Recalling a 'Drum Major for Peace'

From Common Dreams:

Published on Sunday, January 16, 2005 by New York Newsday (Long Island)
Recalling 'A Drum Major for Peace'
by Les Payne

The birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. is a fine time to weigh the cost of war.

His worst detractors all this time later still judge him a man of peace. His nonviolent war-mongering at home saw him opposing most wars waged abroad. King especially opposed those wars of suppression so favored by the techno-military complex that came into flower after Korea. These usually featured a hand-off from a European colonial power that swore the enemy was trapped at home and ripe for U.S. plucking.

The Vietnamese were a bitter fruit, more dangerous than America had imagined. King came out against the war in 1967 not because the United States could not win but because it was not her war to fight. The cost was too high at home.

Even King's closest aides during the Jim Crow wars missed his hankering for a campaign broader still. Some claimed it was the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize that turned King's head toward the Vietnam War. I doubt it. Like most such August awards, the Swedish medallion has a record of banking more fires than it lights.

What mountains left to conquer could still tempt the middle-aged over-achievers who customarily win the Nobel?

In King's case, the unsuspected laureate, who won the prize at 35, had many more arrows in his quiver. His rights agenda was graduated to the Vietnam War, I suspect, more by the young Turks gobbling up the civil-rights turf he had dominated for a decade. And then there was Malcolm X, the acerbic, avenging angel, thumbing through King's dossier and noting contradictions. "How can you be nonviolent in Mississippi," Malcolm charged black men under King's swoon, "as violent as you were in Korea?" He chided them for bleeding "when the white man says bleed," but when it came to defending blacks' rights at home, "you haven't got any blood."

King was increasingly confronted with watered-down versions of Malcolm's sharp critique. At any rate, King's riveting April, 1967, speech at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, came out forthrightly against the Vietnam War.

Criticism of his dramatic anti-war stance was acidic and relentless, and it issued from friends and foes alike. Much of it was condescending, critics demanding to know what right did a black civil-rights leader have to question U.S. foreign policy on matters of war. This, despite the disproportionate number of African-Americans who were dying in the highlands and rice patties of Vietnam.

One of the sharpest critiques came from Carl Rowan, who had covered King's campaign in the South. The former chief of U.S. information agencies, Rowan was something of a former-day Armstrong Williams - that is, a dagger hired to draw black blood. In his column, Rowan accused King of caring little about blacks or the Vietnamese and, in a Reader's Digest piece, he said King was laboring under the influence of Communists.

King stuck to his anti-war guns to the end. But his chief legacy was ridding the nation its Jim Crow laws. The white majority, he maintained, deprived blacks of their liberty, happiness and - all too often - their lives, by cracking heads, drafting laws and shutting Negroes out of the economy. This tyranny of the majority had declared a needless war in Vietnam and was sending black men to fight it who did not share equal rights at home.

As President George W. Bush imposes his brand of democracy upon Iraq, this tyranny of the majority is raising its head as a threat to the Sunni minority. Under the U.S.-imposed electoral system, the Sunni minority has expressed grave concerns about what would happen to their rights and quality of life under an almost certain victory at the polls for the 60-percent Shiite majority. It does not help matters, of course, that as head of the Sunni minority, Saddam Hussein cracked down murderously on the Shia majority in his quarter-century in power.

Were he alive, King would likely oppose the war. The unwillingness of the United States to learn from the mistakes of Vietnam he might find quite baffling; that is, until he discovers what little contact the draft evaders who planned the Iraq invasion actually had with that earlier war.

Though we observe King's birthday, it would do well to recall the words he left us about his legacy: "If any of you are around when I meet that day, I don't want a long funeral. If you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Prize, that isn't important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards. . . . I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King tried to give his life helping others. I want you to say that I tried to be right on the war question. . . .

"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice, that I was a drum major for peace."