What Martin Luther King Really
Said
by H. Bruce Franklin
Preaching to Black ministers assembled in
13, 1993, President Clinton told them--and
the nation--what Martin
Luther King "would say" about
ghetto violence if he were now to
return twenty-five years after being
assassinated. Like a
ventriloquist, the President put these
words in the mouth of Dr.
King: "I did not live and die to see
young people destroy their own
lives with drugs and then build fortunes
destroying the lives of
others. . . . I did not fight for the right
of black people to
murder other black people with reckless
abandonment." Dr. King's
gospel, according to the President, seems
to be that the main
causes of ghetto violence are the
inhabitants of the ghetto.
If President Clinton believes this is what Martin Luther King
would have said on this subject, he must
not remember what he did
say:
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. . . . They asked if our own nation
wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems,
to bring about the changes it wanted.
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 the twenty-six years since Dr. King spoke these words in
his great April 4, 1967 sermon about
imperialism, his analysis of the
interrelations between
policies and the most severe domestic
problems has become more and
more telling. President Clinton's rhetorical stance assumed
that
Dr. King would be surprised by what he
would see if he returned
today.
But in fact King predicted these conditions as consequences
of "American life and
policy," for "racism,
materialism, and
militarism" will continue to grow so
long as "machines and
computers, profit and property rights are
considered more important
than people." The fundamental cause of ghetto violence,
according
to Dr. King's actual, rather than
fantasized, words, is that our
nation is on the "wrong side of a
world revolution," fighting
globally to protect "the immense
profits of overseas investment"
gained through the emiseration of poor and
working people abroad
and at home.
Martin Luther King decried the alliance between our nation and
the "landed gentry" of
intercontinental "pattern of
suppression." He pointed
unwaveringly
at the "glaring contrast of poverty
and wealth," most visible to
its victims throughout the
barrios of the
waged by
of color.
"The need to maintain social stability for our
investments accounts for the
counterrevolutionary action of
American forces," and for
"American helicopters" and "American
napalm and green beret forces" being
used against people in Latin
exploitation and oppression." At the very core of all this,
embodying the nation's deepest sickness,
Dr. King saw
against
of the autopsy must read `
In the quarter century since Dr. King's murder, the United
States has: devastated
savagely than in the years before his
death; helped a terrorist
junta overthrow the legally elected
government of
and occupied
former
overthrow of a Nicaraguan government
committed to ending the
exploitation King denounced; armed,
trained, and financed a
terrorist regime in
thousand people in
killed hundreds of civilians in
running military cabal in
annihilate
system in
President Clinton's main theme, enunciated in his opening
sentence, was "the great crisis of the
spirit that is gripping
ventriloquist's dummy, Martin Luther King
eloquently named and
predicted this crisis: "A nation that continues year after year
to
spend more money on military defense than
on programs of social
uplift is approaching spiritual
death." For him, the violence in
the ghetto is the direct product of our
nation's betrayal of its
"promise of hope for the poor"
and a clear manifestation of "a
society gone mad on war."
Originally printed in the Nation, December
6, 1993, vol. 257, and widely reprinted.