What MLK Said About Change
These are some of the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:
"The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear
against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced. The student sit-ins of 1960 are
a classic illustration of this method....
"So far we have had the Constitution backing most of the demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we
could be sure that the federal courts would usually back up our demonstrations legally. Now we are approaching areas
where the voice of the Constitution is not clear. We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering
the area of human rights.
"The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the
right to an adequate income....
"The past three years have demonstrated the power of a committed, morally sound minority to lead the nation.... Even the
presence of a vital peace movement and the campus protest against the war in Vietnam can be traced back to the
nonviolent action movement led by the Negro."
King was decidedly pro-change. But these are some more of his words:
"The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and
finally, from imitation of manners, dress, and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of
Negro leader acquires the white man's contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class
white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he
changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man's representative to the Negro. The
tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him."
Yes, this is right-wing corporate-media color-blind hero, Martin Luther King Jr. speaking about the white man and the
Negro people. He was speaking about what was, and what largely still is, not about what he dreamed might someday be.
He was for change, but not for electing just anyone who said the word, and not for letting pass the uncomfortable but
necessary warning.
"A time comes," King said, "when silence is betrayal."
"As I have walked," King told the crowd assembled in Riverside Church a year before his assassination, "among the
desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their
problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most
meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation
wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit
home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of
those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I
cannot be silent."
King could be imagined today asking a Senator who would claim to oppose the occupation of a distant land while funding
that violence with enough wealth to remake the globe: "Why, Senator, will you not filibuster future bills to fund this
occupation? Ordinary citizens are sacrificing far more than the embarrassment of attempting a legislative maneuver that
might not succeed. Why will you not use the power you now possess for the good you claim to endorse, prior to asking us
to bestow still greater powers on you?"
"There is nothing wrong with power," King actually said in his final address to the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, "if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one
of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar
opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.
"It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the
Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the
Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing
right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is
sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power
correcting everything that stands against love."
The strongest politicians do not support the waging of war against weaker peoples. The strongest voices in the United
States today oppose the occupation of Iraq, and do so out of love for the people of Iraq and the world, and do so with
more than words.
ENDS
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David Swanson is an organizer of the www.AfterDowningStreet.org coalition.