King was about more than civil rights

King was about more than civil rights BY DESIREE COOPER • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • April 4, 2008

This year, eighth-grade students at Detroit's Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse analyzed a speech by slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Not the "I Have A Dream" speech, but a lesser-known one that King made against the Vietnam War. As the nation gathers to mark the 40th anniversary of King's assassination today, some feel that America has never accepted who the human rights leader really was, especially at the end of his life. "We study King as a political activist who evolved as a person," said Carmen N'Namdi, the charter school's founder and principal. "He didn't stay the same from the age of 26, when he became involved with the Montgomery bus boycott, to the age of 39, when he talked about more than civil rights for African Americans. He had new ideas." Ideas against the war in Vietnam. Ideas about the immorality of poverty in the wealthiest nation on the planet. Ideas that, if he hadn't been assassinated in 1968, may have cost him his legacy. King's real dream In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. The next year, Congress enacted another vital piece of civil rights legislation -- the Voting Rights Act. No one would have blamed King if he'd rested on his laurels at that moment, spending the balance of his life supporting better race relations. But for the Nobel laureate, equality for African Americans was only part of the quest for peace. In the late 1960s, he shifted his focus to what he deemed an immoral war in Vietnam and economic violence against this nation's poor people, no matter what color. It was a risky decision. Even today, those who spoke out early against the Iraq war have been ostracized and branded unpatriotic. Five years later, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have cost $3 trillion and more than 4,000 American lives. Now, nearly 60% of Americans say they think the war was a mistake and want the troops home within 12 months, according to a Gallup Poll taken last month. King was hoping to spare the nation a similar regret. At a symposium in February 1967, he criticized the values of a nation that was spending $322,000 for each enemy killed in Vietnam, but only $53 on the war on poverty. On April 4, 1967, King took the podium at New York's Riverside Church and delivered his speech "Beyond Vietnam." He argued that social programs were being eviscerated by "a society gone mad on war." He said that poor people were sending their children to war in higher proportions than rich people, and that black soldiers were fighting to guarantee freedoms in southeast Asia that they couldn't enjoy at home. The fallout over the speech was shattering. King lost Johnson's support, the FBI fanned rumors about infidelity and relationships with communists. The news media skewered him. Even the NAACP backed away from his antiwar stance, worried that King was diluting his power. "That's what hurt him most," said William Anderson, 80, a physician who befriended King when he was a Georgia teenager. They marched together to desegregate Albany, Ga., in 1961. According to Anderson, who now is vice president of academic affairs at DMC Sinai-Grace Hospital, dozens of black ministers in Detroit openly denounced King. "They said that the war wasn't his business," Anderson said. "They felt he was being unpatriotic." In 1967, Anderson assembled 35 Detroit pastors at the Park Shelton Hotel. King came to personally plead his case. "After that meeting, nearly all of the pastors reversed their position and apologized from the pulpit," said Anderson, a World War II veteran. "But their opposition had hurt King more than anything the Klan had said." N'Namdi was a student at Ohio State University at the time. She said that the backlash from the African-American community may have been generational. "The older generation had been focused on cultural change," said N'Namdi, 58. "They couldn't see that civil rights weren't just for African Americans, they were for everyone -- including the Vietnamese." A time of crisis Despite the splintering of his support, King continued to rail against the war while planning a Poor People's Campaign for May 1968. Thousands of peaceful demonstrators were to converge on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in order to call attention to poverty in America. When striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., asked him to intervene, King saw it as an extension of his cause, not a detour. On March 18, 1968 -- two weeks before his assassination -- he addressed a packed audience at the Mason Temple. "If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life," he preached, "she, too, will go to hell." King returned to Memphis 10 days later to lead a protest. Demonstrators carried signs with the simple, moving declaration: "I am a man." When violence broke out, King was skirted away to a nearby hotel. This was the first time he had been associated with violence. If there was a moment when he should have had a crisis of faith, this was it. But according to Anderson, King "was only certain about one thing: his commitment to the cause." Days later, on March 31, he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.: "On some positions, cowardice asks the question, 'Is it expedient?' " King said. "And then expedience comes along and asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' Conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' " A warrior for peace King returned to Memphis on April 3 to prove that he could lead a nonviolent demonstration on behalf of the sanitation workers. That day, he gave his foreboding speech about having gone to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. He was assassinated in Memphis the next day, April 4, 1968, as he was leaving the Lorraine Motel. That was exactly one year from the date he delivered his first speech denouncing the war. He was 39. "The real impact of his work has never been acknowledged because he's been pigeonholed," said N'Namdi. "Even now, when people talk about him, they only refer to the civil rights movement. They will not talk about his antiwar stance. King evolved, but society still hasn't moved." N'Namdi is right. The last year of King's life makes it clear that his object was peace -- for everyone. To that end, he was willing to confront violence in all its permutations -- racism, war and poverty. On this 40th anniversary of his death, if we want to remember his legacy, we should take to heart the words he spoke at the National Cathedral four days before he was killed: "It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence."