Martin Luther King's birthday defiled by Gulf war deadline

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"We are willing to make the Negro 100 percent of a citizen in warfare, but reduce him to 50 percent of a citizen on By MICHAEL Polls have shown that African Americans form the largest core of opposition to the government's pro-war policy in the Middle East.

Recently, many Blacks were deeply angered when President Bush appropriated the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. to serve the cause of the U.S. war machine. Dr. King's birthdate, Jan. 15, is the deadline for a possible military strike against Iraq.

Martin Luther King worked tirelessly for world peace. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam. And his anniversary celebrations have become a national day of opposition to racism. There is a deadly cynicism involved in the fact that on that day the signal could be given to send thousands of AfricanAmerican youth to die in a new war.

Many Black community leaders are raising their voices in protest. "Of all the dates, they had to choose that one!" said Father Jim Goode of San Francisco's St. Paul of the Shipwreck Church. "I am outraged. That is the birthday of a man of nonviolence.' Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, also expressed her anger, emphasizing that she and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change are strongly opposed to U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. At a news conference in New York last month, she explained that if Dr. King were alive today, he would be speaking out against war in the Gulf.

Soon afterwards, the King Center and the Black commmunity as a whole received a strong slap in the face when the Bush administration approved Gen. Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Grand Marshall of the King birthday celebration in Atlanta. Amidst growing controversy, Powell later wrote Mrs. King that he would decline the honor.

Gen. Powell professes to be an admirer of Martin Luther King and his work. But Powell, a major strategist of the Gulf war operation as well as the brutal invasion of Panama, obviously chooses to ignore King's strong opposition to the government's war policies. During the last year of his life especially, King was a vocal opponent of the war in Victnam.

King's soul-searching

Martin Luther King decided to speak out against the Vietnam War belatedly and only after much soul-searching. Other civil rights leaders (who feared a break with the Democratic Party) advised him to ignore the issue.

In early 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a new massive troop call-up and the American soil."

bombing of North Vietnam. King finally decided he had to protest. At Virginia State College on July 5, 1965, he said, "I'm not going to sit by and see war escalated without saying anything about it. ... The war in Vietnam must be stopped. There must be a negotiated settlement with the Vietcong"

For those few words, King was called to order by the self-proclaimed "friends of the movement" in the Democratic Party. For a while, he avoided the issue of the war in his speeches. But he could not stay silent.

For one thing, a new generation of Black youth had challenged Dr. King in his philosophy of non-violence. How could he Flip Schulke Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

preach to them about turning the other cheek, they asked, and say little or nothing about the violence that the U.S. government was using in Vietnam?

"Their questions hit home," King admitted in a speech in New York's Riverside Church (April 4, 1967), "and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.

In addition, King was becoming increasingly concerned that the government had broken its promises to alleviate poverty in the Black inner cities. He connected that failure with the war. As far as Blacks were concerned, LBJ's "Guns and Butter" project was a bitter illusion.

"The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures, " King said on Feb. 25, 1967, "we will lose in our decaying cities. We are willing to make the Negro 100 percent of a citizen in warfare, but reduce him to 50 percent of a citizen on American soil. Half of all the Negroes live in substandard housing, and he has half the income of whites."

Vietnam War was racist King was disturbed at the casualty rate among Black GIs—who hadn't had the ability to obtain student deferments from the draft, as less poverty-striken whites had. He pointed out, "There were twice as many Negroes in combat in Vietnam at the beginning of 1967, and twice as many died in action—20.6 percent—in proportion to their number in the population as whites."

(Unfortunately, Black people stand to take the brunt of the casualties again today. According to some reports, close to one-third of the troops-including 44 percent of the women-stationed in the Gulf region are Black. But African Americans are only 13 percent of the population.)

Finally, Martin Luther King was appalled at the immorality of the U.S. government's conduct of the war. He believed that he had to speak out against the government not only on behalf of African Americans, but as a person who was at one with the Vietnamese people whose lives were being destroyed.

In his Riverside Church speech, King declared: "Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam."

"I speak as a citizen of the world," King continued, "for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

Several days later—on April 15, 1967— Dr. King spoke from the platform of a giant antiwar rally in New York. Some 400,000 people participated in what was the largest march and rally in American history until that time.

If King were here today, he would surely join us in the forefront of the new movement to bring the troops home now. He would demand that the tragedy of Vietnam never be repeated.

delegates in particular questioned the policy