Martin Luther King, Jr. on Non-Violence and Political Assassination - By William Kelly
Today January 21,
2013 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a national holiday and
inauguration day, when Barrack Obama, the first black president is sworn in for
a second term using Martin Luther King, Jr.’s bible. In addition, for his
invocation, Obama has chosen not a preacher, not a lawyer, but the widow of the
assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
Evers was shot by Brian DeBeckwith with a high powered rifle
in front of his Mississippi home
in 1963, but DeBeckwith was acquitted by an all white jury, and only later
convicted decades later because of the tireless efforts of his widow and the
courageous prosecution by an assistant
district attorney. If Evers’ assassination was properly prosecuted immediately,
it is my belief that President Kennedy would not have been killed the way he
was, by a similar sniper in a southern city.
Before he was killed in Memphis King was the victim of an
assassination attempt in New York City
where he was attacked by a women with a knife when signing copies of his first
book. While he was in intensive care in the hospital, the New York Times
reported that the knife almost severed his main artery, in which case he would
have died if he had sneezed. In Memphis on the stormy night before his own
assassination, King gave his last speech in which he recounted recuperating
from the knife wound in the hospital and receiving many letters of support from
the president, the governor of New York and others, the contents of which he
forgot, but he didn’t forget the letter from a 9th grade white girl
from White Plaines, NY high school, who
wrote simply that she was glad he didn’t sneeze.
As Glen Klotz notes in his @ the Beach blog http://athebeach.blogspot.com/,
King’s radicalization can be traced back to his time at Crozier
College in Philadelphia ,
Indeed, it was while at Crozier on Sunday, June 10, 1950 when King and three friends
visited Mary’s Café in Maple Shade , in Camden
County , New Jersey , and were
refused service by a gun wielding bar owner. They filed charges against him,
King’s first known reaction to blatant racism and the moment that he is said to
have decided to devote his life to the cause of civil rights, not just the
civil rights of blacks but the civil rights of all people. See: http://csopassassinations.blogspot.com/2013/01/mlk-in-south-jersey.html
Klotz, who writes from the Absecon Island (Atlantic City)
Downbeach town of Margate, would be interested to know that King’s most well
know speech, “I Had a Dream,” was co-authored by Clarence Jones.
Jones, an influential civil rights lawyer and close aide and
associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a book “Behind the Dream,” the story of King’s famous March on Washington speech
at Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963. Besides preparing the notes for the
speech, and ensuring it was copyrighted, Jones stood by King when the speech
was delivered, and his book tells the story of how it all came about.
Now a scholar in residence at theMLK Center at Stanford University ,
Jones has recently done some radio interviews with BBC and
National Public Radio in which he recounts some of what is in the book. Most
interesting is the background of Clarence Jones himself.Born in Philadelphia,
Jones’ parents were live-in domestic servants in an apparently well to do
Philadelphia home, so young Jones was sent off to a Catholic boarding school
where most of the students were orphans, educated by Irish nuns who Jones
credits with teaching him how to write well.
One summer however, while visiting his parents at the summer home of their employer in Longport, NJ, the upper crust Downbeach town next to Margate, young Jones went for a bike ride, only to be intercepted by some young white boys who harassed him, calling him “nigger,” “honkey,” “boogaloo,” “monkey,” and things that he had never been confronted with before.
When his mother found him crying, and he told her why, she made him look in a mirror and asked what he saw – telling him “you are the most beautiful thing in God’s creation,” and such taunting no longer affected him as it did that day in Longport.
Having been educated so well by the Irish nuns, Jones attendedColumbia University
and after being drafted and given an undesirable discharge for refusing to sign
an anti-Communist loyalty oath, he studied law and became a lawyer. Moving
to California , one day in
1960 Martin Luther King visited him at home, and tried to persuade him to
assist him in defending against a trumped up tax evasion case, but Jones turned
him down because his wife was pregnant and he didn’t want to move back east. After
being berated by his wife however, Jones attended the church service where King
gave the sermon on the subject of the responsibilities of black professionals
to assist other less fortunate blacks, after which Jones joined King’s legal
team.
Now a scholar in residence at the
One summer however, while visiting his parents at the summer home of their employer in Longport, NJ, the upper crust Downbeach town next to Margate, young Jones went for a bike ride, only to be intercepted by some young white boys who harassed him, calling him “nigger,” “honkey,” “boogaloo,” “monkey,” and things that he had never been confronted with before.
When his mother found him crying, and he told her why, she made him look in a mirror and asked what he saw – telling him “you are the most beautiful thing in God’s creation,” and such taunting no longer affected him as it did that day in Longport.
Having been educated so well by the Irish nuns, Jones attended
To hear the NPR interview with Clarence Jones, or read the transcript:
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132905796/dream-speech-writer-jones-reflects-on-king-jr Clarence Jones is now in residence at
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php
Without success, at least so far, I have tried to find out
the name and current whereabouts of the young 9th grade girl from
White Planes high school who wrote to King to say she is glad he didn’t sneeze,
but I did correspond via email with Clarence Jones, who said that the name of
the family whose Longport home his mother worked as a housekeeper was
Lippincott, a Quaker family who owned the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall (Now Resorts).
With some effort, I did find a partial transcript of the
speech King gave at Cape May , but have yet to learn if
there is an existing audiotape or film of the event.
.
In 1958, before he became a national spokesman for civil
rights. King visited Cape May , where he gave a
speech to a convention of Quaker Friends on the topic of Non-Violence and
Racial Justice.
At a time when blacks were beginning to break segregation
laws that called for separate schools, rest rooms and water fountains, and
prevented blacks from sitting in the front of the bus or at the lunch counter,
King called for non-violence resistance, and not to resort to violence. He
called for everyone to love those enemies who espoused hate, and to “fulfill
the dreams of our democracy.”
Although the call for non-violence resistance went unheeded
with the violent response to the Birmingham bombing, the murders of white civil
rights workers and the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm
X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, King’s Cape May speech is
powerful and moving and indicates the synthesis of his thoughts and ideas that
were later personified in his later work and more recognized sermons and
speeches.
While I have yet to find any news reports of King’s visit to
Cape May, to learn where the Convention was held, if he stayed overnight and if
so where, and have not found a film or audio tape of the speech, I did find a partial
transcript of it in the Friends Journal of July 26, 1958.
It should also be noted that on June 28-July 5, 2008 , the annual Gathering of Friends
met in Johnstown , Pa
to celebrate the 50th anniversary of MLK ’s
address Nonviolence and Racial Justice to Friends at Cape
May , NJ in 1958.
Non violence and Racial Justice
By MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
It is impossible to look out into the wide arena of American
life without noticing a real crisis in race relations. This crisis has been
precipitated, on the one hand, by the determined resistance of reactionary
elements in the South to the Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in
the public schools.
This resistance has often risen to ominous proportions. Many
states have risen up in open defiance. The legislative halls of the South ring
loud with such words as "interposition" and
"nullification." The Ku Klux Klan is on the march again and that
other so-called Respectable White Citizens' Councils. Both of these organizations have as their
basic aim to defeat and stand in the way of the implementation of the Supreme
Court's decision on desegregation. They are determined to preserve segregation
at any cost. So all of these forces have conjoined to make for massive
resistance.
But interestingly enough, the crisis has been precipitated,
on the other hand, by radical change in the Negro's evaluation of himself. There
would be no crisis in race relations if the Negro continued to think of himself
in inferior terms and patiently accepted injustice and exploitation. But it is
at this very point that the change has come.
Something happened to the Negro. Circumstances made it
possible and necessary for him to travel more; with the coming of the
automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, and a great depression, his rural
plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His cultural life was
gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. And even
his economic life was rising through the growth of industry and other
influences. Negro masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves, and the
Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God
loves all of His children and that all men are made in His image. And so he
came to see that the important thing about a man is not his specificity but his
fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the
texture and quality of his soul.
Since the struggle for freedom and human dignity will
continue, the question is this: How will the struggle for racial justice be
waged? What are the forces that will be
at work?
What is the method that will be used? What will the oppressed peoples of the world
do in this struggle to achieve racial justice?
There are several answers to this question, but I would like
to deal with only two. One is that the oppressed peoples of the earth can
resort to the all-too-prevalent method of physical violence and corroding
hatred. We all know this method; we're
familiar with it. It is something of the inseparable twin of Western
materialism. It has even become the hallmark of its Grandeur.
Now I cannot say that violence never wins any victories; it
occasionally wins victories. Nations
often receive their independence through the use of violence. But violence only
achieves temporary victory; it never can achieve ultimate peace. It creates
many more social problems than it solves. And violence ends up defeating
itself. Therefore it is my firm conviction that if the Negro succumbs to the
temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations
will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness. And our chief legacy to the future will be an
endless reign of meaningless chaos.
The other method that is open to oppressed people as they
struggle for racial justice is the method of nonviolent resistance, made famous
in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi of India ,
who used it effectively to free his people from political domination, the
economic exploitation, and humiliation inflicted upon them by Britain .
There are several things we can say about this method. First, it is not a method of cowardice, of
stagnant passivity; it does resist. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed
to the evil that he is resisting as the violent resister.
He resists evil, but he resists it without violence. This
method is strongly active. It is true that it is passive in the sense that the
nonviolent resister is never physically aggressive toward the opponent, but the
mind is always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is
wrong.
This method does not seek to defeat and humiliate the
opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. Occasionally, the
nonviolent resister will engage in boycotts and
noncooperation. But noncooperation and boycotts are not ends
within themselves; they are merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within
the oppressor and to awaken his dozing conscience. The end is redemption; the
end is reconciliation. And so the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of
the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The
method of nonviolence is directed at the
forces of evil rather than at the
individuals caught in the forces of evil. The nonviolent resister seeks to
defeat evil systems rather than individuals who are victimized by the evil
systems.
The nonviolent resister accepts suffering without
retaliation. He willingly accepts suffering. The nonviolent resister realizes
that unearned suffering is redemptive; he is willing to receive violence, but
he never goes out as a perpetrator of violence. He comes to see that suffering
does something to the sufferer as well as the inflictor of the suffering.
Somehow the Negro must come to the point that he can say to
his white brothers who would use violence to prevent integration, "We will
match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.
We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we
cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. Do to us what you may, and we will still love
you. Bomb our homes and spit upon our children, and we will still love
you.
Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our
communities after midnight hours, and
take us out on some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half dead, and we
will still love you. Go all over the
nation with your propaganda and make it appear that we are not fit morally or
culturally or otherwise for integration, and we will still love you. But we will wear you down by our capacity to
suffer, and one day we will win our freedom, and we will not only win freedom
for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will
win you in the process, and therefore our victory will be a double
victory."
That is another basic thing about nonviolent resistance. The
nonviolent resister not only avoids external physical violence, but he avoids
internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he
refuses to hate him. The oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the
temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. We must somehow
come to see that this leads us only deeper and deeper into the mire; to return
hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of hate and evil in the
universe.
So somehow people in this universe must have sense enough
and morality enough to return love for hate.
Now when I speak of love, I am not talking about some
sentimental affectionate emotion.
I'm talking about something much deeper. In the Greek
language there are three words for love. The Greek, for instance, talks about
Eros, a sort of aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his
dialogues, a yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come to
us as romantic love. Therefore we know about Eros. We have lived with Eros.
And the Greek language talks about philia, which is also a
type of love we have experienced. It is an intimate affection between personal
friends; it's a reciprocal love. On this
level we love because we are loved; we love people because we like them, we
have things in common. And so we all
experience this type of love.
Then the Greek language comes out with another word for
love; it calls it agape, creative, understanding, redemptive good will for all
men. It is a spontaneous love which seeks nothing in return; it's an
overflowing love. Theologians would say that it is the love of God working in
the lives of men. When we rise to love on this level, we love men not because
we like them, not because their ways appeal to us; we love them because God
loves them. We come to the point that we love the person who does the evil deed
while hating the deed the person does. And I believe that this is what Jesus
meant when
He said, "Love your enemies."
The nonviolent resister has faith in the future. He somehow believes that the universe is on the
side of justice. So he goes about his way, struggling for man's humanity to
man, struggling for justice, for the triumph of love, because of this faith in
the future and this assurance that he has cosmic companionship as he struggles.
Call it what you may, whether it is Being Itself, with Paul
Tillich, or the Principle of Concretion with Whitehead, or whether it is a
Process of Integration with Wieman, or whether it is a sort of impersonal
Brahman with Hinduism, or whether it is a personal God with boundless power and
infinite love, there is something in this universe that works in every moment
to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole. There is
a power that seeks to bring low prodigious hilltops of evil and pull down
gigantic mountings of injustice, and this is the faith, this is the hope that
can keep us going amid the tension and the darkness of any moment of social
transition. We come to see that the dark of the moral universe is long but it
bends toward justice. This is the faith and the hope that will keep us going.
The nonviolent resister sees within the universe something
at the core and the heartbeat of the moral cosmos that makes for togetherness.
There is something in this universe which justifies James Russell Lowell in
saying,
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim
unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
So down in Montgomery , Alabama ,
we can walk and never get weary, because we know there is a great camp meeting
in the promised land of freedom and justice.
The problem of race is certainly the chief moral dilemma of
our nation. We are faced now with the tremendous responsibility of solving this
problem before it is too late. The state of the world today does not permit us
the luxury of an anemic democracy, and the clock of destiny is ticking out. We
must solve this problem before it is too late. We must go out once more and
urge all men of good will to get to work, urge all the agencies of our nation,
the federal government, white liberals of the North, white moderates of the
South, organized labor, the church and all religious bodies, and the Negro
himself.
And all these agencies must come together to work hard now
to bring about the
fulfillment of the
dream of our
democracy. Social progress does not roll in on the wheels of
inevitability. It comes only through persistent work and the tireless efforts
of dedicated individuals. Without this persistent work time it becomes the ally
of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social
stagnation.
I think of the great work that has been done by the Society
of Friends. It gives all of us who struggle for justice new hope, and I simply
say to you this evening: continue in that struggle, continue with that same
determination, and continue with that same faith in the future.
Modern psychology has a word that is used probably more than
any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted."
All of us are desirous of living the well-adjusted life. I
know I am, and we must be concerned about living a well adjusted life in order
to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.
But I say to you, as I come to my close, that there are
certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted,
and I call upon you to be maladjusted to all of these things.
I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and
discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob rule.
I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessities
from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to adjust
myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical
violence.
I call upon you to be maladjusted to each of these things.
It may be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.
So let us be maladjusted. As maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst
of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the
generations, "Let judgment run down like waters, and righteousness like a
mighty stream."
As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see
that this nation could not exist half slave and half free.
As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of
an age amazingly adjusted to slavery
could cry out in words lifted to cosmic proportions, "All men are created
equal, [and]...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
[and]... among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look at the
men of his generation and cry out, "Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you."
Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from
the bleak and desolate midnight of
man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and
justice. This is what stands ahead. We've made progress, and it is great
progress that we must make if we are to fulfill the dreams of our democracy,
the dreams of Christianity, the dreams of the great religions of the world.
I close by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher
who didn't have his grammar quite right. But he uttered words with profound
meaning. The words were in the form of a prayer: "Lord, we ain't what we
want to be, we ain't what we ought to be, we ain't what we gonna' to be, but
thank God, we ain't what we was."
And so tonight I say, "We ain't what we ought to be, but thank God
we ain't what we was."
And let us continue, my friends, going on and on toward that
great city where all men will live together as brothers in respected dignity
and worth of all human personality. This will be a great day, a day,
figuratively speaking, when the "morning stars will sing together, and the
sons of God will shout for joy.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., is President of the Montgomery ,
Alabama , Improvement Association. His moving address as given here is
somewhat cut. In some of the passages deleted from the first part he spoke of
the 50,000 Negro citizens of Montgomery who had ultimately found it "more
honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation," summarized the
history of the Negro in America from 1619 through the nineteenth century, and
linked the struggle of the American Negro to attain human dignity with the
revolt of oppressed peoples all over the world, particularly in Asia and
Africa.
From: FRIENDS JOURNAL July 26, 1958
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