I come
today to praise Dr. Martin Luther King not to berate him, for though he has
become in our modern life perhaps America's only indigenous saint, it is useful
to remember how utterly bedeviled he was in his final years of life, hounded as
he was by the forces of the state. It is worthy for us to recall that the
highest levels of government taped Dr. King's phone calls, monitored the
privacy of his hotel rooms, steamed open his mail, and assigned anonymous
informants to his every move. What we have forgotten in this era is how the
second highest official in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one William
Sullivan, wrote in a now notorious memo that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King
was "the most dangerous Negro in America ."
How was he
so?
You, of all
people, the congregation at The Riverside Church should know best, for it was
here at Riverside 's historic pulpit that Dr. King spake the words that, in
FBI parlance made him a "marked" man. Here he called his nation, the United States of America , "the greatest purveyor of
violence on earth," and he condemned "militarism, racism, and
materialism."
King felt
common cause with the peasants of Vietnam who were being bombed by the most
powerful military in the world. To King, there was something not just un-Christian,
but unseemly, when the wealthiest nation on earth unleashed an unprecedented
level of violence on an industrially underdeveloped, agricultural society such
as Vietnam . To King, follower of a poor Jewish
carpenter, the worship of wealth amidst immense poverty in America deeply troubled him.
This is why
the Reverend was marked by the state as "dangerous," a socialist, and
a radical. This is why his fair-weather friends departed him and denounced him
in his greatest hour of need. Martin Luther King was an adversary of the
military industrial complex and the mammoth business interests that support it.
. This is why, like the crucified Jesus, state power marked him, quashed his
voice, and gave him up to a violent death.
But King
did not oppose war, materialism or racism purely out of ideological
motivations. As a man and a child of God he felt these things cheapened man's
relationship with man and degraded the divine principle of life itself. He saw
the dynamic of men fighting, bombing and killing other men, women and children
as the ultimate sacrilege. King felt the pain of Vietnam because he truly believed in a beloved
community...one without borders.
For these
principled impulses and for his words he breathed his last, one-year-to-the-day
of his Riverside address.
As we
gather to remember Martin Luther King, we must ponder what this towering figure
would say about the behemoth of modern day mass incarceration, of stop and
frisk, of the death penalty, of the bewildering violence of drones, and of the
continuing hunger for wars abroad in our name.
We know
that the true Martin Luther King does not dwell in statues, in ghetto streets
bearing his name, or in schools where children are violated daily in buildings
erected in his name. His true spirit dwells with the least of these, in
communities of the poor worldwide, in ghettoes north and south, and, yes, even
in prisons.
In the
revolutionary spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, we remember him as he was, not
as he has since become.
I thank you
all.
From Imprisoned
Nation this is,
Mumia
Abu-Jamal
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