Diversify Your Mind
How could I write about anyone today other than Martin Luther King Jr. This would have been his 78th birthday and I am a member of the last generation with a frozen image of April 4, 1968, the day he was gunned down. My personal video clip that has played repeatedly in my mind the last few days is of my mother, stunned and stiffened in front of our small black and white TV. That Thursday night was one of the few occasions when we were allowed to watch TV while eating dinner.
But today as a journalist and teacher my thoughts are on how we have treated King since he died.
I often talk to my journalism students at Columbia College Chicago about the importance of developing an institutional memory. Whether we realize it or not, part of our job as journalists is to shape history for people who weren’t here to live it. How we interpret this history is dependent on what knowledge we have in our personal institutional memory libraries. It’s got to be a diverse collection of thoughts and opinions. We certainly can’t rely on video drive-by accounts provided by many media outlets.
As President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sell their plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, what a better time to turn to our own King library and not allow him to be limited only to the Lincoln Memorial.
Today let’s diversify our minds and also remember King as the anti-war activist who felt obligated to live up to the responsibility of his Nobel Peace Prize.
On April 4, 1967, one year to the day he was assassinated King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City. Even after many of his closest aides advised him not to, King was determined to speak out against the Vietnam War. Douglas Robinson of the New York Times wrote that more than 3,000 people came to hear King that night. “All 2, 700 pew spaces and 1,200 portable seats were filled, and an overflow line stretched toward 120th Street,” according to Taylor Branch’s account in “At Canaan’s Edge” the final installment in his trilogy of the King years.
“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King said that night. “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” King said, paying tribute to Robert McAfee Brown of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. Branch writes that King spoke of being “‘greatly saddened’ that so many people considered the topic a senseless and disconnected shift from civil rights.” King felt that the presumption came from those who did not fully understand him or the movement, Branch says.
King told his Riverside audience that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
In the first few years of the Iraq conflict, the Bush administration has been somewhat successful in silencing critics who have made comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. But how can one not make such a comparison when armed with King’s own words or with Branch’s account.
“The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve,” King said at Riverside. “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.”
It should be noted that one of Bush’s more vocal critics on Iraq policy has been Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam veteran. On the front page of Friday’s Chicago Tribune Hagel is seen going head to head with Rice as she continued to deny that Iraq is in a civil war.
“To sit there and say that, that’s just not true,” Hagel said.
It’s our job as journalists to connect the dots for our readers. Let’s make sure we know our history so we know the dots when we see them.
The complete Riverside speech can be found at blackcommentator.com. It’s a great recourse. I learned about it from Don Terry of the Chicago Tribune, my progressive resource adviser.
Curtis Lawrence can be reached at clawrence@colum.edu