The Fierce Urgency of Now

Yesterday, the forty-second anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, various commentators focused on one of his lesser known speeches. That speech was delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City; and it made him a pariah among the movers and shakers of his time. In the speech, King voiced his opposition to the War in Vietnam. His reasons were many. But, taken together, they added up to the fact that the war was an affront to justice. Admitting that truth, however, was not easy. "Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth," King said,

men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

The war was also an affront to King's faith in non-violence. But, more than that, it was "devastating the hopes of the poor at home" by transferring the resources that were originally targeted for the "war on poverty" to the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Citing a recently released report, "State of the Dream 2010: Drained," from the group United for a Fair Economy, Bill Moyers on Friday drew his viewers' attention to this sentence: "The Great Recession has pulled the plug on communities of color, draining jobs and homes at alarming rates while exacerbating persistent inequalities of wealth and income." Despite the election of Barack Obama, not much has changed for the people whose concerns King championed. "We are at a perilous moment," Moyers said:

The individualist, greed driven free market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted our system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity -- its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist.

A year to the day after King delivered his Riverside speech, he was assassinated. He knew that anger was brewing in the ghettos of the country. It erupted after that rifle bullet ended his life. That was why he warned his audience that "tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now." That was also why Americans had to choose wisely. "The choice is ours," he said, "and, though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment in history."

The Vietnam War has come and gone; and it is now generally acknowledged to have been a colossal mistake. Like the financial meltdown, from which we are now emerging, it was the consequence of monumental arrogance and stupidity. But the plight of the poor and the disenfranchised remains the same -- in the United States and around the world. Once again we live at a crucial moment in history. King was a man for all seasons. Forty-two years after his death, he still asks us to choose justice.

By the Awful Grace of God

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. It had been five years since the historic March on Washington, and four years since he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. He was in Memphis to lead a strike of sanitation workers.

Some interpreted his presence there as a sign of his diminished status. He was, after all, far from the haunts of the powerful. But anyone who had followed his career knew otherwise. For, while he marched against racism, he also marched against poverty. "The curse of poverty has no justification in our age," he wrote in 1967. "It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time for us has come to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."

In the years since his death, some -- citing King's personal failings -- have dismissed him as a hypocrite. But they fail to note that King was at home in the temples of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor. And, despite the rising tide of violence -- which threatened to engulf the Civil Rights Movement -- King remained true to his faith in non-violence. "Non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time," he said when he accepted the Nobel Prize. For, more than anything else, the challenge of the time was " the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence." Non violence was the way to achieve and maintain justice: "the foundation of such a method," he said," is love."

Robert Kennedy, who was running for president when King was killed, spoke to a largely African American crowd on April 4, 1968. Kennedy's biographers claim that, after the death of his elder brother, he read the plays of Aeschylus, with whom he had little acquaintance -- until November 22, 1963. And it was to Aeschylus that Kennedy turned, knowing what would follow King's death :

He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep,
Pain that cannot forget,
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Kennedy's words have a particular poignancy, because he, too, had a date with an assassin's bullet some two months later. For those of us who came of age in that time, King's death marked a turning point. As Jesse Jackson has said, that day has divided life into two segments: before King and after King. His death marked the death of our innocence and the birth of a new cynicism.

But that dichotomy is too simple. We have, in Dickens' phrase, lived through the best and worst of times. Perhaps every generation does. But the challenge every generation faces is to arrive at some kind of wisdom, "by the awful grace of God." The jury is still out on the question of whether or not we have learned anything.