MAKING DR. KING’S VISION WORK
©Wendell
Griffen, 2016
January 18, 2016
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Observance
Henderson State
University
Arkadelphia,
Arkansas
11:00 a.m.
What
does the vision of justice that inspired Dr. King mean for us now? In view of King’s timeless views about the
meaning and imperatives of justice for our society and world, what would he see
and say about the current condition of our society and world? What should we be doing today if we truly
share Dr. King’s view of justice? Are
our policies and practices in line with the life and ministry of that
prophet? To answer those questions
requires that we go beyond the “I Have A Dream” speech. We must, instead, ponder the way we are
living in the light of what Dr. King said in two later, and less-well known,
statements.
A year to the day before he was murdered
in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. King delivered a speech titled Beyond
Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence
during a gathering of concerned clergy and laity at Riverside Church in New
York City. How many of you have read or
heard that speech? How many of you have
heard of it? I encourage you to find it
on the Internet and read it.
A year to
the day before he was assassinated Dr. King publicly defined the war in Vietnam
as a civil rights issue on April 4, 1967, in an address titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence to a meeting of
Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York
City. Dr. King uttered the following
prescient statement in that address.
The war in
Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and
if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and
laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. … In 1957 a sensitive
American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on
the wrong side of a world revolution. … I am convinced that if we are to
get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a
radical revolution of values. We must
rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a
"person-oriented" society.
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are
considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
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 is not haphazard and superficial. 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 Latin America and say: "This is not just." … A true revolution of values will lay hands
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 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.[1]
Public
reaction to King's words was swift and hostile.
A number of editorial writers attacked him for connecting Vietnam to the
civil rights movement. The New York Times issued an editorial
claiming that King had damaged the peace movement as well as the civil rights
movement. Life magazine assailed the speech as "demagogic slander that
sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi."
The Pittsburgh Courier, an
African-American publication, charged King with "tragically
misleading" black people. And at
the White House, President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying, "What is
that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me?
We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty.
What more does he want?"[2]
Dr.
King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee exactly one year after he delivered
the speech written by Dr. Vincent Harding, a black historian and trusted
friend. Despite the hostile reaction to
the speech, Martin King and Vincent Harding never disavowed it. But Dr. Harding, who passed away last in
2014, always believed the speech was the reason King was murdered. “It was precisely one year to the day after
this speech that that bullet which had been chasing him for a long time finally
caught up with him,” Dr. Harding said in a 2010 interview. “And I am convinced
that that bullet had something to do with that speech.”[3]
Well, I hope you’ll read Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Now let me tell you about another, and even
more sobering message you should read.
January
1969 issue of Playboy Magazine contained a lengthy essay every American should read. This essay, titled A
Testament of Hope, was written by a preacher named Martin Luther King,
Jr. I have not found it in electronic
form anywhere. It appears in a book
titled, appropriately, A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., a collection of
Dr. King’s books, speeches, and interviews that was edited by James Melvin
Washington.[4] A
Testament of Hope is Dr. King’s last published work. Yet I never hear preachers quote it. I never hear political leaders quote it. I never hear or read professors and historians refer to it. How many of you have heard of it?
Here is how Dr. King characterized the
state of social justice and civil rights in A
Testament of Hope.
Whenever I am asked my opinion of the
current state of the civil rights movement, I am forced to pause; it is not
easy to describe a crisis so profound that it has caused the most powerful
nation in the world to stagger in confusion and bewilderment. Today’s problems are so acute because the tragic evasions and defaults
of several centuries have accumulated to disaster proportions. The luxury of a leisurely approach to urgent
solutions—the ease of gradualism—was forfeited by ignoring the issues for too
long. …Confronted now with the interrelated problems of war, inflation, urban
decay, white backlash and a climate of violence, [the nation] is now forced to address itself to race
relations and poverty, and it is tragically unprepared. What might once have been a series of
separate problems now merge into a social crisis of almost stupefying
complexity.[5]
…
…Why
is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that
professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich,
productive and awesomely powerful? The
problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is
deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will
unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated
tranquilly.
…White
America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without
radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the
privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status
quo.
Stephen
Vincent Benet had a message for both white and black Americans in the title of
a story, Freedom Is a Hard Bought Thing. When millions of people have been cheated for
centuries, restitution is a costly process.
Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health
care—each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our
heritage. Each will require billions of
dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred
has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in
financial as well as human terms. This
fact has not been fully grasped, because most of the gains of the past … were
obtained at bargain prices. The
desegregation of public facilities cost nothing; neither did the election and
appointment of a few black public officials.
The
price of progress would have been high enough at the best of times, but we are
in an agonizing national crisis because a complex of profound problems has
intersected in an explosive mixture. The
black surge toward freedom has raised justifiable demands for racial justice in
our … cities at a time when all the problems of city life have simultaneously
erupted. Schools, transportation, water
supply, traffic and crime would have been municipal agonies whether or not
Negroes lived in our cities. The anarchy
of unplanned city growth was destined to confound our confidence. What is unique to this period is our
inability to arrange an order of priorities that promises solutions that are
decent and just.
…If
we look honestly at the realities of our national life, it is clear that we are
not marching forward; we are groping and stumbling; we are divided and
confused. Our moral values and our
spiritual confidence sink, even as our material wealth ascends. In these trying circumstances, the black
revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its
interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply
in the whole structure of our society.
It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that
radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.[6]
…
…Many whites hasten to congratulate
themselves on what little progress we Negroes have made. I’m sure that most whites felt that with the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically
solved. Because most white people are so
far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to
challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes
continue to live with racism every day.
It doesn’t matter where we are individually in the scheme of things, how
near we may either to the top or to the bottom of society; the cold facts of
racism slap each one of us in the face.[7]
…
…When
a culture begins to feel threatened by its own inadequacies, the majority of
men tend to prop themselves up by artificial means, rather than dig down deep
into their spiritual and cultural wellsprings.
America seems to have reached this point…. I think most Americans know
in their hearts that their country has been terribly wrong in its dealings with
other peoples around the world. When
Rome began to disintegrate from within, it turned to a strengthening of the
military establishment, rather than to a correction of the corruption within
the society. We are doing the same thing
in this country and the result will probably be the same—unless, and here I
admit to a bit of chauvinism, the black man in America can provide a new soul
force for all Americans, a new expression of the American dream that need not
be realized at the expense of other men around the world, but a dream of
opportunity and life that can be shared with the rest of the world.[8]
A
Testament of Hope is
the last and best evidence we have about how Martin King saw and understood the
plight of our society. Dr. King had the
audacity to declare the unpleasant truth about the interrelationship of racism,
classism, militarism, and materialism and the crippling effects of longstanding
and studied indifference about those evils.
He did so as a follower of Jesus.
He did so as a Baptist preacher and pastor. But most people have not read or hear of A Testament of Hope, yet go on trying to
quote (and often mis-quote) segments of the “I Have A Dream” speech as if it
was Dr. King’s last will and testament.
Forty-seven years later, the evils Dr.
King addressed so profoundly and prophetically have not been confronted. The Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders
documented the effect of abusive law enforcement behaviors, the lack of
meaningful employment opportunities, and pernicious race discrimination as
factors behind the urban riots of the 1960s.
Those appalling realities have not changed. Racial tension is steadily building because
of the deaths of unarmed black, brown, and poor men, women, youth, and senior
citizens at the hands of law enforcement officers.
As
Dr. King acknowledged in A Testament of
Hope, “there is no single answer to the plight of the [American black
community]. Conditions and needs vary
greatly in different sections of the country.”[9] However, the ongoing violence against black,
brown, and poor people by agents of law enforcement is widespread. But I do not merely refer to physical
violence.
We
must also realize, confront, and correct the systemic injustices in our society
caused by political, economic, and environmental violence.
The
2000 election debacle that involved the Supreme Court of the United States
ordering an end to votes being counted in Florida was a colossal example of
political violence. Voter identification
laws that restrict voting based on fanciful notions of voter fraud are examples
of political violence. The decision by
the Supreme Court that gutted key enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights
Act is another example of political violence.
The
political process is more corrupt than ever.
Voters realize that although candidates ask for their votes, candidates
are more concerned about the interests of the largest campaign contributors
than the plight of the men, women, and children they seek to represent.
Mass
incarceration is also political violence.
There were fewer than 350,000 persons incarcerated in state, local, and
federal jails in 1974. Today there are
almost 2.3 million incarcerated persons.
These political dis-enfranchised people are the victims of what
Professor Michelle Alexander has correctly termed “the New Jim Crow.” Black people disproportionately are
represented in this exponential increase in the number of incarcerated
people. During slavery we were denied
political power because we were considered sub-human (three-fifths of a
person). After the Civil War our
political power was attacked by deliberate schemes that included intimidation,
outright terrorism, murder, and fraud.
The Voting Rights Act was passed to address the most egregious kinds of
that conduct. But the effect of
so-called “war on drugs” has been to rob political power from black, poor, and
other marginalized people.
While
politicians and bankers boast about the nation experiencing a modest economic
recovery, black unemployment and under-employment remains at the depression
level state black people have suffered for years. That economic violence affects every facet of
life.
I
encourage you to go online and read an article by G. William Domhoff, Professor
of Sociology at University of California at Santa Cruz, titled Who Rules
America: Wealth, Income, and Power.[10] Professor Domhoff shares the following
information.
·
In 2006, white households had median
household income (earnings from wages and salaries) of $52,600 compared to
$31,600 for black households and $36,800 for Latino households.
·
In 2007, white households had median
net worth (total assets, including home value, minus total debt) valued at
$151,100. The median household net worth
for black households was only $9,700, less than one tenth of the median
household net worth of white households.
The median household net worth for Latino households was slightly lower
at $9,600.
·
In 2007, the median household financial
wealth (non-home ownership wealth that can be immediately used to acquire other
assets or investments) of white households was $45,900. It was only $600 for black households and
$400 for Latino households.
·
In 2009, white households had a median
income (earnings from wages and salaries) of $51,000, down $2,600 from
2006. Black median household income
dropped to $30,000 (down $1,600 from 2006).
Latino median household income dropped also, to $34,000 (down $2,800
from 2006).
·
In 2010, white households had a median
net worth (total assets including home value minus total debt) of $97,000 (down
$54,000—about a third—from 2007). Black
households had a median net worth in 2010 of $4,900 (down $4,800—almost
half—from 2007). Latino households had a
median net worth in 2010 of $1,300 (down $8,300—almost three-fourths—from
2007).
·
In 2010, median household financial
wealth (non-home wealth) was $27,700 for white households (down from $45,900 in
2007). It was only $100 for black
households (down from $600—83%—in 2007), and $0 for Latino households (down
from $400—100%--in 2007).
Professor
Domhoff explains the significance of these numbers in the following words:
"Black
and Latino households are faring significantly worse overall, whether we are
talking about income or net worth. In 2010, the average white household had
almost 20 times as much total wealth as the average African-American household,
and more than 70 times as much wealth as the average Latino household. If we
exclude home equity from the calculations and consider only financial wealth,
the ratios are more than 100:1. Extrapolating from these figures, we see that
71% of white families' wealth is in the form of their principal residence; for
Blacks and Hispanics, the figures are close to 100%."
Plainly, black households have less
wealth to transfer from one generation to the next. Although these numbers give us a sense about
the income and wealth disparities across racial lines in the United States they
don't explain the causes.
Wealth begins with the ability
to convert earnings into assets. Any
fair assessment of wealth disparity between black and white people in the
United States must recognize that slavery cheated black people from the opportunity
to obtain earnings. People whose households have been opportunities to earn for
centuries are less able to acquire the marketable assets that make up the
foundation for obtaining and building wealth.
Black slaves had no income during
slavery. They left slavery without
income, education, and any other means for acquiring wealth when the Civil War
ended in 1865 after having contributed to the earnings that white people used
in South and in the North to acquire wealth.
Poor white persons who did not own slaves but who earned wages for their
work were able, by virtue of being white earners, to gain income they could use
to acquire houses and build wealth which they could pass to their descendants
at death.
Slaves owned no wealth to pass to their
descendants, only abject poverty and a future of racist oppression. White workers have never suffered that
burden.
Income, when saved, can be used to
purchase homes. Home ownership is the
largest asset purchase made by most earners.
After slavery ended, black workers earned fewer dollars for their work
than their white counterparts so black workers had fewer dollars to save toward
acquiring land and houses. Instead,
black families spent more of their meager earnings for consumption items such
as food and clothing.
Most black people were concentrated in
the rural South until the northern migration during the early and mid-twentieth
century. Wages were low and
opportunities to acquire property were limited for black people in the
post-Reconstruction South. When blacks
moved to the industrial cities of the North and Midwest during the twentieth
century, opportunities to purchase houses were severely limited by racially
segregated housing patterns. Banks and
other lending institutions often refused to finance mortgages in black
neighborhoods.
Even when blacks were able to purchase
housing their opportunities to market their houses at appreciating prices were
limited because of segregation.
Consequently, blacks were substantially less able to build net worth
through increased equity in their homes than were whites.
Substandard earning power, legalized discrimination that
affected opportunities to acquire and homes and market them profitably, race
discrimination in public education, employment, and other forms of injustice
have deprived black families from having equal opportunity to acquire and build
wealth. The history of that inequality
is the necessary starting point for any honest understanding and discussion
about the wealth disparity in the United States between white and black
people. Black household income has never
been equal to that of white households.
Black opportunities for education, employment, and wealth acquisition
have never been equal.
And
as Professor Domhoff correctly observes, nonwhite households are affected worse
than white households when the U.S. economy struggles. White household median wealth dropped a third
in the recent recession. Median black
household wealth plummeted by almost half.
Latino household wealth practically evaporated. Hard work alone doesn't correct those
disparities. That reality, while
inconvenient or unpopular to accept, is nevertheless true.
Public policy in the United States has never
attempted to redress historical wealth disparities between white and nonwhite
persons, but has instead systematically and consistently worsened or ignored
them. President Andrew Johnson made
sure that black slaves didn't receive "forty acres and a mule" after
the Civil War. When Rutherford B. Hayes
became president of the nation less than a generation after the Civil War ended,
the former slaves were left to the worse vices of southern white supremacy as
white southerners immediately pursued violent and pernicious assaults against
black attempts at self-advancement lasting throughout the rest of the
nineteenth century and for two-thirds of the twentieth century.
Black
businesses were intentionally destroyed in many places across the United States
by violent perpetrators. In most cases,
local, state, and federal authorities did little or nothing to bring the
perpetrators of that violence to justice, let alone see that the black victims
of it were made whole. White armed
terrorists destroyed the black business district of Tulsa, Oklahoma (Tulsa's
Black Wall Street).
Race
discrimination in education, employment, political participation, business
development, and public accommodation has been public policy in the United
States longer than government policies on equal opportunity in areas of life
related to earning power and wealth acquisition. Societal complicity in and sponsorship of
race-based violence against black aspirations to acquire and build wealth has
never been even admitted by public policymakers.
Despite
all the proof about state-sponsored slavery, Jim Crow segregation, race
discrimination, and the clear evidence that these injustices have contributed
to disparities between white and black households in wealth acquisition, no
local, state, or national policies have ever been seriously attempted to address
those disparities. Dr. King, like Jesus
and the Hebrew prophets before him, denounced economic violence. Unfortunately, there is little evidence we
have been inspired by their example to confront that evil in our time and how
it operates to torment so many people.
In
conclusion, our challenge is to Make Dr. King’s Vision Work! We must quit genuflecting and making
testimonials about the “I Have A Dream” speech, and put our hearts and minds to
work, across racial, religious, income, regional, and other lines. We must learn to speak and listen to
uncomfortable truth. We must learn to
sacrifice together for the good of all.
Those who are privileged must use their power and influence to help
those who suffer. We must shift our
priorities from profits and property to people.
We must become agents of radical change if we want our reality to
change.
Becoming
agents of radical change will begin when we quit talking about, reciting, and
re-playing the “I Have A Dream” speech as if it was the last and best thing Dr.
King said. Dreams that are simply repeated
for more than half a century are mere fantasies. People who believe that repeating any dream
over time will make it come true are either fools are insane.
Then
we must resolve to do the hard work of speaking and listening to inconvenient
and uncomfortable truth. We do not need
more “Kum Ba Yah” moments where we gather, hold hands, sing “We Shall Overcome”
and then continue thinking and doing what we have always thought and done. Radical and systemic change requires
radically different thinking and conduct from each of us. Those who resist that approach signal they
want things to remain as they are, no matter how much they quote Dr. King, sway
while singing “We Shall Overcome,” and talk about wanting things to get better.
Like
Dr. King, I believe in hope. Recall that Dr. King's last published statement was not "I Have a Dream," but A Testament of Hope. But no person can claim a bequest left by a will unless they follow the will. We will should not expect our society and world to inherit the benefits of Dr. King's hope--his vision rather than his dream--if we do not know what Dr. King declared in A Testament of Hope, and then put it into action.
Because I
believe in hope, I reject the idea that we cannot be better than we are. But we will never be better than we are while
being content to remain as we are, behave as we do, and think as we do. If Dr. King’s vision of a just and peaceful
society for all persons is to come true, we must put it to work by becoming
agents of change.
Thank you for allowing me to challenge
you with that opportunity today. I hope
you will accept the challenge.
[1]
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence is
among the writings of Dr. King compiled by James Melvin Washington and
published under the title A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin
Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1986).
[2]
For reactions to Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence see
http://www.milestonedocuments.com/documents/view/martin-luther-king-jr-beyond-vietnam-a-time-to-break-silence/impact..
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/vincent-harding-civil-rights-author-and-associate-of-dr-king-dies-at-82.html?_r=0
[4]
Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., [James Melvin
Washington, ed.], Harper and Row, San Francisco, (1986 )
[5] A Testament of Hope, supra, p. 313.
[6] A Testament of Hope, p. 314-15.
[7] A Testament of Hope, supra, p. 321-22.
[8] A Testament of Hope, supra, p. 323.
[9] A Testament of Hope, supra, p. 325.
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