The Day of the Birth of Martin Luther King, Jr.: segregation, integration—commemorating the words that define the civil rights struggle

Mike King had been born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta. His dad was a Baptist minister, and he was named after him—so he was a “junior”. The elder King brought him up never to accept the racist discrimination they were being forced to live under—and with a determination to strive toward finding ways to address this.

When Michael King, Jr., was five years old, his father took a trip on which he traveled to the Holy Land and other historic places, and which he concluded by attending the annual world conference of the Baptist Church that was being held in Germany. While touring the country, he seems to have become inspired by the legacy of the actions of Luther that had sparked the Reformation, bringing about a movement to challenge the way that the lives of all people—including those in the lowest classes of society—throughout Western Civilization were being affected by the powerful establishment. [

*8]

He came back home at the end of summer, and during that year gave himself Luther’s name. Though it wasn’t until his son was 28 years old that his birth certificate was officially revised to relect the change to “Martin Luther, Jr.”, his dad started calling him that from the time that he took the name himself. [

*19]

When he was just 19 years old, King graduated from Morehouse College, which both his mother’s dad and his father had attended. He received a post-graduate degree at Crozer Theological Seminary, completed his doctorate at Boston University in 1955, and then followed in his father’s profession, pastoring at a number of churches, including in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Alabama. At the end of 1959, he became co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

He was active in civil rights issues through much of the ’50s, gaining national recognition for his involvement in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and, in 1957, co-founding the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). By the early ’60s, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) was continuously spying on him and attempting to harrass and undermine him and the entire civil rights movement.

Two and a half years after King’s birth, Vincent Harding was born in Harlem. He went to CCNY, got a post-grad degree in journalism from Columbia, and did a stint in the Army. At the University of Chicago, he then received another post-grad degree—this one in history—and while studying there for his PhD in history, which he got in ’65, he pastored at a small Seventh-Day Adventist church on Chicago’s south side.

He became acquainted with Mennonites and in 1957, as a lay minister, became an associate pastor there on the south side, at Woodlawn Mennonite Church. He so impressed churchgoers that to some he came across as a modern prophet sent to awaken the church—and this description of him would be repeated numerous times over the next decade when he spoke at church conferences and meetings around the world. Soon his oratorical talents and prophetic calling so shone out that he was being invited often as a guest preacher. But after giving a sermon at one church near Chicago, lots of the whites in that Mennonite church were so outraged that they threatened to leave if any blacks were ever allowed to come there again. Harding and his wife Rosemarie moved to Atlanta in the early ’60s and at the behest of the MCC (Mennonite Central Committee), set up “Mennonite House” right round the corner from King and his wife Coretta’s home. It was modeled after an activist center known as “Quaker House”. King had reached out to the Mennonite community while on speaking engagements at Mennonite colleges in Kansas and Indiana; now he involved the Hardings in further activities of the SCLC beyond just in Atlanta, such as in Alabama and other towns in Georgia. [

*58]

“I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed they’d been trying to do that a little at a time since I could remember”, is the way Fanny Lou Hamer described her feelings when she first heard in a sermon that she had the right to vote. The wife of a tractor driver on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta, she began speaking out and registering people to vote. [

*62]

Throughout America, there were 1,122 civil rights demonstrations in the summer of 1963, with over 20,000 arrests in the South. [

*54] At that point in the Mississippi freedom struggle, it appears that the attacks against black females were the most vicious. They were constantly beaten at demonstrations and in jails; sometimes electric cattle prods were used on them, with at least one incident being recorded of this having been inflicted on a pregnant woman. [

*44]

Along with coworkers returning home from a voter registration workshop, Hamer was arrested by police in Winona, Mississippi, who jailed her and forced black inmates to beat her with a blackjack. After getting out, she made her way to Mennonite House, so’s to try to recover. She got to know the Hardings and was able to converse with and joke and laugh with them while there. [

*57] Although she had sustained permanent injuries, she was able the following year to lead the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the party’s national convention. Their endeavors to have an integrated delegation provide a voice to voters and to those who were tryna exercise their right to vote highlighted the reality of the issue for millions across the country. [

*62]

Riverside Church in New York City—one of the most prominent and best-known religious edifices in America—is modeled after the famous 13th-Century Gothic cathedral in Chartres, France. [

*48] Just half a block from Grant’s Tomb, overlooking the Hudson River at one of the highest points on Manhattan Island, the church is in Morningside Heights, where the Upper West Side meets Harlem—the neighborhood where Dr. Harding grew up—within strolling distance of both his alma mater CCNY and Columbia University, where he got his first master’s degree. [

*49]

The idea of building Riverside came from someone who as a young person in the mid 1800s had found great comfort and inspiration in the social and spiritual life of the local Baptist church where he grew up—teaching Sunday school, volunteering as a janitor, and serving as a clerk and trustee there. [

*13] Five years after the end of the Civil War, he founded a company in Ohio that over the next few decades became one of the first and one of the biggest multinational corporations in the world. It was determined in 1911 that this company—named Standard Oil—was in violation of anti-trust laws; it was broken up, and he—John D. Rockefeller—had become the richest person who has ever existed in American history, with a fortune variously estimated at around a third of a trillion dollars or more, measured at current valuation. [

*6]

In the mid 1920s, Rockefeller began buying land and selecting architects in order to bring his conception to realization. To serve as the first senior minister, there was one particular prominent Baptist minister whom he had in mind. That minister eventually agreed, but only on the condition that it would be a non-denominational rather than a Baptist church, and Rockefeller complied with that. [

*48] In 1930, Riverside opened and calls itself “an interdenominational, interracial, international, open, welcoming, and affirming church and congregation”[

*50]—having affiliations with both the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ, which is a Congregationalist denomination. Over the decades since its opening, it has often been the site of major events and speeches, such as when Nelson Mandela made his first address to the American people in an interfaith celebration at Riverside welcoming him to the US in June 1990. [

*43]

Spelman College in Atlanta is named after Rockefeller’s wife Laura and her parents Harvey and Lucy Spelman; their home in Ohio was one of the secret way stations on the Underground Railroad—through which fugitives were smuggled out of enslavement in the Southern states. [

*24]

By 1965, Prof. Harding had become the chair of the history and sociology department at Spelman and—as well as a friend—an advisor to both Martin and Coretta. [

*11] It’d been a decade since the United States had taken over from France’s colonial role in Vietnam, after having supported and financed the French domination of the country for the previous decade, beginning when France reasserted its imperial subjugation of Vietnam following the end of the Second World War. The year before now, the war’d been ramped up with the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It was at this point that he began to examine and try to face up to the implications of the country’s actions there. [

*56] “I became very concerned that I not go to a teaching situation with young people without having some greater clarity about that war” [

*20].

Harding openly called out King and the rest of the SCLC and, as he recalled it decades later, “raised the question as to whether or not we could, in conscience, keep still about what was going on in Vietnam”, which his detailed and comprehensive historical research had made clear to him was an “anti-colonial struggle”. [

*11] His public letter to them on the 8th of August declared, “It is my personal opinion that our nation is wrong in what it now does in Vietnam, and has been wrong for more than two decades.” And he continued by writing that “I believe, too, that we as a nation are called upon to repent of the arrogance that took us into Vietnam in the first place”. [

*20] There was trepidation—on the part of the SCLC and other advisors and friends of King’s.

And wiretaps by FBI spies reveal that King was pressing for support to speak out more vehemently and that he said to very close confidants of his—concerning America’s conduct of the war—“how immoral this is. I think someone should outline how wrong we are.” His advisors counseled him not to speak out so forcefully. [

*26]

In early 1967, photos of what he saw as atrocities inflicted on Vietnamese children by US bombing are said to have turned his stomach. [

*59] He later stated that the images were unforgettable and that “I came to the conclusion that I could no longer remain silent about an issue that was destroying the soul of our nation.” He joined four US senators who were opposing the war at a forum in February, and he participated in an antiwar march the following month. The press paid very little attention to either of these events. Stanley Levison was a civil-liberties attorney who for a long time had been King’s closest advisor, and King now turned to Levison and told him, “I can no longer be cautious about this matter. I feel so deep in my heart that we are so wrong in this country and the time has come for a real prophecy, and I’m willing to go that road.” [

*26] King asked his personal lawyer, who had drafted speeches for him before, to prepare remarks for him.

He found the result to be far too diplomatic and circumspect; “The Vietnam War is either morally right or morally wrong,” he declared to his lawyer. Dr. King now turned to Prof. Harding. An address on the issue—given by King a couple months earlier—that Harding had prepared for him was their starting point. They modified the overall structure. They made changes in tone and emphasis. They put in crucial additions to clarify key points. “I was not putting ideas into Martin’s head, not even words so much into Martin’s mouth,” Harding recalled later, explaining that he was “doing something for him that he didn’t have time to do for himself.” [

*27]

The time had arrived, and the right setting had been arranged. King had worked on this speech more than most of the ones he’d ever given. He was known to be a very talented extemporaneous speaker, and it was really unusual for him to give a speech from a written text. Copies were made and given to mainstream newspapers from one end of the country to the other, and he was ready to read it word for word. The aim was to minimize any chance that he could be misquoted. [

*59] This was to be no surprise. Three days beforehand, he told a reporter, “We are merely marking time in the civil rights movement if we do not take a stand against the war.” [

*26]

In early spring, Martin Luther King stood at the lectern before an overflow crowd of 3,000 people, and he delivered what history has come to call the Riverside Church speech, which Vincent Harding had penned for him. [

*18] (It is sometimes also referred to as simply “the Riverside speech” or by the title they gave it, “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence”.)

John Lewis—who died just this last summer—represented Georgia’s 5th District in Congress for a third of a century and was witness to some of the most momentous events of the civil rights struggle: he was the chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in the mid ’60s; he was one of the organizers of the March on Washington—where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech—in 1963; he led the first of the three Selma-to-Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became known as Bloody Sunday—when the police and state troopers attacked the peaceful marchers—in 1965.

And he was in the sanctuary on that evening at Riverside Church. [

*33] He knew that King was gonna declare that he was against the war. Nevertheless he was stunned by how eloquent the speech was and how intense its delivery was. He felt that the force of the speech was beyond that of any other one that King ever gave. “The March on Washington was a powerful speech,” Lewis said just a few years ago. “It was a speech for America, but the speech he delivered in New York”, he remembered, “was a speech for all humanity—for the world community.” He went on to say, “I heard him speak so many times. I still think this is probably the best.” [

*27]

It is a brilliantly constructed exegesis (and provides a look into not just the talents and calling of that young lay minister in Chicago but also the skills that would have prompted those many invitations for him to be a guest preacher there years earlier). The speech—after some opening remarks—is architected in four parts.

King firstly details what those trepidations had been that’d caused so many advisors and colleagues to question the wisdom of speaking out—both how this reveals that they “have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling” and how this also suggests, as he says, “that they do not know the world in which they live”—and details the ways in which his own silences had been a betrayal that he needed to break. Secondly he lays out a chillingly comprehensive and elegantly concise history of the war and the context and events surrounding and leading to it. He thirdly provides specific recommendations to deal with “this nightmarish conflict” and makes clear how absolutely necessary these steps are in order both to “save the soul of America” and to give America any chance of winning in its crucial “defense against communism”. And fourthly he concludes with soaring recitations—from poets and pundits, prophets and professors echoing across the ages and from various cultures—imbued with the stirring promise woven throughout Hindu and Muslim and Christian and Jewish and Buddhist beliefs of the transformation we can make “if we will only make the right choice”.

From after he is introduced until he concludes, the audience of thousands is silent—with seemingly rapt focus on his profoundly keen exposition—except during the section when he gives his specific prescriptive suggestions. Once he has begun to deliver these, the audience erupts into applause and does so repeatedly throughout this section—often interrupting due to the ardor and length of their ovations.

— Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary.

— Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

— and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa.

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. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of US military advisors in Venezuela. This need, to maintain social stability for our investments, accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. 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.

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 comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

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 South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand 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 the 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.

War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, —

— realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

When King delivered the Riverside Church speech, it was not the first time that he had spoken out publicly against America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. [

*61] But from this platform, none—in the bastions and citadels where sat the mouthpieces for the power structure of liberalism-conservatism-moderatism—could turn away from or ignore it. The very next day, the speech was attacked by 168 major newspapers. [

*59]

King had in effect cast his vote of no confidence in the liberal establishment—and in the administration of President Johnson in particular. [

*61] LBJ’s reaction was, “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?” [

*29] And the nation’s leading liberals made it immediately clear to all that King had definitively broken ranks with them and they with him. [

*61] So long as he limited his talk to what they could take as some blitheful bliss of racial harmony in some far-off ideal dreamworld—leaving their delusional superiority complex unchallenged and letting them wallow in looking down on segregation in the South while turning a blind eye to the segregation, discrimination, and bigotry in the North—they were perfectly comfortable with that. An articulate black public intellectual who brought the civil rights struggle right to their own doorstep—with incisive research and insightful analysis that held a mirror up to their own intolerance and with a full-throated demand to live up to the principles they purportedly espoused—is something that liberalism just would not countenance. [

*9]

The demonization of Martin Luther King burst forth in full swing. [

*11] The backlash from the liberal establishment came hard and fast; they’d praised him when he kept his focus on a civil rights campaign in the South, but this reaction is what so many of his counselors and friends and advisors had feared. [

*29]

“All the keepers of the conventional wisdom, especially in the New York Times and the Washington Post, simply vilified and condemned Martin,” is what Harding looked back on four decades later. “They spoke about the fact that he had done ill service, not only to his country, but to ‘his people’.” [

*11]

by the Washington Post [

*9] [

*26], and they made sure that all Americans were to be aware that he was up to no good and worthy only of their disrespect, made sure that anybody who supported civil rights was to know that he wasn’t helping, and made sure that his people were all to understand that he was of no use to them;

and they insisted that segregationism in the analysis of each of the two issues must be adhered to. [

*9] [

*26] [

*27] [

*33] They warned everyone not to think about these things in that integrated way but to trust that it would just befuddle anybody if they were stupid enough to try using their mind that way;

When it came to his civil disobedience campaign in the South, the Times had always been a backer of this procedure, but they now insisted that there must be segregation of the method used in the North from the one used in the South; integrating the application of those techniques was a

according to their editorial board. [

*29] The rationale the board gave in favor of being segregationist in the decision of which techniques to apply in one part of the country and which to apply in another part was that they found it contradictory to be integrationist in the usage of methodologies; they also argued that it would be too dangerous at that time in the North when the air was so hot there and because (as they said that King himself knew) black people might just stop liking nonviolence (and for all they knew, white people might get so heated up that they’d cease to like having blacks be nonviolent—just sayin’). That is, the editorial board of the New York Times argued in favor of segregationism of the methodologies used to protest by stating that there was

inherent contradiction in Dr. King’s summons to Negroes to act “peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society.” He himself has acknowledged that nonviolence is losing its appeal; once the spark of massive law-defiance is applied in the present overheated atmosphere, the potential for disaster becomes overwhelming.

He received many letters from irate donors to the SCLC, telling him that they were cutting off their contributions. [

*29] Other civil rights organizations angrily reprimanded him as well. [

*27] Lots of these groups were getting so much of the money that was needed for their operations from white philanthropic institutions, and they were afraid that speaking out like this could put all that in peril. [

*9]

A large number of civil rights groups were afraid of incurring the wrath of the federal government—especially of President Johnson. [

*9] “Johnson needs a consensus. If we are not with him on Vietnam, then he is not going to be with us on civil rights”, was the warning that the president of the National Urban League gave. Jackie Robinson was—after gaining fame two decades earlier for having “broken the color line” by becoming the first black baseball player allowed to play in the major leagues—a prominent voice in the civil rights struggle. And just two weeks after the speech, he tried to smooth the waters by writing a letter to Johnson [

*29]:

While I am certain your faith has been shaken by demonstrations against the Viet Nam war, I hope the actions of any one individual does not make you feel as Vice President Humphrey does, that Dr. King’s stand will hurt the civil rights movement. It would not be fair to the thousands of our Negro fighting men who are giving their lives because they believe, in most instances, that our Viet Nam stand is just.

“Down deep within all of it,” Harding said, “was America’s racist attitude”. He sensed that whites felt that black people needed to stay in their place and not get uppity, and he voiced what that feeling essentially was: “It’s all right, King, for you to talk about colored things, but when it comes to foreign policies, that’s our business. We really don’t want to hear anything from you about it, because that’s our business.” [

*11] He of course was absolutely right. But he and King had delved down and exposed something even deeper still, which their speech reveals as the

For more than a century, it had been clear that the integration of people who are of different races would be the necessary key to ever being able to provide and ensure civil rights for blacks in America. It was less than a decade and a half since the US Supreme Court had repudiated the standard of “separate but equal” treatment of whites from that of blacks and had thereby barely started the massive effort to dismantle segregation—which to this day hasn’t ever been truly committed to.

He and Harding had begun the task that each of them had taken on—of unraveling the causes of the horrors they saw in front of them—on a foundation of the principles of morality, ethics, and justice, with a reliance on their deep religious convictions, and looking towards the stream of humaneness that courses through all of humanity’s great faiths.

The person who’d stood out as a prophet to so many throughout his church had come together with the person whose prominence as a civil rights leader had garnered him the Nobel Peace Prize and whose moral and religious conviction had given him the certitude that a real prophecy was needed and the willingness to bring it. Harding had helped King to discern, develop, and delineate the prophecy that their vision had led them to.

The simple, straightforward, uncomplicated, uncontrived, unforced, unfabricated, forthright approach they took was to avoid segregating their inquiry into what was happening. And this, in the American culture, was of all things: a breakthrough. Not forcing their investigation to artificially box in or box out any concepts or facts they were looking at had revealed the answer. By not using unnaturally compartmentalized segregation of the principles and ideas and attitudes that they examined, they uncovered that the reason for all of these ghastly problems was precisely the same. And this simple integrated approach is of course what so outraged and incensed the liberal establishment.

The reason is that they were sure it was their job to be the “experts”—that it was for them to analyze these most important issues and that it was for them to determine and disseminate the “correct” assessments. And naturally, they were unable to, because it was not possible for them to come up with any comprehensive, cohesive explanations of any of these problems—precisely because they were holding fast to keeping them segregated, in just the same way that they were demanding that everybody else had to. It was just as King and Harding had so straightforwardly explained—the policies and actions that the US government had been adhering to, both domestically for many decades and internationally for at least a couple decades, were absolutely not in accord with the most foundational of American values. Attempting to make coherent excuses or explanations for these policies and actions—as the elite liberal media expertocracy had been trying—could bring about only one thing: cognitive dissonance.

And one of those segments was officials in the highest levels of the US government, who were being taken in by the expertocracy. One official who’d been so dazzled by the particular expertocrats whom President Kennedy brought into his administration was Vice President Lyndon Johnson—whose thrall to them continued into his presidency, which began when Kennedy was assassinated. (

The Expertocrats Dragging America into the Vietnam Horror Chamber: Halberstam’s 20-years-later overview

) In order to safeguard that which was so close to his heart—his war on poverty—he relied on them to fulfill the confidence they professed to him that the Vietnam War could be won. And that very reliance on their guidance to continue prosecuting the war in Vietnam in order to keep his precious Great Society program alive is precisely what caused Johnson to lose his war on poverty and the entire Great Society program that he so cherished.

But where possibly the most insidious effect of this was gonna be is in an enclave and citadel of the affluent and powerful liberal elite; it so sadly has been a key inducement to the higher rates of child suicide in such a prestigious enclave (

Cognitive Dissonance—the Not-silent Killer of Young Kids

), so often by such a stark and glaring method: casting themselves in front of oncoming railroad trains (the bleak cry for help). [

*12] [

*25] [

*32] [

*34] [

*41] [

*45] [

*46] [

*47] [

*53] [

*66] [

*68]

King and Harding prophesied that only “a tragic death wish” would keep the American nation from reorienting its values from those that have been causing “the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth” towards ones that are focused on “fairness and justice”. And in the first decades of this millennium, the nation’s elite have been suffering from this deathly tragedy, as foretold in the prophecy, being visited upon their young.

King’s focus on the needs of American blacks was now over. He had come to the realization that segregating it from concentrating on the needs of all Americans was playing right into the divide-and-conquer strategy of the establishment power structure—that the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of blacks was merely one facet of the overall subjugation and deprivation of Americans in all different racial and ethnic groups. In this last year of his life, he led in beginning to turn the focus of the civil rights movement to integrating the fight against poverty throughout the entire country.

That summer, Senator Bobby Kennedy—who’d become exasperated by the refusal of officials in Johnson’s administration to believe that hunger in America was such an urgent issue [

*17]—sent word to King, “Tell him to bring the poor people to Washington” in order to bring a “visible expression of the poor.” [

*36] King took up the challenge and began planning for it immediately. [

*17]

In November and December, he began announcing what he called the Poor People’s Campaign. He said the plan was to lead “waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C.” with the goal being “to secure at least jobs or income for all”. As the presidential election year got underway, he described the purpose of the SCLC’s program of mass civil disobedience by stating in the spring that “we will be petitioning our government for specific reforms and we intend to build militant nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.” [

*36] The campaign would be centered about a “camp-in” called Resurrection City, to be built on the Washington Mall. Once he had announced the Poor People’s Campaign, the FBI ratcheted up its spying on him. [

*38]

In attempting the mobilization of such an unprecedentedly wide range of disparate groups, King quickly had to come to terms with a strong indignation by other constituencies that the civil rights movement had long focused only on making progress for the rights of male blacks—and particularly with resentment towards paternalistic attitudes and behavior in the SCLC leadership.

Johnnie Tillmon was a pioneering advocate for the rights and needs of poor children. In 1963, she’d founded ANC (Aid to Needy Children) Mothers Anonymous [

*63]; ANC Mothers later merged into the NWRO (National Welfare Rights Organization), and she became its first chairperson.

When King asked the group to support the campaign, they insisted that, instead of summoning them to his turf, he come to Chicago to learn what the goals and strategies that they had been working on for so long were. On the 3rd of February, along with several other of the SCLC’s top leaders, he came to meet with them. They right off started peppering him with questions about their activities and issues—to which he didn’t really have any answers. “You know, Dr. King, if you don’t know,” Tillmon finally said to him, “you should say you don’t know”. He straight up replied, “We don’t know about welfare. We have come here to learn.” The women then and there leaned in to give them some tutelage. The process of dialogue had begun, and the group came to agree to participating in the campaign. But they demanded that they be in charge of those activities surrounding the issues that they were most focused on, and King agreed to all their conditions. [

*36]

King had said from the very start, “We also look for participation by representatives of the millions of non-Negro poor: Indians, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian whites, and others.” He worked hard to impress this on his staff; “Are they poor?” the SCLC’s national campaign coordinator remembered him saying, “Then we want them involved.” On the 14th of March—only six weeks before the campaign was to begin—he convened what was called the Minority Group Conference in Atlanta, which brought together over 80 leaders of nonblack poverty advocacy groups. This was a historic—and very difficult—attempt to build a coalition not seen before, and not all came on board. [

*36]

Yet, many did. And the FBI, with its network of hundreds of informants, agents provocateurs, and saboteurs, could not help but take notice—with alarm—at what he had been able to put together in so short a time; their widespread intimidation and disruption intensified. [

*38]

At the end of the day, the leaders of many Mexican American, indigenous American, Puerto Rican, and poor white communities had pledged to join in [

*22], and it had gotten support from volunteers in programs run by the federal government and from numerous other religious, labor, social justice, and educational organizations, including the YMCA [

*69], the Quaker AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) [

*36], VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and the Peace Corps [

*70], the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) [

*4], and the United Steelworkers [

*10].

Whether or not Dr. King goes ahead with his perilous project, its mere announcement will give added strength to the powerful Congressional elements already convinced that the answer to urban unrest lies in repression rather than in expanded programs for eradicating slum problems.

King’s movement towards total integration of the battle to bring justice not just to black males but to all Americans, and not just to Americans but to all human beings around the world, was the final straw that would end the power structure’s tolerance of the threat that they felt he posed to them, and he was now a prime target in their sights.

When King was gunned down just three weeks after the Minority Group Conference, the leadership of the Poor People’s Campaign committed to carrying it out despite him now being blasted off the scene. If the forces that devised his murder had wanted to—if they did want to—disprupt the launch of this campaign, they could hardly have chosen a more decisive moment, both tactically and strategically. Only three weeks later, the camp-in at Resurrection City began.

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It was likely inevitable that, with King no longer on the scene, the progress he’d envisioned with the Resurrection City camp-in would dissipate, given the confluence of factors and attributes that only he possessed and which’d enabled him to so quickly plan for it and begin to bring it together. These included his international fame and prestige as a Nobel-Prize-winning advocate, his own prophetic vision, his ability to lean on and rely on such a strong and capable covisionary—such a coprophet—as Vincent Harding, his rare capability of breaking through deep differences with others and discovering unforeseen rapport, his experience and skills as an organizer, the trust that so many of his long-time colleagues had in him, and the trust in and admiration for him that were held by so many ordinary people who were part of and supportive of the civil rights struggle. And after all, most of his advisors and associates, and of the rest of the leadership of the SCLC itself and of those from other organizations in the civil rights movement, had been at least somewhat or even strongly skeptical of this new approach. It had primarily been his focused vision and his dynamic commitment to it that had brought so many to join in. [

*10] [

*22], [

*36] [

*38]

The most prominent mainstream political figure who was supporting the actions of the Poor People’s Campaign, Senator Bobby Kennedy—who’d been the person whose urging had started King on the path toward devising and undertaking it, and whose wife Ethel was one of the thousands of participants who attended the Mother’s Day opening of the camp-in—was now a candidate in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. Just a couple months after King’s murder, Kennedy was also shot dead. His funeral procession stopped at Resurrection City on its way to his burial at Arlington Cemetery. [

*22] [

*40]

“I feel very strongly that the speech and his unflinching role in expressing and organizing opposition to the war—and to the foreign and domestic policy it represented—as well as his ineluctable movement toward the call for nonviolent revolution in the U.S., were among the major reasons for his assassination”, Dr. Harding said, looking back on the Riverside Church speech 15 summers later, “But I know that at his best Martin was his own man, and he would not have made the speech if he had not claimed it fully as his own”. He’d known Martin Luther King for 10 years, and in 1998, he wrote that in that final year of his life, “Martin looked more beleaguered, harassed, and desperate than I had ever seen him before”. [

*20].

That notwithstanding, it was very apparent to some that when he broke his silence—which he declared was a great betrayal that he’d been committing—and took this righteous stand, a burden had been lifted off of him. “The cross may mean the death of your popularity,” he pointed out at a conference the next month, with the exhortation to “take up your cross and just bear it. And that’s the way I have decided to go. Come what may, it doesn’t matter now.” John Lewis sensed the change sitting right there the night of the speech at Riverside. “I felt lifted up,” he said. “I thought he would become much more aggressive in trying to get our country and people in high places in our government to put the issue of poverty and hunger back on the American agenda.” [

*27]

The night before his death in Memphis, he gave his famous speech at the Bishop Mason Temple, during which he preaches that he’s been allowed to go up to the mountaintop and has seen the promised land [

*5]. And just a month before that, he delivered a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church where he co-pastored with his dad. He gives it the title “Unfulfilled Dreams” and says that his text is taken from the eighth chapter of the first book of Kings [

*23]:

Sometimes it’s overlooked. It is not one of the most familiar passages in the Old Testament. But I never will forget when I first came across it. It struck me as a passage having cosmic significance because it says so much in so few words about things that we all experience in life.

He describes how one of King David’s biggest aspirations was to build a great temple, how he began the work but was not able to finish the task, and how it was accomplished by a successor of his. From that scripture, he quotes the words of King Solomon, when he and all the people gathered to finally dedicate the temple that David had started to construct and had so earnestly wanted to see completed:

And each of you this morning in some way is building some kind of temple. The struggle is always there. It gets discouraging sometimes. It gets very disenchanting sometimes. Some of us are trying to build a temple of peace. We speak out against war, we protest, but it seems that your head is going against a concrete wall. It seems to mean nothing. And so often as you set out to build the temple of peace you are left lonesome; you are left discouraged; you are left bewildered.

That year, Vincent Harding worked together with Coretta Scott King in helping her to found the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which is “committed to the causes for which he lived and died”. [

*20] [

*30] Being located next to Ebenezer Baptist Church [

*21], it has endeavored to carry out this mission through educational and community programs [

*30].

And that tycoon, John D. Rockefeller—who, on the far Upper West Side in Morningside Heights above the Hudson River, had built the Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King, in the speech that proved to become so fateful, delivered the prophecy that he’d developed with Dr. Harding—had, in 1901, also founded and built the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. [

*14] It’s the first institution ever created in America devoted exclusively to biomedical research [

*14] [

*52], and just five years later, it moved from its temporary quarters to laboratories on the Upper East Side along the East River [

*52]; its campus remains there [

*51], and in the mid ’60s, it was renamed as The Rockefeller University [

*52]. Nearly a thousand miles away, he’d already founded the University of Chicago in 1890 [

*64], and—even before the Rockefeller Institute had settled into its permanent location—in 1905, eight and a half thousand miles abroad, in the land taken from Spain by the US only a few years earlier, which had comprised part of the birth of its new empire that the United States of America had begun to create, he funded the establishment of Central Philippine University [

*28]—not quite a thousand miles from Vietnam, where the US had been striving to maintain the extension of French imperial rule for more than 20 years when the Riverside Speech was given.

It was at the first university Rockefeller had created that Prof. Harding got his master’s and doctorate degrees in history—gaining the training and expertise in the comprehensive research that served him and King so well when he delved into the background of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Had either Rockefeller or his wife been alive to hear the prophetic product—which this scholarly research had yielded, delivered in that momentous speech at the church he’d built—we may wonder just how greatly Laura Spelman Rockefeller or John D. Rockefeller themselves would have looked on that prophecy as an example of why he called the University of Chicago “the best investment I ever made”. [

*64]

Harding became the King Center’s first director, and one of the first tasks that he guided the Center to begin was called the Library Documentation Project. It has collected records and recollections of those who were active during the civil rights movement; many thousands of these are now stored at the King Library and Archives, including correspondences of Dr. King’s, records of many of the organizations that were deeply involved in the struggle, oral histories, and vast audiovisual documentation. The King Center also led in the drive that culminated in 1983 with the legislation that established King’s birthday as the national holiday that Americans are celebrating tomorrow. [

*21]

And they laid bare what caused America to so unfairly and unjustly treat people who were of a different race, what caused America to so unfairly and unjustly treat people who were in a different economic class, what caused America to so unfairly and unjustly treat people who were in a different country on the other side of the world, what caused America to so unfairly and unjustly treat people who were in many different countries all over the world. Segregation was the cause of all of these, and integration was the only thing that could be the solution to any of them. And beyond any of that, they also laid bare that segregating the methodologies of protesting in the North from those in the South, as those powerful pundits were demanding, was a problem; King clearly saw that integrating the protest techniques was the right approach. And beyond all that, they also laid bare that segregating thinking about or talking about unfairness and injustice in America from thinking about or talking about unfairness and injustice around the world, as those powerful pundits were demanding, was a problem; King clearly saw that integrating thinking and talking about unfairness and injustice was the right approach. In one aspect after another, comprehensive integration was the key avenue needed for success, and segregation just held back any meaningful progress.

With a long career having researched and penned numerous works on the history of America, Harding pointed out that—having done “a rigorous analysis of the long black movement toward justice, equity and truth”—he was able to write that “I have freely allowed myself to celebrate.” He and King took a steadfast stand against the waging of an immoral war and against the unjust treatment of people across America and around the world. Over forty years later, the producer of a PBS documentary on the Riverside Speech emphasized how their stance “led to the demonization of King” throughout the realm of mainstream liberal ideology, and he further pointed out, “The speech caused black leaders to turn against him. It got him disinvited by LBJ to the White House. He couldn’t get a book deal. It’s fascinating, given the adulation and adoration we have for MLK today.” [

*11] And in 2007, Harding remarked on how King was caused the most pain by the reaction from the leaders of other civil rights organizations, writing that “the most hurtful criticism was in the movement”. [

*20].

Once King was dead, the sanctimonious arbiters of liberal propriety glommed onto the apparition of an illusory Martin Luther King who never existed, and they have ever since been working to co-opt this phantom memory. Vincent Harding would of course have none of it. “For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep,” he said in 1997, “Martin Luther King, Jr., is surely the wrong man.” [

*56]