Perspectives
Vindicating King's martyrdom
FORTY years ago, on April 4, Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence with regard to the US's once oppressive race relations, met a violent deathcompleting, however, his mission of crafting an America where, one day, a presidential hopeful like Barack Obama would emerge by breaking the racial barrier. King's dream of racial equality found apt expression in his famous August 1963 speechconsidered one of the most powerful orations of its kind in human history. But then, in later years, King had marched beyond his undying commitment to civil rights, and the issue of poverty (not just among the blacks) as well as the angst of the Vietnam War acquired greater priority in his activism. In April 1967, a year before his assassination, King, in a speech at Riverside Church in New York, eloquently expounded his position on Vietnam and moved to break his silence and speak from his heart. As he pointed out: "We were taking young black men who had been crippled by our society, and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in South East Asia, which they had not found in the ghettoes of South West Georgia and East Harlem. So, we have repeatedly been faced with the cruel irony of watching negroes and white boys on the TV screen as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realise they would never live on the same block in Detroit." Comparable sentiments had also been expressed two decades earlier by actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson, who was scathingly criticised and ostracised for questioning whether it made any sense to expect black Americans to take part in any war against the Soviet Union while they were deprived of basic human rights in their homeland. A possible backlash prevented King from claiming Robeson as a crucial political forebear, although the latter certainly would have agreed with King's characterisation of "my government" as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." Torn by myriad contradictions prevailing in the society, he asked: "What do the Vietnamese peasants think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe." Months later, in a sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King acknowledged: "We've committed more war crimes than almost any nation in the world," and raised the prospect of divine retribution. To a considerable extent, on account of King's contribution to its up-bringing, the American nation has come a long way from the days when its race relations resembled South African apartheid. The prospect of an Obama presidency is a reflection of this change. At the same time, there are multiple other respect in which similar changes are still true. As a consequence, King's critique of his ration's role in Vietnam remains broadly applicable in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan. Last month, the Democratic presidential hopeful found himself in the eye of the storm triggered by a controversial assertion of the former clergyman of his local church, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had commented shortly after nine-eleven that: "America's chickens are coming home to roost," and also suggested that "damn" ought to be substituted as the crucial verb in Irving Berlin's hymn "God bless America." Obama was obviously obliged to distance himself from such comments, and he did it in a manner that only enhanced his stature among impartial observers. "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," Obama said of the man who happened to have solemnised his marriage and baptised his children. "He contains within him the contradictionsthe good and the badof the community that he has served diligently for so many years," he added. He also pointed out that the anger and bitterness still persisting were not baseless, that slavery was America's "original sin," and the brutal legacy of slavery and apartheid lingered on. "The anger," he said, "is real. It is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races." Much the same argument can be applied to embrace the indignation and exasperation that dominate the rest of the world's attitude to the US, and there have been indications during the campaign that Obama is aware of the challenges posed by the nation's deeply flawed assumptions and behaviour in the international arena. During the campaign, Obama said that he didn't want to end just the war in Iraq, he wanted to end the mindset that got US into the war in the first place. The comment by Gary Younge in the Guardian, on the 40th anniversary of King's martyrdom, succinctly encapsulate the man in the following words: "Forty years after King's death, the ability of America to both mythologise the man and marginalise his meaning is all too cruelly apparent ... Had he lived he would most certainly have been loathed. For America to love him, he first had to die." As for Obama, he is imperfect like all human beings, but it does not detract from his status as the most interesting and promising candidate to have been thrown up by the American electoral system in many decades in an America envisioned by Martin Luther King. A thoughtful, intelligent young man, half-Kansan, half-Kenyan and all American, realistically vying for the White House, an idea King would have relished.
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