Fifty Years Ago Today: Memories of MLK

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.  The events of the last several years have demonstrated that while laws have changed, in many ways the things he and others said then are still quite true now.  I remarked to a colleague and friend when he posted James Baldwin's quote that to be black " and to be relatively conscious is to be in a constant rage."  The profound incongruity based solely on race remains profound and somehow even harder to acknowledge today than it was then.
Fifty one years ago today, MLK delivered his speech decrying the war in Vietnam and the disproportionate price that people of color and people who are poor pay in times of war. I think there are a number of things about it that reflect on him as a compassionate man that sway me in memorable ways.  And this day,  the day after our President, in an act demonstrating how little he understands about the military, sought to deploy them to our border with Mexico, this speech about the consequences of such actions rings very clear indeed.
Here are some excerpts from it.  We have not moved beyond war and the tyranny of oligarchs, far from it. 
"A Time to Break the Silence"

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be -- are -- are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land....

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

...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.

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202]

 

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202