Headline: KING'S
WORDS SPEAK TO TODAY
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman
Publication: ST.
LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: 1/19/1997
Section: NEWS, Page: 4B, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT
IT'S THAT TIME
again.
Martin
Luther King Day is tomorrow, and once more everyone is pulling out all the stops.
The TV documentaries, the school programs, the celebrations and church services,
all honoring the man who had a dream.
But
as the years go by, King's messages become fuzzier. Some would even paint a
picture of King as a mild, passive man who simply urged all Americans to hold
hands and sing "We Shall Overcome."
King was much more forceful, much more complex than that.
In his later years, for instance, King was angered by the problems of economic injustice, both in the United States and internationally. Quotes from his speeches on those topics, though, have been virtually ignored by the media.
Rare are the times
that we hear quotes from King as he criticized U.S. foreign policy, as he did
in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, delivered April 4, 1967. In that speech,
he called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today, " adding that internationally the United States was "on the
wrong side of a world revolution." He questioned "our alliance with
the landed gentry of Latin America" while suppressing revolutions "of
the shirtless and barefoot people" of the Third World.
King
developed a strong anti-war stance, and in 1967 proposed a nationwide campaign
for a referendum on the war in Vietnam. That campaign sought to place anti-war
referendums on petitions on local and state ballots, he said, "as a unique
and dramatic way for people to deliver their mandate against the war."
King's final months were spent organizing the Poor People's Campaign planned, he said, as "a multiracial army of the poor" that would go to Washington and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience if necessary, until Congress established a poor people's bill of rights.
Rare is this side of King shown in retrospectives. Yet it became an important aspect of his life.
Instead, at times, some groups try to use King's words to support their causes, sometimes completely subverting his meaning.
A prime example
of that was the campaign last year for California's Proposition 209, the effort
to do away with affirmative action in that state. In their zest for winning
approval of the measure, its supporters tried to subvert King's words, implying
that he would have been supportive of efforts to eliminate affirmative action.
Yet
in two books, "Why We Can't Wait, " published in 1963, and "Where
Do We Go From Here, " published in 1967, King made his position clear.
In the first book, King noted that many whites "recoil in horror"
at the suggestion that blacks deserve not merely equality but "compensatory
consideration." But, he noted, "special measures for the deprived"
were a well-established principle of American politics. The GI Bill of rights,
for example, offered all sorts of privileges to veterans. Given their long "siege
of denial, " King wrote, blacks were even more deserving than soldiers
of "special, compensatory measures."
In
the second book, King wrote more about the need to combat the economic plight
of the poor of all races, but he also favored measures according blacks "special
treatment" because of the unique injustices that had been heaped upon them.
"A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds
of years must now do something special for him, " King wrote.
Despite the suggestion
by supporters of the California measure that King had argued in favor of using
"bootstraps" alone for success in America, King said this about bootstraps
in a 1967 speech:
"Remember
that nobody in this nation has done that. While they refused to give the black
man any land, don't forget this, America at that same moment, through an act
of Congress, was giving away millions of acres in the west and Midwest to white
peasants from Europe. Never forget it. What else did they do? They build land
grant colleges for them long before they built them for us, in order to teach
them how to farm. They provided country agents long before they provided them
for us, in order to give them greater expertise in farming. And then they provided
low interest rates for them so that they could mechanize their farms.
"And
now, through federal subsidies, they are paying many of these people millions
of dollars not to farm. And these are the very same folk telling Negroes that
they ought to lift themselves by their own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest
to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.
. . . Emancipation for the black man was freedom to hunger."
The man we honor was a complex man. It's easy to pull out one or two things that he did and mythologize. But to do so is to do a disservice to a man who gave a great deal to this nation in many different ways.
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