The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Viet Nam

From dduffy@email.unc.edu Fri Jan 14 02:53:01 2005

Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 05:51:15 -0500

From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Viet Nam

As long as we are talking about social issues, with MLK day coming up on Monday I want to point out grounds to consider the preacher and civil-rights leader as a martyr for the people of the Viet Nam, and a prophet some there should notice.

His assassination came one year after his April, 1967 sermon "Beyond Vietnam", known as the speech at Riverside church, although he had developed it at several places beforehand.

King had survived near-insurrection in Birmingham, in part through the armed self-defense of his followers. Gandhian non-violence came late to King's career and never spread to all his allies. When the pacifist Bayard Rustin first arrived from Gandhi's circle, he found King in a living room bristling with shotguns, rifles, and pistols.

Atlanta and Birmingham and Memphis, the stations of his cross, were railroad towns, where black communities traded shots with whites in a testy modus vivendi, rather than suffer the abject terror of the plantation countryside. But King also had survived because his early message lay square within traditional American individualism.

Many of his black and white supporters were and remain deeply conservative people, outraged simply that a black man couldn't get an education, work, own property and support his family. The martyr Medger Evers, for example, was in life a Mississippi insurance salesman, who would dodge guns and dogs to slip into the plantations at night to sell burial policies, so peons could least plan to rest in their own graves.

When King preached in New York that we must recognize the humanity of Vietnamese farmers, and then at Memphis in April, 1968 that we must extend our recognition to the poor, he stepped outside the bounds of his origins. The next day, we are to believe, a single drifter without resources succeeded in what ten thousand established guardians of white rule in the South and one hundred thousand volunteers had not managed when their whole way of life was threatened.

I think that King died for Viet Nam, courtesy of those in Washington who carried out the daily tasks of the Cold War. That conviction brings me back to King's most famous speech, to the march on Washington. He developed that one on the road, too, giving it for instance at the Detroit church of Aretha Franklin's father.

Known to the world as "I have a dream", its introductory metaphor reflects the bourgeois values of King and his supporters. He begins, "we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check."

His point is that the nation was founded on certain ideals which have not been honored, on a bad check. Today, when most blacks in the United States have full citizenship, but most remain poor and most of the world remains poor, more Americans since the Populists at last are free to question these capitalist values themselves.

But in one country, the other one King died for, nobody is really free to question anything. They don't have freedom or justice. The Party wrote us all a bad check.

They rallied King and the conscience of the world to their side in a civil war, for the right of people to live in peace across Viet Nam. The moment they won they extended a police rule over the entire country which has never let up.

Who will cash King's check in Viet Nam, the check for "the riches of freedom and the security of justice?" There may well be one or two black Baptist preachers in Viet Nam, what with all the GIs and the missionaries in the South.

But I don't expect they will lead any social movement. I would like to see it be the Buddhists, because they hold the great virtue of non-violence at the core of their beliefs. Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Dan Duffy