I am going to keep on marching for justice, equality, peace and reconciliation of the human family until I am called home.— Coretta Scott King
I remember that April evening so clearly. My father was coming out of one of his upholstery shops in suburban New Jersey when I walked up. I'd just heard the news on the radio and was anxious to tell him.
"Martin Luther King got shot," I said.
An odd look crossed my old man's face, like he'd been punched unexpectedly and was trying not to show that it had hurt. "Where?" he asked.
It was not a geography question. "In the head," I said.
My father turned around and walked back into the store.
Dr. King's message of peaceful change notwithstanding, there is nothing more American than brutal violence. The country was built on it, revels in it and shows every evidence of clinging to it with the crazed, destructive strength of an obsessive lover.
The cities of Newark and Detroit had gone up in smoke less than a year before the rifle shot from James Earl Ray took out Dr. King. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities on the night that Dr. King died. Buildings went up in flames. Motorists were pulled from vehicles and beaten. Rioters were slain by the police and soldiers of the National Guard.
Two months later Bobby Kennedy, who had called for calm on the night of Dr. King's death, was murdered in Los Angeles. Through all of this, the mindless orgy of violence in Vietnam continued without respite.
Dr. King understood with unusual clarity the price to be paid for the terrible belief that every problem could be settled by a bullet or a bomb. He warned his followers and the nation as a whole to avoid the "quicksand" of violence and hatred. He urged blacks to remain nonviolent in the face of horrendous injustices, and he spoke out boldly against the war in Vietnam.
He might as well have been whispering into a hurricane. Extreme black power advocates excoriated him as a Tom, and supporters of the war told him, essentially, to shut up and stick to civil rights.
We've honored Dr. King, but we've never listened to him. Our addiction to the joy of violence is far too strong. We'll search like hollow-eyed junkies all day and all through the night for a rationale, any rationale, to keep the killing going. Democratic politicians have suffered for years because they have been insufficiently insistent on violence as a solution to national problems.
When Dr. King was slain in 1968, the carnage in Vietnam was just hitting its stride. Barry Zorthian, the public information officer for American forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, was quoted as follows in the book "Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides":
"We probably could have gotten the deal we ended up with in 1973 as early as 1969. And between 1969 and 1972 we almost doubled our losses. It's easy to second-guess but I've never been convinced that those last 25,000 casualties were justified."
And that's just on the American side. Anywhere from a million to two million Vietnamese lives were lost in the war.
Here in the U.S., it's almost too frightening to consider how many lives have been sacrificed to mindless violence over the past four decades. In many parts of the black community, this form of domestic terror is taken for granted, and even celebrated in many of the most popular songs.
"Niggas who fuck wit me get shot up," says 50 Cent.
Civil rights leaders recently went out of their way to pay their respects to the memory of Stanley Tookie Williams, a co-founder of the Crips street gang who was executed in December for the murder of four people.
He'd been redeemed, they said. Maybe so. But the Crips, the Bloods and their murderous imitators have spilled oceans of innocent blood. I think of them as world-class destroyers of children.
And, of course, the war of choice today — the quicksand that Dr. King would certainly have counseled us against — is in Iraq.
Thirty-seven years after the death of her husband (who was only 39 when he died), Coretta Scott King has been called home. Like her husband, she always believed that America's addiction to violence could be brought under control.
They were wrong. We love it much too much.
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