During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. allied with the Vietnamese peasants \u201cliving under the curse of war\u201d and castigated the unconscionable scale of it. | Jeff Kamen\/Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sheryll Cashin is a law professor at Georgetown University and author of <\/em>several books<\/em><\/a> on racial justice and American democracy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n MLK Day is upon us once again, with its choices of how to spend it \u2014 a parade, a public celebration, service opportunities, a visit to a monument or museum? And each year, when his birthday rolls around, I prepare to wince. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I was born into civil rights agitation in Alabama, sent to jail with my mother at 4 months old because she had the temerity to sit down at a lunch counter to order a hamburger \u2014 with me on her lap \u2014 and refused to leave. So I view MLK Day as more than a day of service. And I get irritated by the sanitized version of Dr. King that is presented to us, devoid of his most insistent demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. King would be considered a radical today. And he was considered a radical when he walked this earth, contrary to his Kumbaya-I-Have-a-Dream image. For me, radical is a good word. After all, the Declaration of Independence was radical and revolutionary. \u201cWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal \u2026\u201d Those 13 words penned by Thomas Jefferson signaled a founding aspiration for a potentially exceptional new nation. Generations of Black Americans, including King, including me, were able to claim and love America based on those words \u2014 notwithstanding the irony that they were, alas, written by an enslaver. The Civil Rights Movement, powered by thousands, including my mother, who were willing to put their bodies on the line in nonviolent resistance, was one of the most patriotic movements this country has known. Because these soldiers for justice agitated to make our radical founding ideal of equality true. For everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of celebrating that kind of \u201cgood trouble\u201d radicalism on MLK Day<\/a>, far too often Dr. King\u2019s legacy is reduced to platitudes, or worse, weaponized by the right<\/a> to advance a colorblind ideology that attacks or suppresses the transformative multiracial democracy to which King aspired. Casting MLK Day as a Day of Service<\/a> is comforting. Yes, on its face, that\u2019s not a bad thing, in that it encourages people to do something kind for others on this holiday, rather than, say, going shopping. But unfortunately, a call merely to service belies King\u2019s positively radical agenda. He championed nonviolent resistance and spoke moral truth precisely to induce \u201c creative tension<\/a>\u201d or discomfort \u2014 a critical step on the road to transformation and creation of the beloved community he imagined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this spirit, for my third annual MLK Day opinion piece for Politico, I decided to reflect on a sermon other than the famous one delivered at the March on Washington that we often hear. It\u2019s a lesser known speech, perhaps his most controversial, because it shows his radical revolutionary vision for America and the world while also outlining his strong opposition to the Vietnam War. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, Dr. King addressed an audience of 3,000 at the iconic Riverside Church in Manhattan. \u201cA time comes when silence is betrayal,\u201d he began and proceeded to deliver a sober, multipoint critique not just of the Vietnam War but also of unchecked capitalism, militarism and racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is well worth a <\/a>56-minute listen<\/a> on his holiday. There are timeless lessons here for our current moment, as we grapple with war abroad and existential threats to democracy at home. I want to underscore three points of his opposition to the Vietnam War that suggest what he would say today about the Israeli-Hamas war \u2014 and America\u2019s role in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, he called for a \u201cradical departure\u201d from the extended destruction and bombing of Vietnam and recommended a unilateral cease-fire to create the conditions for negotiated peace, suggesting that were he with us today he would heartily advocate for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In making his case, King allied with the Vietnamese peasants \u201cliving under the curse of war\u201d and castigated the unconscionable scale of it, perhaps a million killed at that point, \u201cmostly children\u201d he noted. The U.S. military had herded them \u201coff the land of their fathers into concentration camps\u201d to evade bombs, then destroyed \u201ca million acres of their crops\u201d with defoliants. The peasants poured into hospitals \u201cwith at least 20 casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers,\u201d he intoned. And so he spoke:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. \u2026 We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have no doubt Dr. King would have brought the same moral clarity from the beginning to the Israeli-Hamas conflict. He would have decried Hamas\u2019 unspeakable acts of violence, rape, torture and hostage taking on Oct. 7. He would also denounce the U.S. for funding the mass destruction in Gaza that now subjects the entire population to the risk of death by disease, dehydration or starvation. He would denounce the death toll of about 23,000 now in Gaza, the dropping of 2,000-pound bombs in dense urban areas they were not designed for, including in southern territory to which Gazans were ordered to flee for safety. If King were alive today, he would demand that Israel immediately stop the air and ground war, despite the Israeli military\u2019s claim that it is in the process of shifting to a more targeted <\/a>strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Second, Dr. King invoked and applied the nonviolent aims of the Civil Rights Movement \u2014 animated by a moral philosophy of universal human equality and radical love \u2014 to engender understanding of the perspectives of our so-called enemies, the Vietnamese. He called for a \u201cradical maturity\u201d that would give the Vietnamese agency in peace negotiations, sovereignty over their lands and reparations for the damage done to them. Of course Dr. King would demand the same for Palestinians and Gazans. Interestingly,\u00a0some families of Israeli hostages<\/a>\u00a0have made a similar call for cease-fire and a negotiated, permanent political solution \u2014 a perspective perhaps gained because their loved ones held hostage by Hamas have also suffered the nightmare of indiscriminate bombing and war.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, and most uncomfortably, King argued that the Vietnam War was \u201ca symptom of a deeper malady of the American spirit\u201d and demanded a \u201cradical revolution of values\u201d in which we transform from a society focused on \u201cthings\u201d to one that uplifts all people and restructures the edifice that produces poverty. In 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a potentially \u201cdisastrous rise of misplaced power\u201d by \u201cthe military-industrial complex.\u201d<\/a> At the Riverside Church six years later, King echoed Eisenhower\u2019s warning, but took it a step further, bemoaning excessive spending on military violence and connecting it to our nation\u2019s disinvestment in poverty reduction and policies for promoting peace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He spoke from the deepest Christian teachings that animated his life: \u201cA nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n King was very aware that in articulating his empathy for the \u201cpeasants\u201d of Vietnam and their aspirations, he risked being cast as a communist sympathizer ( the FBI certainly saw him that way<\/a>) and therefore undermining the domestic cause of civil rights. But he deflected this criticism by doubling down on the most American of ideals. Our best hope for fighting communism, he insisted, was to rekindle the American revolutionary spirit: Our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolution we initiated created a vacuum for the rise of communism. King, the radical, argued that we must \u201cboldly challenge the status quo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Domestic transformation and peace abroad required \u201can overriding loyalty to humankind as a whole,\u201d he said. And that, he argued, required the hardest work of all to show \u201cconcern beyond one\u2019s tribe, race, class, and nation.\u201d Unconditional <\/a>agape love<\/a> was an absolute necessity for the survival of all humans and the supreme unifying principle of all great religions. To end war and rekindle democracy, he called on all Americans to reject the self-defeating path of hate and retaliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our choice was clear then and it is clear now: \u201cnonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.\u201d The \u201cconundrum of life and history,\u201d King concluded, was getting this choice right. In 2024, in the Middle East, where the Israeli-Hamas conflict threatens to consume the region, and at home, where <\/a>threats of violence<\/a> are a regular feature of far-right politics, we may be running out of time. On this MLK Day, my hope is that we all examine King\u2019s radical playbook and choose nonviolent, agape coexistence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Opinion by\u00a0Sheryll Cashin, 01\/15\/2024 The civil rights icon\u2019s image has been sanitized to Kumbaya, feel-good platitudes. But his message was always that of radical, revolutionary change. During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. allied with the Vietnamese peasants \u201cliving under the curse of war\u201d and castigated the unconscionable scale of it. | Jeff Kamen\/Michael […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15149,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15148\/revisions\/15149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n