conference on Racism held in Durban, South Africa, we were all shocked by the attacks on Jews, Israel and Zionism. The United States of America stood up against these vicious attacks.

Once again, the words of King ran through my memory, “I solemnly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of the Jews-because bigotry in any form is an affront to us all.”

During an appearance at Harvard University shortly before his death, a student stood up and asked King to address himself to the issue of Zionism. The question was clearly hostile. King responded, “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.”

King taught us many lessons. As turbulence continues to grip the Middle East, his words should continue to serve as our guide. I am convinced that were he alive today he would speak clearly calling for an end to the violence between Israelis and Arabs.

He would call upon his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, Yasser Arafat, to fulfill the dream of peace and do all that is within his power to stop the violence.

He would urge continuing negotiations to reduce tensions and bring about the first steps toward genuine peace.

King had a dream of an “oasis of brotherhood and democracy” in the Middle East.

As we celebrate his life and legacy, let us work for the day when Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, will be able to sit in peace “under his vine and fig tree and none shall make him afraid.”
U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat, represents the 5th Congressional District of Georgia and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.

I personally cannot diminish what this great man gave me by calling it "MLK Day," I just can't.

It's still "Martin Luther King Jr Day" to me. And that's a tribute to both Dr. King and my parents (Civil Rights Movement), and the tens of thousands of others who peacefully fought for equal rights.

This holiday called MLK's birthday, I fear, has taken the kind of face of other holidays. The celebration is carried out without recognition of the meaning and the events that have lead to there being the holiday in the first place. In the future, I fear, it will come to represent fighter planes and a capitalistic pride that one man was able to overcome the hardships that he faced to become a world leader... so why not everyone? To say that there are those who do not get past the "I Have a Dream speech"... those people who actually get that far might actually represent the choir.

I ashamed to say, but my feelings are that this holiday is - that it has become a distraction from the real intentions of Martin Luther King. I had read biography years ago, and so I had already made up my mind before the first holiday. My impression was that MLK would regard himself a failure if we came to think that the triumph of the day was about Martin Luther King, and not about civil rights and human rights.

The future holds far greater challenges than the past. We've created an illusion of two worlds - one of the East, and one of the West. With the world becoming more inter-related, more dependent on interaction, it should be quite apparent that action is necessary now in order to avoid escalating tensions between peoples down the road. Yet, we have done nothing, perhaps less than nothing to avoid on the oncoming train-wreck. We still live in segregated worlds. The east and the west expect compromise from the other on every issue from terrorism, to poverty, to global climate change, and yet we do little to even get to know the other side better.

It is time to call for the resignation of forces that would isolate the West. It is time to create a consciousness for the oneness of humanity. It is clear that corporate powers have already created a challenge to the sovereignty of the United States. We might in fact recover our sense of sovereignty and representation with the manifestation of a global consciousness.

Thanks for the illuminating post and the links. I feel humbled by MLK's leadership. He knew so well the right choice of words at each juncture. Who do we know today that could be so inspiring?

What Jefferson(1776)/HIM(1935)/MLK(April 4, 1968) said.
One human race is the only way.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,...

We still don't accept people by their merits and not the color of their skin. Laws to force us to do so cause resentment. I truly don't know the answer to fix the whole problem quickly. There are so many aspects to consider. There is no one solution. We certainly haven't fixed it by socially segregating people.
We need to unite all the citizens as one people, Americans.

Thanks for posting this Ras. I can't think of a time when this information would not be relevant.

MLK Day reminds all of us of Martin Luther King Jr.'s strong stance against shipping mail on certain days of the year ...and the price he paid for it.

Simple, Dr. King would be ashamed!

When Dr. King criticize America's foreign policy record, LBJ said he had to go, just like LBJ said that JFK had to go when he passed Executive Order 0001, taking the money printing responsibilities from the Federal reserve and giving them to the Department of Treasury.

LBJ's first order of business was restoring the money printing duties (opportunities to steal) back to the Federal Reserve, which is actually a private bank.

It's about as federal as Federal Express is.

The article calls to actions and lays a heavy list of global atrocities, but what exactly is the author advocating people to do? I'm very interested in reading this speech. Good post

I agree . He was great man . They attack them with some sex scandal , to try and tear down the great ones . Corporatists have no equal to them . The power of his words and ideas will never die , we must remember them , though . I feel like there is a collective amnesia about this universally realized and obvious truth . Great post !

With these words, King became a true revolutionary himself, and, most likely, signed his own death warrant exactly one year to the day of that speech. These words, especially, challenge us to question capitalism, the very economic ideology and system which so many tout as not only the prerequisite for freedom and democracy, but as the basis of "The American Dream": ""an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

Imagine what he would say today, as we suffer with more than 17% total real unemployment (much, much higher among Hispanic and African-American males), more than six applicants for every job, increasing home foreclosures, growing numbers of hungry and homeless, a widening wealth gap between the top 5% and the rest of the U.S. greater than ever, and 45,000 dying each year due to lack of affordable health care in the wealthiest nation on earth, while Wall Street bankers get record-high bonuses, war profiteers see increasing stock prices, and climate change becomes life-threatening climate chaos for our children and grandchildren as well as for so many non-human species which share our precious planet.

King would most likely be at the forefront of a people's movement to restructure our entire culture from a predatory, thing-oriented one to one of compassion, as he said. His reaction to his own Nobel Peace Prize is indicative of who he was and what he would be doing, and challenging us to do, today: "I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man.' "

What a contrast to the war-justifying speech Barack Obama gave in Oslo when he accepted his own Nobel Peace Prize! And what an inspiration for all of us to keep working, each in our own ways, to help make King's more transcendent "dream," that of a true revolution of values, especially the anti-capitalist value of compassion, a reality some day.

We must remember Dr. King's transformative speech as we celebrate his birth and life this week. His vision of a planet peopled by humans who value justice and compassion and each other more than shiny, expensive objects and the power to dominate or exclude or exterminate others, is a vision worth striving for more than ever as our nation struggles to restore what is left of democracy here, and as our species struggles with the global climatic consequences of its addiction to extreme materialism, racism, and militarism.

Remember what he said: "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."

2010 is the year we must begin to live his words, and to meet the challenge he gave us nearly 43 years ago. His true legacy lives on in the way we must now live our lives, and continue his struggle to make that long-overdue "true revolution of values" a reality.

We can no longer rely on delusions and distractions such as Obama, or the Pentagon, or Democrats, or Republicans, or pundits, or the media, all of whom have vested interests in maintaining the morally corrupt, inhumane, violent, self-destructive, and insane status quo which now threatens us all. It is solely up to us to continue his great work. And we must, if we care about the future.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

- Frederick Douglass

What would he say about the vast network of perhaps as many as 800 U.S. military bases, huge and small, intentionally built in dozens of foreign countries where our "national interests" (translation: corporate/geostrategic advantages) allegedly lie?

What would he say about nuclear-armed U.S. naval fleets on and under every one of the earth's oceans, and our total nuclear arsenal of close to ten thousand thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction which could end most human life on the planet in 30 minutes?

What would he say about the tragic irony of the first African-American U.S. president presiding over, if not controlling, this menacing global corporate-military empire?

Here is what he did say, presciently, in "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence": "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Of course, in the supposedly "most religious" Western nation addicted to extreme materialism and too distracted by celebrity gossip, sports, and "reality" TV to care about the true state of their own declining country, let alone the planet, "spiritual death" is the very last thing on the minds of most U.S. consumers. Then again, we should never be so foolish as to confuse religion with spirituality, let alone consumerism with citizenship.

Not content, however, to only delineate our country's bloody history and its violent flaws, King spoke about what we need to do in words that are timeless:

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 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 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.

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 the 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.

Looking back at our nation's roots and its bloody history, King had come to realize how the lust for power and resources, mixed with and justified by racism, and carried out with ever-growing deadly military force, had made the United States government, by 1967, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

What would he say now, in 2010, as the U.S. occupies Iraq and Afghanistan, with their proximity to oil and natural gas as well as to Iran, Russia, and China, having helped cause the avoidable deaths of more than one million Iraqis and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Afghanis (but, since we "don't do body counts" of those Muslim "Others" whose countries we invade, we'll never know the correct figures)?

What would he say today as our nation uses drones and mercenaries to kill people in Pakistan (strategically located near China and India) and in Yemen (a strategic chokepoint for oil)?

What would he say about the yearly $3 billion given to Israel in U.S. military aid and weapons, much of which is used on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank in that 42-year illegal occupation?

What would he say about the U.S. military in Colombia, building more bases there to threaten the peoples' revolutions ("Socialism! Socialism! How dare those people think they have a right to the resources in their own lands?) which have occurred throughout South America?

What would he say about the creation of AfriCom, the new U.S. military command which hopes to control the resources, mineral and human, of all of Africa, regardless of how many hundreds of thousands of African "Others" are slaughtered so our cell phones will continue to be mass-produced?

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