By Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, Truthout | Op-Ed
Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking against the Vietnam War at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul Campus, April 27, 1967. (Photo: Minnesota Historical Society / Flickr)“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Democracy is dead. It has always been an afflicted creature - hobbling about - wounded at its very being. An enslaving disposition corrupted the United States before it matured. Its spiritual death was foretold, but the nation refused to hear the black voices crying out in the wilderness. At the Riverside Church, the Holy See of liberal Protestantism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - born in the bosom of the black Baptist church - prophesied: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." And he was martyred a year later on April 4, 1968.
A year before the racist, materialist and militaristic ax cut King down, he warned the nation of its demise. The now infamous "A Time to Break the Silence" speech at the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, was a stern warning against the maladies of the American spirit - materialism, racism and militarism. The year between the Riverside speech and his assassination proved to be a radical one. As though he was racing against death's chariot, King accelerated his critique of the United States and took up more radical tactics...
With keen economic analysis in one hand and the Bible in the other, King preached that the federal government should devote billions of dollars to ending poverty in the richest nation in the world. Economic justice was essential to the democratic experiment. While King held anti-capitalist beliefs since his childhood, his heart was strummed by the Watts riots and tuned during his time in Chicago in 1966...
Renting an overpriced flat surrounded by abject poverty, King moved his wife and children to the West Side of Chicago. He made the connection between the situation of blacks in the north and the south. "We are tired of being lynched physically in the Mississippi and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and psychologically in the Chicago," he told the several thousand gathered in a Chicago stadium. The experience of living in a dilapidated apartment in a major Northern city cemented King's disdain for the right to vote without economic justice. In Chicago he lived with and worked among gang members - the hardened and hard-core poor. King met regularly with black gang members in his Chicago apartment. He provided them with training in nonviolence. He carried their message to the Riverside Church. A major reason for his opposition to the war grew out of the time spent in Northern ghettos:
"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? ... Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government."
In addition to seeing the war in Vietnam as immoral, King saw the war as a direct threat to Johnson's War on Poverty. Like "a demonic suction tube," resources were being drained from the poor in the US to kill the poor of Vietnam. His experience in Northern ghettos and the quagmire in Vietnam needed a tactical response. Having refused to believe that the bank of justice was bankrupt, King issued a notice to the the republic – the Poor People's Campaign. On behalf of the abused poor, the Poor People's Campaign was a direct confrontation with the federal government over spending in Vietnam and the lack of economic redress in the United States...
King was slain standing in solidarity with poor black janitors in Memphis and the Poor People's Campaign did not achieve its stated goals. And King's prophetic warning concerning spiritual death has come to pass. In the past decade, the triplets of evil are embodied in correlating events: Hurricane Katrina (racism), the Iraq War (militarism), and the fiscal crash of 2008 (materialism). To make matters worse,Citizens United and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down limits to campaign contributions may be the last gasp of the American empire, signaling the trump of materialism over democracy. The onslaught of reproductive rights restrictions and anti-queer legislation combined with aggressive voter rights violations has taken the body politic off life support.
The United States may have a black president, but the black poor still do not belong.
The United States may have a black president, but the black poor still do not belong. In some urban centers, upwards of 50 percent of black and brown men are unemployed. It seems every other week there is a Trayvon Martin, CeCe McDonald, Renisha McBride or Jordan Davis - victims of state-sanctioned violence against black bodies. The UN recently issued a reportcondemning the United States for a racist prison industrial complex and racist policing (racism); illegal drone strikes, extrajudicial assassinations, indefinite detention, torture, and NSA surveillance (militarism) and criminalization of homeless (materialism). In the "Kids Count" Report, the Annie E. Casey Foundationindicated that African American, Latino, and Native American children lag in every early childhood indicator.
King warned the US of democracy's pending doom here. King's mission was to "redeem the soul of America." The black freedom struggle, in part, accentuated redemptive possibilities - but the United States may prove beyond redemption. The triplets render the Statue of Liberty blind and mute. Like its greatest son, the body politic lays it head on its cooling board and the flag is its winding cloth. In the wake of King's death, his beloved Coretta mourned: "He gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam. The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace." To be sure, King is turning over in his grave.
The above are excerpts - please go here for the full Truthout article: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23253-prophecy-delivered-martin-luther-king-jr-and-the-death-of-democracy.
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