Vigil to evoke King's appeal for peace
Event called time for reflection
By CHRISTINA HEADRICK, Staff Writer
RALEIGH -- Exactly one year before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke strongly and publicly against the Vietnam War.
Now, with the nation at war in Iraq, the organizers of a prayer vigil on the 35th anniversary of King's death say they want Triangle residents to take time today to pray for a quick end to the new conflict and to reflect on King's legacy.
"We're trying to present the vigil as a way of uniting people," said the Rev. William A. Thurston, pastor at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Wendell and head of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Shaw University. "There are some who are for the war. There are some who are not. But we should all be united for peace on earth as it is in heaven."
The Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee of Raleigh is sponsoring the event with the Interfaith Alliance of Wake County and the N.C. Council of Churches. Organizers say the vigil will not be a war protest but a time for "solitude and reflection," although the program does include some speakers who are against the war in Iraq.
King didn't mince words about his opposition to war when he preached April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, making his most explicit statement up to that point about the Vietnam War. "The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just," King said.
"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."
A cycle of violence
King argued that the Vietnam War would lead to the United States' declining moral status in the world, harm the right of Third World countries to determine their own future and undercut domestic programs while money and talent were diverted to war. He criticized the United States as colonialist for pursuing the Vietnam conflict and said the war fed the triple evils of "racism, extreme materialism and militarism."
"I guess the best way of putting it is that he felt war is always counterproductive; it leads to a cycle of violence," said Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University history professor and one of the nation's preeminent scholars on King.
"It was very difficult, as he put it in one of his speeches, to call for black people to use nonviolence in the struggle for freedom at home while also not speaking out against the use of the violence to achieve America's objectives abroad, especially when it would be the same young black men in the trenches abroad."
Earlier this year, Carson wrote a script for a reading of King's statements on war and peace, which was performed by an actor in Stanford's chapel.
"It was remarkable," Carson said, "that speeches that were more than 30 years old still had the ability to move an audience."
Drawing on his words
The civil rights leader's words about war resonated at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations earlier this year at the BTI Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Raleigh.
Rania Masri, director of the Southern Peace Research and Education Center in Durham and founder of the Raleigh-based Iraq Action Coalition, spoke to the crowd at the center, saying that the war against Iraq would feed the triple evils that King had defined. Masri's comments, sprinkled with quotations from King, drew a standing ovation. She will speak at today's vigil.
Charles Payne, a history professor at Duke University who has written about the freedom movement, said that King's messages also have appeared at campus peace rallies at Duke. Payne is not surprised that activists would draw on King's words, given his memorable use of language and the moral authority of his name.
A whole generation of Americans has grown up thinking that the "I Have a Dream" speech was the definition of King, Payne said, when he had much more to say.
"I think he was absolutely unambiguous in his condemnation of war and Vietnam at the time," Payne said, adding that King was criticized roundly for his views. "There's nothing in his reasoning that can be used to justify preemptive war. His first premise was always that he rejected the use of violence."
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