Dan Rather's thoughts on Martin Luther King Day
Today, as we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, I fear that the elevation of King to the pantheon of great Americans who have national birthday celebrations has come at a subtle cost.
King is now spoken of with hushed and nearly universal acclaim, but this has deadened the radicalism of King's message. We must remember that King was a deeply contentious person at the time of his death. The clarity of his mission for justice was not welcome in many corridors of power. He not only preached powerfully about the necessity of racial healing and inclusion. He also issued stirring rhetoric from his pulpit on the need for peace and economic fairness across racial lines. I believe that many who now pay homage to his legacy with florid paeans would be singing different tunes if King was still actively rallying civil disobedience toward the twin causes of racial and economic fairness for the marginal and dispossessed.
With this in mind, I would like to mark this day by looking at a chapter late in King's life that has been too long overlooked. My hope is to give more shape to the nuances of King's mission for justice, a mission that seems all the more relevant - and perhaps distant - in our perilous political moment.
(The following excerpt is from my WHAT UNITES US book in the chapter on dissent.)
"On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York for one of the most consequential and controversial speeches of his career. It was entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” and most Americans weren’t ready for the message he would deliver. Instead of the optimism of “I Have a Dream,” there was a weariness verging on pessimism. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” King said. “. . . We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” King preached about money going for bombs instead of to the needy, about the uneven burden of military service between the rich and the poor, and about the institutionalization of violence at the heart of all wars. King described the plight of the Vietcong and argued that the world would see us as occupiers. In perhaps his most controversial statement, he equated the use of napalm by the U.S. military with the tactics of Nazi Germany. “What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?”
I was not in the pews that evening, but I remember reading the press coverage and feeling a deep ache in my heart. The thought occurred that perhaps King had gone too far. He might have gotten a standing ovation from his antiwar audience, but the larger response to the speech was highly negative. The New York Times ran an editorial entitled “Dr. King’s Error” that suggested, in an observation echoed by many commentators and even some of King’s allies, that the civil rights leader should have kept his focus on racial justice instead of war.
But King saw these causes as inextricably linked. A few days after the speech, he was captured on an FBI surveillance tape in a heated debate with his friend Stanley Levison. Levison worried the speech was a disaster that played into the hands of their critics. King was resolute in response. “I figure I was politically unwise but morally wise. I think I have a role to play which may be unpopular.” That quote is as elegant a definition of dissent as you are likely to find.
In all the sanitized reimaginings of King’s legacy, the Riverside Church speech is too often forgotten. That is a mistake because it captures both the complexities of the times and of a man who was one of the great dissenters in American history. King had exhorted his audience “to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism” to “a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.” I like the phrases “smooth patriotism” and “firm dissent” because fighting for justice is rarely smooth and dissent requires steely resolve.
What is perhaps most striking about the Riverside Church speech, and something I think too often misunderstood about King, is his strong belief that communism was not the answer. For while he was highly critical of the United States, he told his audience, “We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.” One of the more remarkable interchanges I had in an interview with Fidel Castro was when the Cuban communist firebrand expressed his complete bafflement as to why King and other civil rights leaders in the United States had not embraced communism, as so many other protest and revolutionary groups around the world had. I think the answer lies in the nature of principled dissent. We have a long history in the United States of marginalized voices eventually convincing majorities through the strength of their ideas. Our democratic machinery provides fertile soil where seeds of change can grow. Few knew that better than King."