Torchbearers of Dr. King, Bernice and Martin Luther King III, Reflect on Thoughts, Words and Deeds of their Father, Fearful of ‘Wars and Rumors of Wars’
This year, MLK Day occurred on what would have been Dr. King’s 95th birthday – January 15. But on Saturday, Jan. 13, two days before the holiday, thousands of protesters gathered in downtown Washington, D.C. for an afternoon rally calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and the end of America’s willingness to assist Israel in the conflict. With crowds overflowing in Freedom Plaza, just a stone’s throw away from the White House, protesters chanted and held signs that expressed their outrage over the ongoing war and the nation’s support of Israel’s bombing campaign that has left more than 23,000 Gazans dead.
Reflecting on the dangers America and the world now face, in light of “wars and rumors of wars,” two of Dr. King’s children, the Rev. Bernice King and Martin Luther King III, who serve as the official torchbearers of their father’s legacy, considered what he would do given the turbulent days humanity currently faces.
“While my father would honor every person’s right to exist and live, he told us war is not the answer. What’s happening to the people in Gaza – the diminishing of those people – it’s disconcerting. Someone has to speak for them and against the ongoing violence,” Bernice King said.
“It’s not okay. We need to have the courage, the strength, the tenacity and the moral will to lead. That’s what Daddy was saying about Vietnam. We need to take the moral high ground because we’re losing it. He would not support the taking of lives just because other lives were taken. As my father emphasized, retaliatory violence is not the way, even in war,” she said, pointing to Dr. King’s historic address in which he condemned the war in Vietnam, “A Time to Break Silence,” delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 – exactly one year before his assassination.
In the prophetic words of Dr. King himself – April 1967
Dr. King’s antiwar sentiments emerged publicly as early as March 1965 when he said, “millions of dollars can be spent every day to hold troops in South Vietnam and our country cannot protect the rights of Negroes in Selma.” When asked why he had taken a stance against the war, joining similar voices of dissent, King, said the following. “Though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live …
“Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So, we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school …
“The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways,” Dr. King said.
More on the war in Gaza and what King would say
During the cease-fire rally last weekend, Dr. Cornel West, a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual, professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary and a candidate for president, echoed the words of Dr. King.
“I just got off the stage and from the streets of Washington, D.C. with tens of thousands of people of conscience to show this nation, this world and the agents of the derelict duopoly what love looks like in public for the precious people of Gaza still being subjected to a barbaric genocide and a brutal occupation . . . it truly was a profound glimpse of the dream Brother Martin Luther King prophesized and offered to the world in this same city more than 50 years ago,” West said.
Emphasizing Bernice King’s observation that Dr. King invoked the ire of many Americans, including both Blacks and whites who had once supported him, when he publicly denounced the war in Vietnam, Lerone Martin, the director of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, noted that while Dr. King may have undoubtedly felt all alone, he remained steadfast in his beliefs.
“King’s ideas were and still are considered radical, like his unpopular stance against the Vietnam War, his support for a universal basic income and his view that racism hurts both victims and perpetrators alike,” Martin told a reporter on NPR’s Morning Edition, on Jan. 15. “Many people saw his ideas as dangerous and I think it was a deliberate effort by some to take his words out of context and bend them towards the status quo. Taking part in a community cleanup or volunteering at a soup kitchen do reflect part of King’s ideas. But learning about his beliefs and activism throughout the year are needed as well.”
King’s oldest son, Martin Luther King III, said more about the “dream” during an interview with the host of PBS News Weekend, John Yang, on Jan. 14.
“Every year I’m asked the question, have we achieved the dream that my father envisioned and my answer, unfortunately, every year is we didn’t achieve it last year, “ King III said. “But every January we have an opportunity to start anew …. Our violence is busting out at the seams. That has got to change. Dad used to say, we must learn nonviolence or we may face nonexistence. We do not want to face nonexistence. So, hopefully we will learn nonviolence someday,” King III said.
