Today in Washington, there was an official ground-breaking ceremony for a statue honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Washington Mall. The newscasts focused on King's famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he movingly spoke of his belief that full racial integration could be achieved in America. The speech is an iconic moment for baby boomers, and for the Establishment. King's speech spoke to us as we like to be believe we are, a just, democratic nation, guilty of missteps at times, but ultimately the "good guys," inhabiting a shiny city on a hill.
But there is another version of America, one that Martin Luther King known and understood as only a victim of that America truly could. It was an America King, especially in the last years of his life, frequently spoke about, in increasingly angry terms, never as a demogogue, but as a leader of the oppressed, who understood all too the methods, ideology, and worldview of the oppressor. It is a King we do not like to commemorate or dedicate statutes to. It is the King who,in April 1967, stood in Riverside Church in Manhattan and spoke these words:
"Somehow, this madness must cease. We must stop now. ... I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America, who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of our own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
King understood, both intellectually and spiritually, how the American economic system was driving both military imperialism abroad and structural racism and poverty here at home. If he were alive today, he would be a leading critic of the "cultural wars," "war on terrorism," the demonization of "illegal aliens," and corporate-driven wave of "globalization". King would know that these are contemporary manifestations of a system that gave us slavery, segregation, Vietnam, a systme based on violence, a violence aimed not only at the body, but the mind and the soul. King, one of the leading apostles of non-violence in the past century, if he could stand on the Mall today, would most certianly delvier a speech that would probably get him labeled a traitor and perhaps packed off to one of the Government's secret prisons.
But it is that Martin that deserves to be commemorated, not the Martin that our society has turned into a harmless plaster saint.