King, death, regression

Just
after Abraham Lincoln was killed in Washington in April 1865, Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton said the famous words, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Lincoln’s birthday became a national day of commemoration, and he became an
icon for Americans of all races and ethnicities. Stanton faded away, though his
defense of Reconstruction, which if carried through might have prevented a
century of Jim Crow, and attacks on War Department waste and corruption spoke
to the future, too.

            Now we’re observing the life and
death of another assassinated national leader whose story intersects America’s
“color line.” But Martin Luther King, born in January 1929 and killed
in April 1968, has not yet won suitable recognition as a man for “the
ages.” Rather, he’s been largely ghettoized as an African-American hero,
not a universal one, and the full breadth of his work is too little
appreciated.

Dr. King, it’s
often said, has become a plaster saint: no flesh, blood, or radical thoughts. The word
“dream” recoils on him, making him sound vague, merely evocative.

            But the famous 1963 “I Have a
Dream” speech in Washington also had guts, and it remains current. In that
speech, King said America “has given the Negro people a bad check… which
has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.'” Echoing Frederick Douglass’s
reference to the “awful roar” of oceanic change, he foresaw that
“whirlwinds of revolt” would shake America’s foundations.

            There was a flip side, too. In his
Gandhian advice to anti-racist movements, King told us we must “[meet]
physical force with soul force.”

            But it was in his “Beyond
Vietnam” speech of April 4, 1967, that King brought these points home most
forcefully. And most sweepingly: He announced to his audience, for example,
that he was a “citizen of the world” testifying “against the
path” his nation had taken.

            Delivered in New York City’s
Riverside Church, the speech is definitive evidence of King’s transformation
into a political radical, a man who said what Americans needed to hear. The
occasion was a meeting of a group King supported: Clergy and Laymen Concerned
About Vietnam, which would continue as a social-justice organization under the
name Clergy and Laity Concerned. (Disclosure: The writer was a longtime
coordinator of the Rochester CALC chapter, the Peace and Justice Education
Center.)

            Though the speech was naturally
about Southeast Asia, it fits the War on Terror like a glove. “Somehow
this madness must cease,” King thundered. The war, he said, was exacting a
“double price,” “smashed hopes at home and death and
corruption” abroad. America’s aggression against Vietnam, he said,
“is but a symptom of a far deeper malady.” He predicted that, without
a basic political transformation, the US would move from war to war, and
“we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’
committees for the next generation.”

            The nation must begin a
“revolution of values,” he said. “When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,
the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable
of being conquered.”

            He argued for economic justice and
redistribution, as well: “[T]he 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… [A]n edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring… A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.”

The speech
contains treasures beyond description, and it pays to look at the entire
7,000-plus-word text. And like the better known “I Have a Dream”
speech, “Beyond Vietnam” deserves to be disseminated as widely as
possible. But there are barriers to wider distribution — not just doctrinal
ones, that is, the usual intellectual blinders that American institutions wear.

            There actually are struggles over
Dr. King as a brand name and cash cow. King’s legacy is still far from the
public domain. We found this out the direct way when we tried to publish longer
extracts form the “Beyond Vietnam” speech so King’s oratorical power
would jump off the page.

            Our story began with a visit to the
definitive source for the “Beyond Vietnam” speech and other King
documents: Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project.
Founded in cooperation with Mrs. Coretta Scott King and the Atlanta-based King
Center and King Estate, the Project is compiling a 14-volume edition of King’s
papers for research purposes (at $50 per volume). The Project also maintains an
extensive on-line library of King documents (www.stanford.edu/group/King/).

            When we opened the Project’s
portable document file of “Beyond Vietnam,” we encountered some
electronic barriers. Regina Covington, a one-time Rochester resident, confirms
they’re in place. “We have [the speech] on our site, but you can’t
download it or copy it” because of permission restrictions, she says. As
Covington explains, users who want to do more than read a text must detour to
the King Estate’s Intellectual Properties Management office, which jealously
controls the copyrights.

            We e-mailed and faxed
“IPM” for permission to reprint several paragraphs of “Beyond Vietnam,”
but the office did not respond by press time. We also reached King Center
spokesperson Robert Vickers by phone. He declined to speak to us, asking that
we submit questions by fax. We did so but received no response.

            Covington tells us that this is a
busy season for the King Center; and so it must be, with King commemorations
occurring all over the map, and requests of all sorts pouring in. Still, over
the last few years the King Center has drawn ample criticism — from sources
across the political spectrum — for its handling of the legacy.

            In 2002, for example, Forbes magazine ran a piece accusing the
Center of “minting a fortune” from the licensing of King’s image and
speeches. The accusation referred to some wheeling and dealing in Washington.
The King Center had asked the Library of Congress to pay $20 million for a
collection of King documents, and a bill was introduced in Congress to
authorize the minting of a King commemorative coin to raise the money. (The
bill was reincarnated last year and still sits in committee.)

            The Center also made headlines a few
years ago for suing CBS over the latter’s use of the “Dream” speech
without permission. After some to-and-fro in the courts, the matter was settled
in summer 2000, with CBS agreeing to make a donation to the Center.

            In 2001, conservative Black
columnist Armstrong Williams took on the Center for letting Alcatel
Communications use a clip of the “Dream” speech in a TV commercial.
Williams charged there’s “a certain brutality to using a civil rights
leader’s image to hawk merchandise.” Similarly, in 1999 leftist Black
commentator Manning Marable told CNN: “It’s unfortunate that the King
family has devoted its life and livelihood to the commodification of the image
of Martin.”

            Then there are corporate
partnerships that have made heads turn. For M.L. King Day 2003, the Center
announced the entire “I Have a Dream” speech was being offered
“free to the public” — “at participating 7-Eleven® stores
while supplies last.” Last November, the Center said it had “accepted
a $1.2 million check” from the Denny’s restaurant chain. The money,
collected from sales of Denny’s “All-American Slams”®, will fund the
Center’s “nationwide community service initiative. And this month, the Center
chose two honorees for their work “toward building the ‘Beloved
Community,'” U2 lead singer Bono — and Target Corporation, the latter in
part for its philanthropic activities.

            On the other hand, said CNN in 1999,
the Center, though it carries its own line of King merchandise, has
“fought off attempts to market King’s image on everything from
refrigerator magnets and plastic statues to switchblade knives.”

As the
business plan unfolds, the dream of economic progress is unrealized.

            For example, “Black-White
gaps” are still wide, and some gaps are still widening, says a new report
from a Boston-based group, United for a Fair Economy. In 1968, says the report,
the “typical Black family had 60 percent as much income as a White
family.” But by 2002, says the report, the figure had declined to 58
percent.

            Today “one in nine
African-Americans cannot find a job,” says the report. “Black
unemployment is more than twice the White rate, a wider gap than in 1972.”

            The report does foresee progress —
of a sort. It notes the black-white poverty gap has narrowed (though in 2002,
“the Black poverty rate was three times greater than the White poverty rate”).
The kicker is the pace of improvement. “At the slow rate that the Black-White
poverty gap has been narrowing since 1968,” says the report, “it would take 150
years to close.”

            So it turns out the economic vision
in “Beyond Vietnam” is of a distant beyond, indeed.

            And King’s 1967 vision of peace?
With the nation’s leaders issuing explicit calls for endless war and imperial
extension, and cutting budgets while financing a Pentagon bonanza, the slain
leader might say the nation is no longer approaching spiritual death, but has
arrived.

This article appears in Jan 21-27, 2004.