Dr. King

I didn’t write a post for Dr. King’s birthday this year. I just wasn’t ready.

What could I say that hadn’t been said already? What could I add that hadn’t already nudged Dr. King toward banality and being taken for granted?

I had already noted his eminence as our nation’s chief national saint and martyr, far surpassing the over-hyped Nathan Hale. Hale had given his life for the cause of American independence, in a war that took six years. Dr. King gave his life for the cause of freedom and equality, in a mostly peaceful struggle that just recently passed four centuries in duration and is still going on. He brought about a moral awakening in a much larger and more complex nation than Hale’s, and he built his awakening on a solid foundation of non-violence.

Only three people in human history have wrought freedom for oppressed people without violence. All were non-white: Dr. King, Mandela and Gandhi. Dr. King’s revolution is still incomplete. But, as we will see, it’s incomplete precisely because of its extraordinary context: a nation that believes it can do no wrong but is in fact one of the most consistently violent societies in human history.

Still, something was missing from my understanding of Dr. King. It hit me about the time I wrote what I did on his birthday: a paean to Stacey Abrams and her brilliance in re-discovering neighbor-to-neighbor politics in the Age of Facebook and algorithmic lies.

If anything can cure the disease of high-tech algorithms that systematically press our emotional buttons of shock, fear, surprise and hate, it’s getting to know real people who live around us. What Abrams had re-discovered and put into action was a timeless truth about human nature and social evolution: trust develops best with long-term, face-to-face daily living. Her insight was brilliant, and so was the way she put it into practice.

Funny thing, that. How often have you heard the word “brilliant” applied to Black people? I haven’t done a Google search, but as I scan my 76 years of memory they come up blank. We credit a now half-forgotten white Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, with saying “all politics is local.” But who recently reminded us that politics is human, not a matter of software and algorithms and the money behind them? Who taught us, with actual electoral success, that more durable human connections can bring us back from the brink?

Abrams did, and her insight just might save us all. On the way, it might spare political contributors a whole lot of useless expense on various forms of risky electronic propaganda.

But back to Dr. King. At about the same time it dawned on me how brilliant Abrams is, I had similar thoughts about him. I went back and re-read the speech that he gave precisely a year before his own assassination, on April 4, 1967. Entitled “Beyond Vietnam—Time to Break Silence,” it was his first clear break with the Administration of Lyndon Johnson on the War in Vietnam.

Today the speech is available online, in verbatim transcribed text and (on YouTube) in full-motion video. If I were a high school social-studies teacher, I would teach it as one of our nation’s founding documents, right after the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. (I would do this only in high school, for I would have to presume a working knowledge of slavery, our Civil War, Jim Crow and institutionalized racism, and our abject loss in Vietnam—the first loss of a major war in our history.)

Understandably, Dr. King spent a large part of his speech explaining why he was breaking with the same president who had managed to twist arch-segregationists’ arms to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If you’re in a hurry, you can skip this introductory part, and begin with the words “Now it should be incandescently clear . . .” and the short excerpt from a Langston Hughes poem above them.

If you read the rest of the speech with an open mind, you will discover something extraordinary. Way back in 1967, while our escalation of the War in Vietnam was just gathering serious steam, Dr. King predicted precisely how and why we would lose the war. He also predicted how our involvement would poison our own society and destroy the Great Society that Lyndon Johnson was trying to build at home, even while waging a cruel and unnecessary war abroad.

What impresses is not just Dr. King’s moral tone. That was his trademark. What impresses, even today, is the uncanny accuracy of his predictions. It bares repeating that he made them nearly 55 years ago, in the midst of embattled politics and only partially successful civil-rights activism. No one, except apparently him, could foresee what he saw.

Every step of Dr. King’s logic was based on cause and effect: “if we do this, then that will happen.” For a man who had gained fame as a preacher and activist, it was an extraordinary display of brilliant reasoning. To an ex-scientist turned law professor like me, it resembles a physicist or chemist describing the expected result of a bad experiment. What Dr. King was describing, with depressing accuracy and decades in advance, was our society and its future.

In the very old days, people would have called Dr. King a “seer” or a “prophet.” Perhaps we should use those words again today. We desperately need simple language to identify leaders who can see cause and effect. We have so few of them in public life today: most of our pols spend their time laying blame after the fact and inciting hate, even making up lies for those purposes.

But I digress. The secret sauce of Dr. King’s prophecy had three ingredients. His moral temperament and his absolute commitment to non-violence are well known. What is less well known is a penetrating, insightful intellect, of a quality that shows up only rarely in the hurly-burly of the public arena. This rare combination of faith and deep intelligence made Dr. King the kind of leader whose greatness only time and future generations can reveal.

I’ll close by examining a notable quote from him, seemingly divorced from his main topic. (At the time, it got a lot of critical press, mostly out of context.) Ending the long introduction on his break with Johnson, Dr. King said:

“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.”

With this quote, he addressed over-the-top, high-tech violence that we were then visiting upon the mostly-peasant people of Vietnam, in an ultimately fruitless quest to bend them to our will. The violence included saturation-bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bombing innocent neighboring countries Laos and Cambodia, napalming whole villages, the infamous Mi Lai Massacre, defoliating millions of acres of forest with the cancer-causing Agent Orange, and the mining millions of acres of farmland with land mines that still maim people today.

If you focus your lens on our nation now, an even clearer image of mayhem comes into view. We have the most guns per capita, by far, of any nation on Earth. We have by far the greatest number and percentage of random firearm massacres of innocents of any nation in human history. Our Supreme Court has perverted a constitutional provision about “a well-regulated militia” into carte blanche for today’s primary instrument of crime, disorder and mayhem: the individual handgun.

Next, widen your gaze to societal violence of the type we perpetrated in Vietnam. We spend as much on “defense” as the next nine nations combined. We have the world’s most extensive nuclear arsenal, ultimately capable of extinguishing all life on Earth. We have, proportionately, the greatest number of people incarcerated in any nation on Earth.

Perhaps the least-known aspect of our inherent societal violence is assassination. Deliberate killings of our own leaders have sealed our national fate and set our national direction more than any other nation’s, let alone any democratic one’s.

Perhaps our most consequential assassination ever was Lincoln’s. It ultimately ended Reconstruction with little progress for Black people besides nominal release from slavery. Then, a century later, we suffered the three terrible assassinations of my youth, JFK’s, RFK’s and Dr. King’s—all within five years. Can anyone imagine how different (and how much better) our nation would be today if all three men had lived?

These fateful killings were but a sample. If you add up all assassinations of and attempts on presidents, assassinations of presidential candidates and of Dr. King, they amount to six assassinations and two attempts in a mere 150 years: more than one every generation, on average. If you can cite any other developed nation, let alone a developed democracy, with that dismal a record of killing its own best leaders, please let me know.

Some of this horror undoubtedly derives from our original sin. For most of four centuries, we used whips, chains, lynching, incarceration and police violence to enslave, exploit, oppress and incarcerate Black people. Most recently, we used an official knee on a neck, sparking a long-delayed awakening. And last year’s January 6 Insurrection made us the only purported democracy in any developed nation to have suffered a fatal attack on its legislative center. (The Brits celebrate thwarting such an attack on Guy Fawkes Day, and the notorious burning of Germany’s Reichstag came a month after Hitler’s election as Chancellor, when the weak Weimar Democracy already had been spent.)

Way back in 1967, when Dr. King described our government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” it seemed an edgy characterization, perhaps a false prediction. In light of subsequent events, his insight only enhances his reputation as an accurate social seer. Today we would have to include our people, not just our government, in the characterization.

We now face grave problems that even Dr. King could not foresee: global warming, a persistent global pandemic, accelerating nuclear proliferation, other-species extinction (perhaps followed by our own), gross overpopulation and planetary-scale pollution. All these things require non-violence and cooperation to solve. All can be made worse—even species-extinction-level worse!—by violence among ourselves.

So maybe we should not just name streets for Dr. King. Maybe we should recognize him for what he was: a moral and practical prophet of the same magnitude and importance of those in our ancient scriptures. He gave us a clear recipe—nonviolent cooperation—for surviving our modern age, if only we would use it.

In the final analysis, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was far more than “just” a civil-rights activist. He was one of the great thinkers of our age, perhaps the most important. It’s now up to us to recognize his wisdom and put it to practice. For the hour is growing late, not just for us Americans and our democracy, but for our entire human species.

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