Opening Remarks—Martin Luther
King Day Chapel Service
Daniel F. Sullivan—January
22, 2007
I
am always amazed, as this annual celebration of the life of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. approaches and I think about what
to say to you at the beginning of this service, at how spending
some time with King’s writings and speeches—using
them as a lens with which to view the present—helps me
see the present more clearly. Not surprisingly this year,
many—including even the Syracuse Post-Standard on its
front page a week ago—have raised up for new consideration
King’s pivotal speech at Riverside Church on the evening
of April 4, 1967. It was there, at a time of escalating
national tension not just over civil rights but also the expanding
war in Vietnam that King linked the two and, at great risk
to the civil rights movement many said, became an outspoken
critic of U.S. policy with regard to Vietnam.
He opened
this way:
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because
my conscience leaves me no other choice . . . . . .
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to
my beloved nation . . .
And then quoting from recent statements of the executive committee
of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, he said:
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not
easily assume the task of opposing their government’s
policy, especially in time of war, [but] “A time comes
when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come
for us in relation to Vietnam.
Among the links he made between Vietnam and the civil rights
movement in America were these, summarized wonderfully in Taylor
Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge, the last volume
of his three-part biography of King and easily one of the five
best books of any I kind I have ever read:
Vietnam had “broken and eviscerated” the
historic momentum for justice since the [Montgomery] bus boycott
. . . . . Moreover, circumstance compelled poor black
soldiers to kill and die at nearly twice their proportion for
a stated purpose to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that
remained myths at home, fighting “in brutal solidarity” with
white soldiers “for a nation that has been unable to
seat them together in the same schools.”
The
risks to the civil rights movement many within the movement
thought he was taking were primarily about King’s relationship
to President Lyndon Johnson. King and Johnson had begun
a cautious relationship as the President began to move his
major civil rights bill forward. As committed as Johnson
was to winning in Vietnam, King’s speech at Riverside
Church would surely make Johnson so angry King’s advisors
argued that Johnson might back down from his civil rights commitment. There
is no better example from history of what we mean by the phrase “speaking
truth to power.”
Had King known then what was only suspected
but has now been brutally confirmed by the release of previously
classified documents from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI leadership—namely
that King and all civil rights leaders were under constant
illegal FBI wiretap surveillance; that Johnson first suspected
and then knew this for certain, ordered it stopped but Hoover
disobeyed; that the FBI knew of several credible threats to
King’s life and didn’t warn him; and
that in a number of cases the FBI actually knew ahead of time
of planned Klan killings of civil rights marchers and protesters
and stood by while they occurred —King
surely would have felt less ambivalence about taking his stand
on Vietnam. The parallels between a Democratic president’s
support of the secret abuse of civil rights and privacy on
behalf of a failed war policy in the Vietnam era and those
same abuses during a failing war in Iraq by a Republican president
today (though not, as far as we know, including support of
standing by while innocent people were murdered) are truly
scary.
The origins and nature of the conflict in Vietnam
were well-documented but relatively unknown outside certain
circles of scholars as we moved inexorably into deeper involvement
there in 1967. But
King knew this history and he cited it at length in his Riverside
Church address. Again, we benefit from Branch’s
incisive summary:
King . . . describe[d] decades of nearly continuous
war from the viewpoint of the ordinary Vietnamese. “They
must see Americans as strange liberators,” he said. His
historical sketch grew relentlessly more intimate past the “tragic
decision” of 1945 to revoke independence with a nine-year
attempt to reestablish French colonial control. “Now
they languish under our bombs,” said King, “and
consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, their real enemies.”.
. . . . “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd
them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps,” said
King. “They watch as we kill a million acres of
their crops . . . . They wander into town and see thousands
of the children homeless, without clothes, running in packs
on the streets like animals.”
King
went on to say powerfully:
At this point I should make it clear
that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a
voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments
of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply
concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For
it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam
is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war
where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We
are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must
know after a short period there that none of the things we
claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before
long they must know that their government has sent them into
a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely
realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure,
while we create a hell for the poor.
These
short excerpts of King’s analysis give the gist,
but they do not do justice to the depth of his understanding. You
should read that section of his speech carefully yourselves.
King
rightly understood the basic conflict in Vietnam as a civil
war with American soldiers in the middle, not an invasion of
one nation by another, just as we have come to understand the
war in Iraq as a civil war mostly of our creation with American
soldiers in the middle. There are many ways
in which Vietnam and Iraq are dissimilar, but in both cases
we failed to grasp the fundamental nature of the situations
and sought to impose democratic governments where the underlying
economic and social transformations necessary to produce the
competing interest groups that would preserve the checks and
balances to sustain a liberal democracy were not even close
to being in place. By “liberal democracy” I
mean of course a democracy committed to the protection of political
and other minorities, tolerant of dissent, and a protector
of human rights; committed, in other words, to the guarantee
of liberty. Here I recommend to you a marvelous recent
book—The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria—that
reminds us powerfully of how democracy can lead not to freedom
but to tyranny, the tyranny of the majority.
“The
very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute
sovereignty of the majority.” This problem, alive
and urgent to Madison and Tocqueville, may seem less important
in the West today because elaborate protections for individual
and minority rights exist here. But in many developing
countries, the experience of democracy over the past few decades has been one
in which majorities have—often quietly, sometimes noisily—eroded
separations of power, undermined human rights, and corrupted long-standing
traditions of tolerance and fairness.
None
of the economic, social, and political building blocks necessary
to sustain a liberal democracy were in place in either Vietnam
or Iraq. Democracy
alone isn’t enough. How
could anyone imagine that a liberal democracy could emerge
just by arranging elections given the history and traditions
of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq? What were we thinking
when we began this war?
King went
on to say:
The world now demands a maturity of America
that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we
admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure
in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the
Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must
be ready to turn sharply from our present ways . . . . . we
should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic
war.
And
then he made five bold recommendations for extracting ourselves
from Vietnam.
We did not, of course, admit defeat in
Vietnam until almost a decade later, after thousands of additional
American soldiers’ and
hundreds of thousands of additional Vietnamese lives were lost. It
is very tough, I know, to admit a big mistake and try to make
it right. But no man or woman can be a great leader if
they cannot do that.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a flawed
man, but he was an exceptional leader. I am uplifted
each year when we take this occasion to think carefully about
him, and I am grateful for the opportunity this service gives
me to look at the present through the lens he used to see our
past. I so very much hope we can become
the America he believed we could become.
Thank you.
Taylor
Branch,
At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King
Years 1965-68 (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2006), 591.
Ibid.,
175-6. Indeed, in the famous case of the shooting
death of Viola Liuzzo, the FBI had an informant in the
car whose occupants shot at the Liuzzo car and its occupants
while passing them, and he also participated in the shooting.
Martin
Luther King. Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to
Break Silence,” speech at Riverside Church, April
4, 1967, 10.
Fareed
Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: WW.
Norton & Company, 2004), 105-6.
