A President and a King

Submitted by Alexander Carpenter on January 28, 2007 - 6:26pm.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007 As I read this morning that the President told students at Cardozo High to honor Dr. King's legacy by helping others in need, I tried to articulate what Dr. King's legacy is. I concluded that his legacy has to do with social change with a strong commitment to non-violence. Then I came across a speech he delivered on April 6, 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned, Riverside Church, New York City. From Beyond Vietnam: "I have tried to offer [the desperate, rejected and angry young men in the ghettoes of the North] my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." Of his five suggestions, at least 1, 2, and 5 relate directly to another nightmarish conflict happening right now: "I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict: 1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. 2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. 3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. 4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government. 5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement." As I read this speech, I could almost hear the voice of Dr. King addressing the President's plan for a military surge in Iraq, and thought about the irony of Bush's words to the students at Cardozo High. 11:44 AM

» Alexander Carpenter's blog