The 1960's were in some ways even more violent than the 1860's in the United States. While the number of deaths during the Civil War exponentially exceed the number of American deaths during the 1960's, there were individual deaths among American leaders during that decade that permanently altered the American reality.
John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy certainly occupy this tragic pantheon. But Martin Luther King, cut down 40 years ago this weekend, was more powerful than these other men in ways that are seldom acknowledged.
Martin Luther King had a larger impact on America than any person who has ever served in the government of the United States. Chew on that. King is the symbol of a moral reckoning that covered more ground in less time than any other moral reckoning in recorded human history.
To consider the power of this man, murdered before reaching the age of 40, is a sobering undertaking. A man who lacked the coercive apparatus of any government or any gun shifted the very meaning of the word "American" more than all the money or the murder in the world could ever have done.
We must also remember that King gave speeches other than the "I Have a Dream" standard. Towards the end of his life, King said things about the American government and America's role in the world that, in the current climate, are every bit as inflammatory as anything Barack Obama's preacher has said.
King called the American government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." That is a statement that the current political discourse simply would never tolerate. It is a debatable assertion, but there is a kernel of truth to it.
It is a rather ironic thing that American society writ large came to accept that segregation was wrong, but that same society was largely unwilling to reject the premise that it had the right to slaughter Vietnamese. There was a connection there that King was uniquely equipped to speak to.
King exuded humanity, and the entire underpinning of his philosophy was the premise that if any people are denied their freedom, then we are all in prison. So while America was right to reject segregation, it had not shaken the sickness, the dehumanization that made it possible, unless and until it fore swore a prerogative to slaughter foreigners who were no threat to America.
That is a bridge we have yet to cross. The important thing about King was that he spoke early and often about that bridge. The slippery slope is another useful cliche. If a culture is willing to treat blacks or Vietnamese or anyone else as less than fully human, that culture will eventually devour itself.
One of the many eerie ironies of 1968 was Bobby Kennedy's speech in Indianapolis on the night of King's murder. My friends and I watched the speech on youtube last night after an immoderate consumption of single malt scotch. The sense of what was lost to America that year is a visceral, nauseating thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IivNv61pDg&feature=related
Kennedy went into the black neighborhood of Indianapolis with no police escort, the chief of police having refused to send any police into an area he was sure would be burning within the hour. And it fell to Bobby Kennedy, a laughably stereotypical privileged brat, to break the unbearable news to a crowd of black folks.
When he tells them of King's murder, a sickening shriek ripples through the crowd, and we are whisked back to a time before cell phones, before the Internet, before cable television, to a time when face to face interaction was still the medium for human communication. And a more human moment could rarely be witnessed.
At that moment, Bobby Kennedy was in serious physical danger. He spent 1968 acting as if he fully expected to be killed, ala Malcolm X in 1965. It is an incredibly liberating thing to be unafraid of death, and it liberated Bobby Kennedy to be the man he was that night.
He spoke to the crowd of forgiveness, of peace, of love, of his own pain over the murder of his brother, the first and last time he spoke in public about John's killing. He quoted Greek poetry off the top of his head. To a crowd of black folks in Indianapolis. And there was no riot that night in that city, unlike most.
Exactly two months after King's murder, Bobby Kennedy's lifeblood seeped across the floor of a kitchen in a California hotel. More Americans were killed in Vietnam in 1968 than any other year, but it was the loss of Martin and Bobby that made those deaths even more pointless.
On Christmas eve of that same year, astronaut Bill Anders took a picture that showed the world what King and Kennedy had seen, but had never lived to see recognized. A picture of a single world suspended in a hostile void of nothingness. Ironically, it was Lyndon Johnson, whose warmongering forced him to abdicate the presidency in 1968, that said it best. "We must love one another or die."
Here are the last words Martin Luther King spoke in public. If you can listen to him say, "I'm not fearin' any man" without getting goosebumps, you should get that checked out.
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