The Re-Assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Wendell Griffen
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 85 years old on January 15, 2014. His assassination on April 4, 1968, silenced his voice and robbed the world of his presence. In the aftermath of Dr. King’s death, the issues of militarism, racism, and material-ism—the triplets he identified as the cause of so much suffering in the United States and across the world— have not been conquered. Instead, they remain dominant, if not dominating, factors for suffering around the world.
A year to the day before he was assassinated Dr. King publicly defined the war in Vietnam as a civil rights issue on April 4, 1967 in an address titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City. Dr. King uttered the following prescient statement in that address:
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation…. In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. … I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. Martin Luther King Jr.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.”… A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.2
Public reaction to King’s words was swift and hostile. A number of editorial writers attacked him for connecting Vietnam to the civil rights movement. The New York Times issued an editorial claiming that King had damaged the peace movement as well as the civil rights movement. Life magazine assailed the speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American publication, charged King with “tragically misleading” black people. And at the White House, President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying, “What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me? We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty. What more does he want?”3
King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee exactly one year after he delivered the speech. Nine years after his death Dr. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by another Baptist from Georgia, President Jimmy Carter. A federal holiday has been established to honor his birthday. His statue has been placed in Washington, DC. Numerous cities and towns have renamed major traffic arteries for him in the United States, and he is revered throughout the world as one of the most prophetic souls of the 20th century, if not the modern era. When he took the oath of office to begin his second term, President Barack Obama placed his hand on a Bible that belonged to Dr. King and alluded to him during his inaugural address.
Yet the veneration of Dr. King has not included any significant or serious effort by U.S. policymakers, social commentators, and moral leaders to embrace the “radical revolution of values” King called for in A Time to Break Silence. The “giant triplets” of racism, militarism, and materialism have not been confronted. The U.S. currently devotes more of its budget on national defense and homeland security than on educating children, fighting disease, feeding the hungry, and alleviating poverty.
We may never learn the true financial cost of the tragic exercise in military adventurism known as the war in Iraq. As the 10th anniversary of the war in Iraq approached, Reuters reported on a study by a team of academicians which tallied the cost of the war at $1.7 trillion, a figure that did not include $490 billion owed to Iraqi war veterans. The study projected that expenses related to the war in Iraq could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades.4
At the same time that U.S. leaders are venerating King’s memory they have callously rejected his call for the United States to use its wealth and prestige to lead the world in a radical revolution of values that rejects war as the preferred means of resolving differences. President Barack Obama could not have been guided by the vision of the Baptist preacher whose Bible he used for his second inauguration. Had that been the case, Mr. Obama would not have tried to recruit U.S. global allies and members in Congress for launching military strikes against Syria in 2013.
The same spirit of militarism that produced the tragedy that King denounced concerning Vietnam led to the travesty of Iraq. Although President Obama could not persuade U.S. officials and global allies to embrace a military response to Syria the way President George W. Bush did concerning Iraq, U.S. militarism continues to cast an ominous cloud over the world and hinder efforts to address glaring problems at home.
Jonathan Tran’s 2012 essay in Christian Ethics Today about the war policies of the Obama administration reminds us that President Obama has articulated what Tran described “a theology of war.”5 It is more than sadly ironic that the first African-American to hold the office of president of the United States currently oversees a policy of killing American citizens by using armed drones. The same militarism that King criticized is also evident in the virulent response by President Obama and other U.S. leaders to the disclosures by Edward Snowden that the U.S. has been engaged in wholesale spying on American citizens and others throughout the world—including the leaders of nations considered its allies.
Forty-four years after Dr. King was murdered by a gunman, the nation witnessed the massacre of 20 children and six adult staff members of Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut by a gunman who had already killed his mother and later killed himself. The militarism that drives U.S. global policy seems to have turned on our own children. The response to the Sandy Hook massacre has not been, however, to confront the giant of militarism. Firearm manufacturers and their lobbyists, like defense contractors and their lobbyists, now hold more influence than ever before.
Sadly, devotion to corporate profit- making continues to hamstring efforts to make our society and the world safe. Thus, militarism has joined forces with materialism so much that American schools run the serious risk of becoming fortresses. We seem unable to recognize the moral and ethical contradiction of singing Let There Be Peace on Earth while we are arming school teachers and cheering people who openly brandish handguns.
The moral and ethical disconnect between the rhetoric used to venerate Dr. King and the persistence of entrenched racism in American life continues to afflict us. Policymakers refuse to acknowledge the plain truth that the “law and order,” and “war on drugs” mantra used by every U.S. president since Lyndon Johnson has actually produced the mass incarceration of millions of people who are disproportionately persons of color. The oppressive law enforcement policies that gave rise to civil unrest during Dr. King’s lifetime still operate against people who are black and brown. Five years after President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder became the first black persons to hold their respective offices, racial profiling is as much a reality as it was when Dr. King was assassinated. Insensitivity to the insidious nature of racism that characterized American thought when Dr. King was killed has not changed. Trayvon Martin,6 Oscar Grant,7 and Amadou Diallo,8 like Martin Luther King, Jr., were black men shot to death by people who claimed the moral and legal right to take their lives. These and other less-notorious examples show that Americans clearly have not become more informed or responsive to racial injustice since Dr. King died.
Simply put, we have not confronted or corralled the giant triplets of militarism, materialism, and racism. The sad truth is that political, commercial, and even religious leaders have become skilled at bestowing platitudes on Dr. King’s life and ministry while actively and deliberately disregarding his warnings. These leaders play on (pimp) Dr. King’s moral authority at every opportunity. However, they question the relevancy of his teachings and warnings for our time.
Such contradictory behavior amounts to a re-assassination of Dr. King. Martin Luther King, Jr. is being re-murdered by drone warfare, NSA surveillance, and the half-truths and outright falsehoods uttered by policymakers who defend those actions. Dr. King is re-murdered by fiscal policies that promote the corporate interests of investment bankers over the lives and fortunes of workers, homeowners, retirees, and needy people. King’s dedication to attack and eliminate the causes of systemic poverty is currently being re-assassinated by policies that widen the glaring income inequality between the super-wealthy and the poor. And King’s righteous indignation against injustice is murdered by proponents of the so-called “prosperity gospel” and those who use religion as a weapon against people who are homosexuals, poor, immigrants, women, or otherwise vulnerable.
When one honestly assesses the mood and conduct of American leaders and the public at large since Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, it becomes clear that we have not chosen to embrace the “radical revolution of values” Dr. King articulated.
We have not weakened the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism. We have nourished them. Religious leaders such as the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. who have followed Dr. King’s model of prophetic criticism have been rejected and condemned in much the same way President Johnson responded to Dr. King.
Now, more than ever, the evidence shows that Dr. King was correct. “America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities…” Sadly, we seem unable to realize that by rejecting his call to reorder our values and priorities we not only “re-assassinate” King. By rejecting his values while pretending to venerate King as our greatest prophet we are destroying ourselves and run the risk of permanently forfeiting any moral authority as agents for peace, justice, and truth in the world. Sooner or later, those who feed a death wish find a way to destroy themselves.
Wendell Griffen is a district court judge in Arkansas and pastor of the New Millennium Baptist Church in Little Rock. He is a writer, speaker, and justice advocate and is a member of the Board of Directors of Christian Ethics Today.
