This year the celebration of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King has a sharp edge. People are seizing this day to recommit to our capacities to create loving communities and forging a world capable of finding peace. This commitment to is emerging in the face of war. It is emerging as we drift closer to global nuclear catastrophe than at any time since the middle of the last Century.

People are turning to King’s strongest message against the US war in Vietnam. To open the Palestinian Festival of Literature on November, Michelle Alexander turned to him to frame her welcome. She emphasized that we are “morally obligated to speak for the suffering, helpless and outcast children.” She called us to remember King’s emphasis on our loyalties to a broader humanity, quoting:

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

She also called upon his most forceful critique of US society saying: “He decried the moral bankruptcy of a nation that does not hesitate to invest in bombs and warfare around the world but can never seem to find the dollars to eradicate poverty at home. He called for a radical revolution of values.”

Reclaiming King’s radical vision enriches our movements for peace and justice. It helps us understand the interconnections of the structures of power that are bringing us to global destruction.  And it points toward strategies to bring about a radical revolution of values needed if we are to create a future.

During this holiday we encourage people to read and discuss the full text of Beyond Vietnam. 

We also think it is important to look at two speeches that foreshadowed his stance on Vietnam and provide a basis for expanding our understanding of what needs to be done today: His acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize and his Nobel Lecture, both given 60 years ago this December. In these speeches King emphasizes that love is the only way to defeat violence.

Accepting the Nobel prize “on behalf of a civil rights movement,” King began reminding everyone of the violence unfolding daily in the US. He then affirmed his commitment to nonviolence as a strategic and tactical expression of love and as a powerful moral force for change. He concluded:

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace... If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

For King, love is not a sentimental idea but is central to resolving the fundamental crisis of our time. 

In the lecture given the day after the awarding of the prize, King pinpoints “the most pressing problem” confronting us as the contradiction between our “spectacular strides in science and technology” and the “poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.” He explores this contradiction saying:

“Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live…This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul.” 

King saw this “spiritual and moral lag” expressed “in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

King concluded,” Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away, and out of the womb of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born.”

Many hands today are helping this birth. From South Africa to the global actions calling for peace, the world is shifting. Each of us can turn our hands and hearts toward bringing this new world to life.