Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
The retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens--by far the most consistently progressive and socially responsible figure in the Court over the past 30 years and the acknowledged leader of the minority liberal wing in the Court--is a major political loss for real progressivism on the Court and thus represents a serious challenge and absolute imperative for Obama to aggressively replace him with a genuine liberal/progressive nominee...
Most importantly Obama must be willing to go all the way and FIGHT HARD for him/her when the notorious Republican right inevitably tries to eliminate and destroy the nominee--a process which will of course begin immediately...
If the President doesn't have the vision and guts to do so we will all live to regret it bigtime...
Kofi
Retirement of Justice Stevens Is Political Test for Obama
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Charlie Savage New York Times
WASHINGTON — The announcement by Justice John Paul Stevens on Friday that he would retire at the end of this term gives President Obama the rare opportunity to make back-to-back appointments to the Supreme Court during the first two years of his presidency.
But it also presents Mr. Obama with a complex political challenge: getting a nominee confirmed in the thick of a midterm election season, when Republicans, fueled by the intensity of their conservative base, are angling to knock him down, and Democrats, despite having lost their 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, are eager to flex their muscles after passing a landmark health care bill.
Justice Stevens’s announcement, delivered to the White House on Friday morning in a one-paragraph letter that began “My dear Mr. President,” set off an immediate scramble among the parties and a raft of advocacy groups that have been assembling dossiers on potential successors.
The three leading candidates — Mr. Obama is considering about 10 names all told, the White House says — present the president with a spectrum of ideological reputations, government backgrounds and life experiences. His choice will shape the battle to win Senate confirmation of his nominee.
In effect, the president must choose to be bold or play it safe.
Merrick B. Garland, 58, an appeals court judge here, is well liked by elite legal advocates and is widely considered the safest choice if Mr. Obama wants to avoid a confrontation with the minority party. A former federal prosecutor who worked on the Oklahoma City bombings, he is well-known in Washington’s legal-political community, where some view him as a kind of Democratic version of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Elena Kagan, 49, is solicitor general but has never been a judge and does not have a lengthy trail of scholarly writings, so her views are less well documented. But as the dean of Harvard Law School, she earned respect across ideological lines by bringing in several high-profile conservative professors, and she is a favorite among some in the extended Obama circle, who see her as smart and capable. Her relative youth means she could shape the court for decades to come.
Diane P. Wood, 59, a federal appeals court judge in Mr. Obama’s home city, Chicago, is seen as the most liberal of the three. She has been a progressive voice on a court that is home to several heavyweight conservative intellectuals. As a divorced mother of three, she brings the kind of real-life experience that Mr. Obama considers important. But her strong support for abortion rights would provoke a confrontation with conservatives. On Friday, the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life warned that a Wood nomination “would return the abortion wars to the Supreme Court.”
In making his selection, Mr. Obama confronts a vastly altered political landscape from the one he faced just 11 months ago, when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill the seat left vacant by the retirement of Justice David H. Souter.
With the election of Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, Democrats can no longer hold off a Republican filibuster. And while Democrats are emboldened by the health care vote, the passage of the legislation — which is already facing legal challenges from Republicans who say it is unconstitutional — has left the Senate more polarized than ever and created a climate in which the courts could easily become an election issue.
For the court, Justice Stevens’s departure will be the end of an era. He is the longest-serving justice by more than a decade, and he is the last remaining justice to have served in World War II. (He joined the Navy, where he served as a cryptographer, the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked.) His leaving will not, however, change the composition of the court; although he was appointed in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican, he has become one of its most reliably liberal members during his nearly 35-year tenure, as the court drifted ever rightward.
Still, for Mr. Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago (where he was a colleague of Judge Wood), the vacancy is an unmistakable chance to put his stamp on the direction the court takes for the next several decades. Mr. Obama is already engaged in an unusual public confrontation with the court over its recent decision in the Citizens United case, which lifted strict limits on corporate spending in elections. On Friday, during a brief appearance in the Rose Garden, he made clear that the case was very much on his mind.
He vowed to “move quickly” in announcing a nominee. Senior advisers said they expected a decision within the next several weeks. The president said he would look for a candidate who possessed what he described as qualities similar to that of Justice Stevens: “an independent mind, a record of excellence and integrity, a fierce dedication to the rule of law and a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people.”
And, in what legal scholars took as a clear swipe at the Citizens United decision (for which Justice Stevens wrote the dissent), the president said he would look for a justice who “knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.”
The White House already has a Supreme Court nomination team in place, with the selection process run by the new White House counsel, Robert F. Bauer, and overseen by Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff. Once a nominee is picked, Mr. Bauer’s wife, Anita Dunn, who is Mr. Obama’s former communications director, will coordinate with advocacy groups. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during some of its most contentious confirmation fights, is also likely to play a crucial role.
On Capitol Hill, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and the current chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview that Justice Stevens told him privately several weeks ago of his intentions. Mr. Leahy said he had had “long conversations” with the president and wanted a vote before the August recess so that a new justice could be installed by the start of the fall term.
“When I was the most junior Democrat in the Senate, I voted for John Paul Stevens,” Mr. Leahy said. “He was a Republican nominated by a Republican president who was going to be up for election, and we voted for him, and proudly.”
That kind of bipartisanship is highly unlikely this time. While both sides agree that Republicans are unlikely to use a filibuster to block a Supreme Court nominee, conservatives will at the very least use the debate to make the case for Republican candidates. They say they will calibrate their fight to how liberal they perceive Mr. Obama’s choice to be.
“If it’s someone like Merrick Garland, I don’t think there’s going to be a big fight,” said Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, a conservative advocacy group. But Mr. Levey said a more liberal nominee, like Judge Wood, would “be a field day for the conservative groups.”
But leaders of liberal groups, like Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice, are suspicious of conservative assurances that a more centrist nominee would face little opposition. They note that Justice Sotomayor was perceived by many on the left as far more centrist than they would have preferred, and yet Republicans portrayed her as a “judicial activist,” and 31 voted against her.
“No matter who he sends up,” Ms. Aron said, “I think Republicans are loaded for bear and will oppose.”
Democrats were divided Friday over whether Mr. Obama would pick a fight with Republicans or shrink from one. But Walter E. Dellinger III, who was acting solicitor general under President Bill Clinton, predicted passion, as much as politics, would play a role in Mr. Obama’s decision.
“I think that in choosing a Supreme Court justice,” Mr. Dellinger said, “the president is less likely to compromise and more likely to go with his heart than on any other matter.”
IF Ms. Heins is correct in asserting that Obama "won't have the courage to rebuild the liberal wing of the Supreme Court" then he will deserve his self imposed fate as a spineless political coward and empty charlatan who openly sold out the nation to curry favor with a dangerously demented and oppressive national rightwing element and their superwealthy and overtly criminal corporate sponsors who are-- and will remain-- fierce political, economic, and ideological enemies of any semblance of mass democracy in the United States...In that case only we will be the losers...Stay tuned...
Kofi
Exclusive: Obama ‘won’t have the courage’ to rebuild the liberal wing of the Supreme Court
By Gavin DahlApril 4th, 2010 The Raw Story
President Barack Obama should have the courage to try to rebuild the liberal wing of the Supreme Court but he probably won't, free speech attorney Marjorie Heins told Raw Story in an exclusive interview conducted Saturday.
When Obama appoints a new Justice to replace John Paul Stevens, "that Justice wouldn't make a dent in the 5 justice right-wing majority that ruled in Citizens United," Heins said.
Heins, founder of Free Expression Policy Project, and longtime director of the ACLU arts censorship project, pointed out Anthony Kennedy's going to be the swing Justice regardless of whom Obama appoints to replace Stevens. "Obama has had a record of being very slow with judicial appointments below the Supreme Court level," said Heins. "And that's of course where most cases are decided and that's a real problem. At the Supreme Court level, he won't be slow, but he'll probably be very cautious.""In the days when we had Black and Douglas and Brennan and Marshall there really was a liberal wing on the Supreme Court," she continued. "And now what we really have is a right wing and a moderate wing, we don't really have a liberal wing anymore. Or liberalism has moved so far to the right that we can't recognize it. Obama should have the courage to try to rebuild the liberal wing, but he probably won't because he doesn't want to create any more controversy and opposition than necessary in Congress."
This weekend Justice John Paul Stevens confirmed that he plans to retire during Obama's first term as president. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa) told Fox News Sunday he hopes Stevens waits a year, to avoid gridlock while Senate business is so backed up due to battles over health care legislation.
"I think we need someone who will step into Justice Stevens' shoes, who will be very tough on the issues of executive power," Specter said. "A federal court this past week declared the warrantless wiretapping unconstitutional. I think we need the kind of balance that Justice Stevens has provided to offset the majority on the court which is in favor of executive power."Justice Stevens, in his passionate Citizens United v. FEC dissent, wrote of the majority's threat to democracy, because one of the fundamentals of free speech is that all, not just the richest or most powerful, need to be heard. Vast majorities of Americans who identify as members of each of the major political parties are unhappy with the Supreme Court's decision, which fundamentally changes campaign finance laws in the United States.In a detailed article posted to the Free Expression Policy Project website immediately after the Supreme Court decision, Heins highlighted Stevens' description of the majority's argument as "aggressive judicial activism" suffering from "glittering generality."
Heins guesses he wrote the Citizens United dissent in the way he did because he wants it to be remembered. "Stevens is about to turn ninety and still plays tennis," she said, laughing. "He's incredible. One of the ironies of course is Stevens was the author of Pacifica, the case that allows the FCC to censor what it thinks is indecent on the airwaves."
Stevens is considered a first amendment champion now, but in 1978, just after he was appointed to the court, Heins says, "He didn't get it. He wrote this Pacifica decision which he ought to apologize for some day, and perhaps he even will. But certainly in Citizens United he's trying to make a very strong statement against this kind of -- beyond judicial activism -- it's very unusual what the Supreme Court did."
The key swing vote on the Supreme Court used to be Justice O'Connor, Heins points out, but now it is Kennedy. "Kennedy is usually pretty good on first amendment issues although in this case his interpretation was 'oh the first amendment doesn't allow us to make distinctions between speakers.' That's what Stevens was referring to as a 'glittering generality.' Of course government can make distinctions between speakers! Corporations are not individuals and they don't have the same rights as individuals, but Kennedy did not agree with that."
Supreme Court Justice Stevens Will Retire in June 09 April 2010by Michael Doyle and David Lightman McClatchy Newspapers t r u t h o u t
Washington - Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement Friday, setting up a long-anticipated confirmation battle during the most sensitive of political seasons.
Stevens, who'll turn 90 on April 20, said that after 34 years on the high court it was time to step down.
"It would be in the best interests of the court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the court's next term," Stevens said in a letter to President Barack Obama.
A Supreme Court representative conveyed Stevens' letter to the White House at about 10:30 a.m. Friday. White House Counsel Bob Bauer called Obama with the news, reaching the president aboard Air Force One as Obama was returning from the nuclear treaty signing in Prague.
Stevens' departure in June at the end of the 2009-10 term will remove from the court its most senior justice as well as the linchpin of what's now the liberal wing. Stevens' retirement also will ensure that the Supreme Court is front and center during the upcoming midterm congressional elections.
For conservatives and liberals alike, the pending court vacancy will become a way to mobilize the troops as well as to wage proxy fights over hot-button issues, including abortion and wartime security.
For Obama, the vacancy provides a challenge and an opportunity.
Republicans are eager to unite around an issue that will engage their conservative base. The president's Democratic Party controls 59 seats, one short of the number that's needed to stop a filibuster. In a break with tradition, some senators have signaled that they wouldn't be reluctant to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee.
Stevens' departure also provides Obama a second chance to shape the court with a relatively young justice who'll be interpreting the Constitution for the next several decades. Because of Stevens' relatively left-of-center position, the new justice may not tip the court's overall ideological balance.
"I hope that senators on both sides of the aisle will make this process a thoughtful and civil discourse," said Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous case for judicial restraint and the fundamental importance of an evenhanded reading of the law," cautioned Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
The experience of the president's first court choice, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, may foreshadow the political conflict to come. Thirty-one Republicans opposed her, including some who'd traditionally crossed party lines to approve Democratic choices in the past.
Nine Republicans voted for Sotomayor.
Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it this way: "Given the track record of the Senate Republicans, anybody Obama supports is going to be attacked. They're geared up for battle. The question is can Republicans oppose the nominee without embarrassing themselves too much."
Having named Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court, Obama now could make more history.
The nine-member court has never had more than two women serving at a time. Obama can change that if he reinforces Sotomayor and the 77-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a female nominee. Several possibilities exist.
A very serious contender is Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the first woman to hold that prestigious post as well as the first female dean of Harvard Law School. An appellate judge who was considered seriously last year, Diane Wood of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, knows Obama from their teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.
The president might name a second Hispanic justice, Judge Kim Wardlaw of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm comes from the non-appellate world, which Obama has said he'd like to make use of.
Alternatively, the president might try to name the first Asian-American to the court. Although only seven Asian-Americans are serving on the federal bench, the president could search elsewhere; for instance, by tapping his top State Department lawyer, former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh.
Regardless of whom the president nominates, a fight is all but guaranteed. Currently, only six of Obama's 15 appellate court nominees have been confirmed.
The last unanimously approved Supreme Court justice was Anthony Kennedy, 22 years ago. The deeply conservative top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, was himself rejected by Democrats when he was nominated to the federal bench, and midterm election years generally only harden positions.
Stevens' retirement announcement wasn't unexpected. He'd hired only one law clerk for next year, instead of the customary four. He would've had to serve roughly another year to become either the oldest or the longest-serving Supreme Court justice.
The longest-serving justice will remain William O. Douglas, whose seat Stevens took after President Gerald Ford nominated him in 1975.
At the time, Stevens was serving on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A Northwestern University Law School graduate and Navy veteran of World War II, he was deemed a conventionally moderate Midwestern Republican at the time.
Stevens "has earned the gratitude and admiration of the American people for his nearly 40 years of distinguished service to the judiciary, including more than 34 years on the Supreme Court," Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said Friday. "He has enriched the lives of everyone at the court through his intellect, independence and warm grace."
McClatchy White House Correspondent Margaret Talev also contributed to this report.
We had all better hope this is not the case! If so it will be an unmitigated DISASTER for us all... Kofi
A Supreme Court Shift to the Right? 09 April 2010 by Ruth Marcus Op-Ed t r u t h o u t
Washington -Here is an unsettling thought for those who waited eight years to have a Democratic president appointing judges: Barack Obama could well end his first term with a more conservative Supreme Court than the one he inherited.
This is, I hasten to admit, premature speculation -- even with the not-so-surprise announcement that Justice John Paul Stevens, the anchor of the court's liberal wing, is retiring.
First, the president's only nominee so far, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has not even finished her first term. Where she turns out to be on the ideological spectrum in comparison to the justice she replaced, David Souter, is unknown.
Second, the accuracy of this conjecture will depend hugely on who the president selects to fill the vacancy.
Finally, as the examples of Souter (named by President George H.W. Bush) and Stevens (selected by President Gerald Ford) demonstrate, predictions about a new justice's future performance can make weather forecasting look like an exact science.
Nonetheless, it's entirely possible that a more conservative court could be Obama's paradoxical legacy -- particularly if he only serves a single term. The likelihood of the court shifting to the right is greater than that of its moving leftward.
In part, this could have been predicted even before Obama took office. It reflects less about him than it does the identity of the departing justices, one liberal followed by another. The next oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 77. Conservatives are reaping the benefits of Bush father and son having selected justices who were relatively young. Justice Clarence Thomas was 43 when tapped, Chief Justice John Roberts was 50, and Justice Samuel Alito was 55.
It would likely only be in the case of a departure by 74-year-old Justice Antonin Scalia -- not likely to occur voluntarily during Obama's presidency -- or Justice Anthony Kennedy, 73, that the president would have an opportunity to dramatically alter the court's ideological makeup.
But there's little in Obama's record as president to suggest that he would expend enormous capital to secure the most liberal possible justice. From the point of view of liberal groups, Obama's nominees to the lower federal courts have been, overall, disappointingly moderate.
In selecting Sotomayor, Obama acted with an eye less to ideology than to ethnicity; the selection does not offer much of a clue into what the president is looking for, as a matter of constitutional interpretation, in future justices. The conservative howling about Sotomayor's alleged radicalism had as little basis in reality as do the parallel assertions about Obama.
As Tom Goldstein of ScotusBlog put it after analyzing Sotomayor's appellate record, "Our surveys of her opinions put her in essentially the same ideological position as Justice Souter." From her conduct on the bench so far, there's no reason to change that assessment.
By contrast, it's likely, although not certain, that a Stevens replacement will be more conservative than the retiring justice. If so, this would be largely in line with history. In an interview with Jeffrey Rosen for The New York Times Magazine in 2007, Stevens noted, "including myself, every judge who's been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell (chosen by Richard Nixon in 1971) has been more conservative than his or her predecessor." Stevens excepted Ginsburg, who replaced the more conservative Byron White.
In any event, Stevens' replacement is almost certain not to be as influential a player on the left as the departing justice. As the court's senior associate justice, Stevens spoke immediately after the chief justice during the court's discussion of cases; he had the power to assign opinions and some influence with swing justices such as Kennedy and, before her departure, Sandra Day O'Connor.
I'm not arguing, by the way, that Obama would go wrong by picking a Stevens successor likely to edge the court to the right. Indeed, there is a plausible argument that a justice viewed as more centrist might have more chance of bringing along conservative colleagues on a particular issue. Two of those mentioned as possible replacements, Judge Merrick Garland of the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, are viewed as more moderate than Stevens. Either would be a superb choice.
But my prediction stands: The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now.
Ruth Marcus' e-mail address is marcusr@washpost.com.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
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Virulent antiblack racism and the pathologically revered doctrine of white supremacy continues to rule with an iron fist and ruthless precision--like it always has in the United Hates of Hysteria that eternal domain of the 3H club: Hatred, Hubris, and Hypocrisy ...And just like millions of others Gerald Boyd spent his entire life living with that relentlessly destructive fact-- and typically wound up paying the inevitable price by dying young at age 56...(when one considers that Dr. King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Eric Dolphy, Jimi Hendrix, Lee Morgan, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Fred Hampton, Bob Marley, and Albert Ayler never made it to age 40 and that John Coltrane, Nat King Cole, Wes Montgomery, Roland Kirk, and Billie Holiday never made it to age 45-- just for starters) it all begins to make a very perverse, predictable, and horrific kind of sense doesn't it?...
Kofi
Gerald Boyd: On Being Fired From The New York Times Book Review by Russell Baker The New York Review of Books 04- 8-10
A Bad Morning at The New York Times
My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at the New York Times by Gerald M. Boyd, with an afterword by Robin D. Stone Lawrence Hill, 2010402 pp., $26.95
Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother. Childhood was work and study, study and work, and though they do not always guarantee success, for Gerald Boyd they did just what movies, books, and professional moralizers said they would do, probably because his widowed grandmother contributed a lot of wisdom, love, and iron to the self-making; and in his early fifties Gerald Boyd became managing editor of The New York Times. This was the second most important job in the newsroom of one of the world's better newspapers. He was the first black ever to reach such a dazzling position in the Times hierarchy, and the gaudiest job of all--the executive editorship--seemed within his reach almost until the very moment he was fired.
The firing occurred in the spring of 2003 in a bizarre seizure of office politics, and, as such things will, it left Boyd anything but well disposed toward his former employer and colleagues. He has written a good book filled with ill feeling toward the Times, many of its editors, and a variety of colleagues who turned against him under pressure or simply because they wanted him to fail and be damned. Written during the three years between his firing and his death from cancer in 2006, the book is now published posthumously with the help of his wife, Robin Stone.
Lovers of newspaper gossip will find it delightfully indiscreet about self-serving treacheries hatched in the newsroom by people simultaneously engaged in high-minded pursuit of all the news that's fit to print. Times folk, especially of the management class, will not be delighted by his account of their awkward struggle with the race problem or Boyd's suggestion that bigotry was one of the causes of his downfall.
There were other causes, however, and when all are combined, they present a picture of a runaway newsroom that left the paper's top editorial caste--and even its owners--suddenly powerless to control events. In the plainest possible terms, what happened in the newsroom was a successful workers' uprising against the bosses, in which the workers won and the bosses were humiliated.
What may strike the reader as oddest of all about the several curiosities of this rebellion is that it had almost nothing to do with the paper's editorial policy or its news coverage. When it was over, the Times 's news management had changed hands, but the paper went right on being the same New York Times it had been before. What had happened was not a revolution of ideas, but only a great gale of office politics about matters of negligible interest and no conceivable concern to inhabitants of the world outside the Times building.
It is mildly surprising, to be sure, to find that the Times, so famous as a bulwark of liberalism, was still bogged down with backwater racial passions. These made Boyd a central figure in the uprising since one cause of the newsroom's epic discontent was the muted displeasure some white employees felt toward the paper's "diversity" program. As a black giving orders in the newsroom, Boyd was the human manifestation of "diversity," hence a vulnerable figure once rebellion required a few executions.
The Times had been grappling with its race problem since the 1980s when Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., not yet the publisher but preparing to be, started talking about his desire for "diversity," a euphemism for affirmative action in hiring and promotions. Whether the Times newsroom was a more exclusive white male enclave than that of most other metropolitan dailies is doubtful, but its prominence made it a natural target for blacks, gays, and women hungry for a crack at high-end journalism, and Sulzberger's support for "diversity" was an attempt to bring the paper into the modern social order.
Boyd was recruited for a management position in the 1980s by Max Frankel, then executive editor. By that time, Boyd had already established himself as a top-of-the-line reporter during an exemplary career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Times 's Washington bureau. Frankel told him that the Times "severely lacked minorities to promote to management," that it was hard to find "suitable candidates," that increased "diversity" was not just one of his own priorities but one of Sulzberger's too, and that Boyd's "help toward the effort would mean a lot."
The message did not require a decoder: thanks to the paper's "diversity" policy, Boyd was being offered a chance to climb the executive ladder. He did not need much persuasion to abandon the reporter's life and join the executive chase for glory. He acknowledges that his race gave him an advantage in the incessant bureaucratic struggles for advancement that afflict the Times newsroom, but declines to display any bogus humility about it. He is obviously aware that a generation earlier his race would have made it hard to get any Times job more elegant than slicing salami in the cafeteria.
The Times newsroom, which plays such an important role in Boyd's story, was a big and highly talented bureaucracy principally made up of reporters, editors, photographers, and technicians skilled in the printing and electronic arts. The network of presiding editors, deputy editors, and assistant editors was complex and filled with people of high ambition and dangerous cunning. Each of the paper's departments, sections, and so-called "desks" had an editor, sometimes a deputy editor, and a varying number of assistant editors. All these, in turn, were overseen by perhaps a half-dozen assistant managing editors, who were a rank below the managing editor, who reported to the grand editor of all editors, who bore the title of executive editor.
This grandee's only superior was the publisher. When Times people spoke of the publisher, they pronounced the word with a capital P. His was the name of the family that had controlled the paper since the death of Adolph S. Ochs in 1935, when control passed to his daughter Iphigene, the wife of Arthur Hays Sulzberger. In Boyd's time the publisher was a great-grandson of Adolph Ochs and bore the name Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. His training for the job had included study at the Harvard Business School and a tour in the Washington bureau.
Boyd's newsroom was the home office of a journalistic elite class--college-educated, the sort of people who could chat comfortably with Supreme Court justices, Wall Street finaglers, prime ministers, opera singers, archbishops, sheikhs, crooks, cops, grave robbers, and even an occasional scientist. Born in the age of American mastery and comfort that followed World War II, they had large ideals and small experience of hardship or need, and, being quite a bit spoiled, they expected to be listened to with more respect than was accorded the working-stiff hotshots who populated newsrooms in the pre-Kennedy years.
The Sulzbergers were inclined to respect the newsroom. They practiced journalism obedient to the founding philosophy of Adolph Ochs, which held that success in the newspaper business depended on providing more thorough news reporting than the competition, even when thorough reporting threatened to reduce profits. The newsroom was the jewel of the Times corporation, a costly and precious asset to be cherished and fretted over. This explains why it was able to exert such force in the spring uprising of 2003.
The newsroom Boyd inherited was, he judged, a fair sample of white upper-middle-class America, mostly liberal on social issues and quick to endorse racial equality in principle. In practice, however, he found many slow to abandon the uptown white's view that affirmative action was an unjust imposition on the innocent progeny of an older generation's oppressing classes. Though the newsroom discreetly supported the publisher's "diversity" program, he was quickly made to realize that many privately detested it. They seemed angry because it "not only opened a door for me but also gave me an unfair edge over the competition in climbing higher," and he adds, "Perhaps they had a point."
Moving to the New York office as a junior executive after eight years of reporting in Washington, Boyd was startled to discover a "blatant racial tension" in the newsroom. He sensed a hostility expressed in the form of passive aggression. "No one ever challenged my authority outright, but I had to repeat my orders frequently and then double back to make sure they were followed."
He found "ignorance, indifference, and arrogance, which played out on every level." There was an atmosphere that left blacks feeling they had to demonstrate that they were good enough to work there. There seemed to be an abiding conviction that whatever a black did could always be done even better by a white. High in the management Boyd found a white executive astonished that a black could write competently. On the day the Times hired him, the newsroom's administrative officer greeted him with praise for samples he had submitted of his work at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"I really enjoyed your clips--they're so well written," he said as I sat there smiling, pleased with myself. Then he added: "Did you write them yourself, or did someone write them for you?"...It was my first exposure to the racial culture of the paper, the ugly underside of life at the Times.
Despite all this, Boyd seems to have been good at his job. He moved steadily toward the top of the newsroom bureaucracy and, along the way, worked on projects that earned the Times ten Pulitzer Prizes:
My rise at the paper was smooth and steady, and the view from the top was spectacular: as the Times' managing editor, second in command, I witnessed and shaped history. I reveled in the paper's legend, guarded its secrets, learned to analyze and strategize in the tradition of its best editors. Second only to my family, the Times defined me.
As the first black managing editor in the Times's long history, he writes, "I knew I was on track for the top job of executive editor--if I played my cards right." Then, he writes, "calamity unfolded with a surprising fury."
Calamity's agent was Jayson Blair, a young black reporter whose mind was addled by cocaine, whiskey, and private despairs. Blair had worked at the Times off and on for five years. Beginning as an intern hired under the "diversity" policy, he was moved up to reporting on relatively modest stories and assisting coverage of bigger stories that required team reporting. Unnoticed by a variety of newsroom authorities who were paid to notice such things, Blair had been engaged in unethical practices that are loathsome to all sensible journalists and justify immediate firing at the Times. The most serious of these were plagiarizing the stories of other reporters-- basically common theft--and submitting as news stories pure fictions about events he had not witnessed.
People unaware of the Times 's passion for the integrity of its news columns might find Blair's behavior amusing, the sort of fodder that makes an entertaining movie about mischievous adolescents having a little harmless fun at the establishment's expense. The Times was unamused. The struggle for accuracy in its news columns was a nearly sacred mission with the Times. The discovery that Blair had been getting away with fraud and foolishness for weeks, months--who could say how long?--was infuriating. The vast network of editors, assistant editors, deputy editors, assistant managing editors--the whole glorious structure for protecting the sanctity of the news columns--had suffered a prolonged breakdown.
In the long-term view, there is indeed something amusing about the uproar that ensued. It brings to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's definition of a newspaper columnist as a person obliged to find significance three times a week in events of absolutely no consequence. The Blair story was catnip for the Times 's media competitors in print, cable TV, and blogs. The media reaction, and not just by the Times, was the stuff usually reserved for an event of great consequence, yet it is hard to find the slightest evidence that Blair's plagiarism or fictions affected anyone's life but his own and his editors'.
The Times 's contribution to the uproar included a lengthy story in which Sulzberger stated that the paper and its employees had sustained "a huge black eye." There was speculation that Blair had damaged the Times 's credibility beyond repair for years perhaps. With such ado, it was obvious that something-- something--had to be done. In short, firings were inevitable. The atmosphere demanded it.
The Times proceeded as most well-run corporations proceed at such times: with an investigation to discover what went wrong, then to discover who was to blame, and finally to rid the company of the faulty party or parties. The investigation came at a moment when office politics, always major sport at the Times, were highly volatile. Discontents, both personal and professional, were running very high against the executive editor, Howell Raines; against the "diversity" program, and by extension against Sulzberger; and, perhaps to a lesser degree, against Gerald Boyd, who was not only Raines's chief lieutenant but also the very embodiment of the campaign for "diversity."
As this atmosphere changed the nature of the investigation, Blair himself became an irrelevant minor character, an obscure mischief maker who, by sheer happenstance, had become a weapon with which a rebellious newsroom could overpower its top editors. Now Howell Raines emerged as the chief target for the discontented, and the Times was confronted with an uprising of reporters and editors against its top management.
The plagiarism charges against Blair first surfaced in April 2003, and were reported in several newspapers almost immediately after Boyd learned of them. The media frenzy began almost instantly, as unstoppable as a barn fire on a summer afternoon. Everything burst out of control before the management people could act. Competing papers, news magazines, television channels, bloggers, gossip mongers--every media outlet jumped merrily into the show, all telling the story from the rebellious newsroom's viewpoint. This was inevitable since management still hadn't decided what the story really was or how to tell it.
The newsroom version was humiliating to the paper: a looney young reporter had been filling its columns with fake news, and the editors had let him get away with it. Jon Landman, the editor on the metro desk (covering news in the New York area), was said to have warned his superiors against Blair one year earlier by sending them an e-mail. Its message quickly became famous: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."
Landman said he sent the message to Boyd, among others. Boyd says, "He never did." And why, Boyd asks, did Landman not stop Jayson from writing? As metro editor, Landman had the power to do so, he says.
Other papers, always pleased to see the Times embarrassed, provided aggressive coverage of the uprising, relying heavily on Landman's story or his e-mail about Blair to support suggestions that Raines and Boyd were soft on Blair, and were letting him get away with breaking the journalistic code. Some stories suggested that they had favored him because of the "diversity" program. Some reported that Boyd was Blair's "mentor." Boyd says that all such stories were malicious distortions circulated by newsroom people--never identified--to garnish their case against him. These distortions, he says, were magnified by out-of-town reporters listening to the chatter among Times staffers.
Whatever the fact, Raines and Boyd lost the battle for the press, and readers were invited to suppose that they were either hopelessly incompetent or so bonded to Blair by the "diversity" program that they could not bear to fire him. The story in this form gained traction so rapidly that Raines and Boyd were quickly consumed by it. The team of reporters who wrote the story of Blair's deceptions insisted that neither of them see it before it was published. When Boyd went to the room where they were working in order to offer some information, they quickly "closed windows on their computer screens."
That Times management yielded readily--if not abjectly--to its rebellious newsroom testified to the respect that working journalists had accumulated during the half-century following World War II. And also to the high-flying state of the economy in 2003 when the uprising occurred. Nowadays, with newspapers shriveling and dying, and many of their best journalists taking "buyouts" to vanish and stay forgotten, newsroom rebels might not be so cheeky, or get such agreeable results when they are. At the Times they succeeded in putting an abrupt end to the hitherto triumphant career of Howell Raines and may even have briefly endangered Arthur Sulzberger's position as publisher. "Suddenly the publisher was everywhere," according to Gerald Boyd. "I had never seen him so engaged, so blunt, so determined.... He acted as if his job depended on it, and perhaps it did." Here Boyd seems to echo newsroom rumors heard during the struggle that the Times board had become impatient with Sulzberger's handling of the uprising.
Raines's account of the affair, written for The Atlantic Monthly a year later, says that Arthur Gelb, a retired editor and usually credible source of in-house Times gossip, told him that a group of Sulzberger family stockholders were becoming "restive."
Whatever the fact, as Blair became a club with which the newsroom could attack Raines, so Raines became a club for attacking Sulzberger. Raines had been Sulzberger's personal choice for the editor's job in spite of--or perhaps because of--a reputation for being hard on those who failed to measure up to his standard of excellence. His predecessor in the job, Joseph Lelyveld, was rumored to have argued for a less flamboyant figure--the veteran foreign correspondent Bill Keller.
The job of executive editor of the Times is always the publisher's to bestow. It is the point at which the paper's ownership exerts its influence over the news coverage. The Times ownership has traditionally exerted that influence with a very light touch, in conformity with its founding pledge that neither "fear or favor" would affect its coverage. This is quite different from the original role of the American press, which began as a candidly political arm of this party or that; in more modern times the style has been like that of the early Hearst and Pulitzer and more recent Murdoch newspapers, in which the owner is a not-so-candid political operator but still has the last word about what is news and what isn't.
With Sulzberger's choice of Raines, the publisher was making a stronger statement of ownership prerogative than the newsroom was in a mood to accept. The newsroom feeling about Raines was chilly before he stepped on the scene and turned surly as he began taking charge. A dynamic executive trying to impose his will on a reluctant bureaucracy is usually in for a formidable and often losing struggle. Raines's Washington experience watching presidents might have taught him that, but if so he did not apply the lesson to newspaper management.
Boyd depicts Raines as a man passionately dedicated to ridding the news staff of lethargic old habits that had allowed competitive papers to embarrass it on important stories like Watergate and the Iran-contra affair. In Boyd's portrait, Raines came to the newsroom with a "bare-knuckled" management style that made him easy to dislike. Stories about Raines told by those who had worked with him often began by acknowledging his "brilliance" before expounding on his "arrogance." Boyd, who worked with him in Washington, writes that there he set out to rid the bureau of people he considered "dead wood" and "systematically pressured" several veteran reporters to leave.
His tactics were ugly: he bounced reporters' stories back repeatedly, needled them to produce more, and challenged their basic understanding of their areas of coverage.
Years later, I would come to understand how he saw the bureau staff as made up of an A team and a B team. The former received his encouragement and attention; the latter, he ignored or tried to force off the paper.
Jill Abramson, who ran the Washington bureau, was one of his particular dislikes. Boyd, who thought she was fine in the job, argued for keeping her, and Raines, though wanting her out, "was unwilling to pull the trigger," Boyd says. "Instead, he kept her in place and made her life miserable."
Raines's approach to the editorship reminded Boyd of "the uncompromising General George Patton" fighting World War II "aggressively and ardently." For a model, Raines himself seemed to prefer Attila the Hun. "I want to hunt big game, not rabbits," was his way of describing the kind of stories he wanted the Times to pursue. Boyd recalls a meeting with Sulzberger and a few other executives in which "an animated Raines described not only how he wanted to lead the competition but to descend from the mountains like Attila the Hun and pillage the rival papers, raping their women and daughters." This was an example of "the verve that helped Raines beat out Keller" for the top job, Boyd writes, though "Sulzberger admonished him to use less offensive imagery." Boyd made Raines's A team in Washington, and it was Raines who secured him the job as managing editor in New York. Boyd liked and admired him until their losing fight for survival soured the relationship. Boyd's portrait of Raines in the final phase of the newsroom uprising is singularly unkind. To some extent this may reflect Boyd's suspicion that Raines had never seen him simply as a man, but always as a black man. In a confrontation with the newsroom staff, staged in a Broadway movie theater, Raines, who came from Alabama, was accused of ignoring warnings that Jayson Blair was committing intolerable offenses against the paper. Raines's response included a suggestion that he might have treated Blair gently because, "as a Southerner, he believed that African Americans deserved opportunities." This expressed a patronizing idea that Boyd had always detested: that guilt for a racist history obliged white people to do special kindnesses for the undeserving black. "As I watched the faces of my colleagues," Boyd writes, "I realized that if he had that view of Blair, he probably felt the same way about me. Could his decision to name me managing editor be rooted in nothing more than white guilt over four centuries of oppression?" One is tempted to think of Boyd in this affair as the innocent bystander run down at an intersection in a smashup between two powerful egos--the ambitious Raines and the insolent newsroom of The New York Times. Yet the impulse is misleading about Boyd. He is not an innocent and his fall was not accidental. He is close to the classically tragic figure--in the Blair matter, at least, the one person who seems to have a touch of nobility. The self-made man may sometimes flirt with nobility if only because he usually begins with a faith in the urgency of leading a principled life. Tragedy lies in nobility's fall, brought about by a fatal character flaw, and Boyd had the fatal flaw--his ambition to become a great prince of journalism. Howell Raines offered the opportunity to fulfill his ambition ("I was on track for the top job of executive editor--if I played my cards right"). And it was his association with Raines that ended his career, for when Sulzberger was forced to fire Raines, it was certain that Boyd must also go. The newsroom was now dictating how the cards would be played, and to the newsroom Boyd and Raines were a team. Boyd, moreover, was the physical symbol of the "diversity" program so unpopular to the newsroom. A fired black representative of "diversity" might mollify the newsroom with assurances that would have been awkward to define explicitly. Saddest of all from Boyd's viewpoint as he went to the chopping block, there seemed to be nobody left who did not approve of his departure. In the final days, he writes: I was trying to cope with the reality of watching colleagues I worked with for years, whom I had recruited and helped hire and worked to promote, turn against me. I had been there for them, and now they were my fiercest critics. Their e-mails, sent to Sulzberger and forwarded to me, were devastating. A particularly absurd one suggested that I supported Blair because he reminded me of myself. Hearing me deny the obvious, the critic wrote, was "distasteful." Throughout Boyd's version of events, one cannot help wondering whether the Blair story would have amounted to more than a light entertainment if Jayson Blair had been white. In that case might his journalistic derelictions and drug-and-whiskey-inspired antics have passed through the media as a circus sideshow, amusing because he got away with it at such a notorious institution, a delicious little New York tale of no consequence whatever, in a class with the French tightrope walker dancing between the twin towers of the World Trade Center?
Blair's being black made such a happy outcome impossible. The "diversity" issue was always the ugly subtext to the dull narrative about a management failure at the Times. "Diversity" is not a subject for light amusement in America. It is a subject that Americans take to the Supreme Court.
After he and Raines were both gone, Raines wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly in which appeared, among other material offensive to Boyd, "inaccurate descriptions of me as Jayson Blair's mentor." The article "blasted my former colleagues, Sulzberger, and me," and "portrayed the staff as largely mediocre, the publisher as lacking backbone."
As for Boyd, Raines wrote that he "wanted to see, as Arthur himself needed to, what Gerald Boyd could do in a high-demand situation," thus reducing him, as Boyd puts it, to "a managing editor trainee."
Boyd's book identifies only one newsroom enemy by name. He is Jon Landman, author of the damaging "stop Jayson from writing'" e-mail. The two, from Boyd's account, appear to have disliked each other from first meeting, and dislike obviously deepened with the passage of time. Its origin is not clear from reading Boyd. He leaves the impression that Landman might have been angry about Boyd's getting the managing editor job and suggests that Landman had expected to get the job himself if Keller had become executive editor.
At one point during the final crisis, Boyd writes that Raines attributed his problem "to a group of newsroom malcontents led by Landman" who were working, he said, to undermine him. "Landman had a single concern, Raines said: opposition to my appointment as managing editor." Regrettably, Boyd was not writing a balanced news report, so we do not know Landman's side of the story.
Raines and Boyd were fired on June 4, 2003, or, as Arthur Sulzberger phrased it to Boyd, "Tomorrow morning, at ten-thirty, we will announce that you and Howell are resigning." The Times knew how to do things right. Years before, Boyd had attended a seminar for company executives on how to fire people, and the publisher seemed to be doing it correctly. No mention of "firing." Raines would leave the building next morning immediately after the announcement and did not plan to talk to the media. Sulzberger suggested that Boyd do the same. Only five weeks had passed since Boyd first learned of Blair's transgressions.
It must have been a bad morning for Sulzberger, too. Raines had been his personal choice for the job, and a daring choice as well, a choice expressing his own readiness to use power. Now he was forced to yield to a newsroom rebellion and to fire the most important appointment he had yet made--and because of a frenzy of malcontents, as Raines had called them. A bad morning indeed.
The next executive editor he appointed, after a suitable lapse of time, was Bill Keller, who now has two managing editors: John M. Geddes and Jill Abramson.
Read more at The New York Review of Books
PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY OF GERALD M. BOYD:
Born Gerald M. Boyd, in 1950, in St. Louis, MO; married Robin Stone; children: one. Education: University of Missouri, Columbia, B.A., 1973. Memberships: Founding member and first president, St. Louis Association of Black Journalists, 1977.
Career
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reporter and White House correspondent, 1973-83; New York Times, national political reporter, 1983-84, White House correspondent, 1984-91, metropolitan editor, 1991-93, assistant managing editor, 1993-97, deputy managing editor for news, 1997-01, managing editor, 2001-.
Life's Work
When Gerald M. Boyd was named managing editor of The New York Times in July of 2001, he became the first African American in the newspaper's history to hold such a senior rank. A Times staff member since 1983, Boyd began as a reporter with the paper's national political team, serving as White House correspondent during the Iran-Contra affair, became metropolitan editor in the mid-1990s, and, by 1997, had risen to the position of deputy managing editor for news. "Gerald will be a great managing editor by virtue of his journalistic ability, his experience as a leader in our newsroom and his deep understanding and commitment to the values of The New York Times," said Howell Raines, The Times'; executive editor, in announcing Boyd's appointment to the Business Wire. "He has impeccable news judgment, and I am excited by the prospect of working with him in close partnership with our colleagues in the newsroom, our bureaus, and at New York Times Digital." Boyd now oversaw some 1,200 reporters and editors, his name listed third from the top on the masthead of one of the nation's most prestigious newspapers.
Gerald Boyd was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother died when he was six, so he and his brother, Gary, were raised by their elderly grandmother. To supplement his grandmother's meager pension, Boyd worked forty hours a week at a local grocery store while attending high school. He was an excellent student, and, following his graduation in 1969, he was awarded a scholarship to study journalism at the University of Missouri, sponsored by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Here, in addition to serving as student body vice president, he was inducted into one of the university's senior honor societies. Then, because the student-run newspaper, Maneater, had no black writers, he and fellow student Sheila Rule launched Blackout, a minority-run publication. Boyd received his bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1973.
Launched Career in St. Louis
Boyd began his newspaper career as a copy boy for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He quickly rose to the post of City Hall reporter, later wrote on housing and consumer affairs, and, after three years, was assigned to cover Congress. He later became the newspaper's White House correspondent. "There were just two minority reporters covering the White House then, so that brought me to Reagan's attention," Boyd recalled in an interview with The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I got far more attention than I deserved, and I would always be called on by Reagan at press conferences.
In 1977, his fourth year with the Post-Dispatch, Boyd founded and served as first president of the St. Louis Association of Black Journalists. Among the association's projects was a seven-week journalism workshop for high school students, which Boyd initiated. During this time he also taught writing at Howard University and served as an instructor in the University of Missouri's journalism workshop for minority students. In 1977 he was named Sigma Delta Chi's Journalist of the Year, and two years later was the youngest journalist selected to attend Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow.
Boyd joined The New York Times in November of 1983, after ten distinguished years with The Post-Dispatch. He began as a national political reporter assigned to cover the activities of Vice President George Bush during the 1984 presidential campaign. Promoted to White House correspondent following the election, Boyd produced in-depth articles on the internal shake-up following the Iran-Contra disclosures and the resignation of Donald T. Regan, President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff. In 1988, he covered Vice President George Bush's quest for the presidency, beginning with the nominating process and continuing through the general election. Later he wrote extensively on Bush's cabinet appointees and his plans for the nation.
Helped The Times Win a Pulitzer
In 1991, Boyd was named a senior editor at The New York Times, moving into the position of special assistant to the managing editor. He then worked briefly as chief editor in the paper's Washington bureau and on the national and metropolitan news desks before becoming metropolitan editor, a major job which involved directing a staff of more than 100 reporters and editors. While serving as metropolitan editor, Boyd oversaw a major expansion of the newspaper's metropolitan report. This involved hiring new staff, reorganizing the department, and reconfiguring its news coverage. In 1993 he directed The Times'; coverage of the World Trade Center bombing, which earned the paper a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. This was the newspaper's first Pulitzer for local reporting in more than twenty years. A number of Boyd's staff reporters also won recognition as Pulitzer finalists in the categories of investigative reporting and spot news.
Named an assistant managing editor in 1993, Boyd became deputy managing editor for news in 1997. Among his responsibilities were supervising The Times'; coverage of Washington, foreign, national, and metropolitan news, organizing the final news lineup, and overseeing the front-page layout. In 2000 he served as co-senior editor of the paper's "How Race is Lived in America" series, an examination of racial experiences and attitudes which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
Took #2 spot at The Times
When Boyd was named managing editor of The New York Times in 2001, he became the second-ranking member of the organization's 1,200-member news staff. Upon learning of his appointment, Boyd said he felt both honored and delighted. "I will do everything I can to help us maintain our tradition and our standards and to continue to be the crown jewel of journalism," he said in an interview with The New York Times. In the same article, executive editor Howell Raines described Boyd as a combination of "strength ... spine ... [and] gentleness." Boyd, he maintained, had "a deep, deep, deep commitment to the ideals and values of The New York Times, and it is these ideals that keep each and every one of us coming here every day. And I know he will be a worthy steward of those values." In speaking to his colleagues at The Times, Boyd added that he hoped his trail-blazing appointment would serve to inspire a new generation of African-American achievers. "I hope tomorrow, when some kid of color picks up The New York Times and reads about the new managing editor, that kid will smile a little and maybe dream just a little bigger dream," he said.
Awards
Nieman Fellow, Harvard University, 1980.
Further Reading
Periodicals
Jet, September 10, 2001, p. 25. Newsday, July 27, 2001, p. A48. The New York Times, July 27, 2001, p. 13. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 15, 2000, p. E1. The Washington Post, July 27, 2001, p. C8
In honor of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- visionary prophet, social activist, cultural critic, public intellectual, community organizer, radical political leader, and profound global advocate and defender of peace, freedom, justice, equality, and human rights--the following speeches by Dr. King are offered as a reminder of just how extraordinary his contributions were to 20th century history, the ongoing African American liberation struggle in all of its many complex dimensions, and the general mass movements for social, cultural, economic, and political revolution against all forms of racism, sexism, militarism, imperialism, and class domination in the United States and in the rest of the world.
This is also to remind us all that Dr. King was brutally assassinated 42 years ago today on April 4 1968. He was 39 years old.
Kofi
This first speech was given April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York. Entitled "Beyond Vietnam" this courageous and riveting antiwar statement infuriated President Johnson and incurred the fierce wrath and disapproval of not only the White House but the general public, the media, and even most civil rights organizations and leaders:
The following speech --also opposing the war in Vietnam--was given at Dr. King's own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia on April 30, 1967
The following speech was given in Memphis, Tennessee the night before Dr. King was murdered on April 3, 1968. It became widely known as the "Mountaintop" speech and it rather eerily and uncannily speculated openly on his own death:
The following speech excerpt was taken from Dr. King's speech in Montgomery, Alabama following a major civil rights march and rally from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery--March, 1965
What follows is the full text of Dr. King's pivotal Vietnam speech from April 4, 1967:
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence
Delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City
[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio. ]
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked 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 ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask 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.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath -- America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 19541; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
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.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of -- in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.
Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred -- rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:
Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.
I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
Part of our ongoing -- Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile -- Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.
If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
Further filmed footage from Dr. King's Vietnam antiwar speech from April 4, 1967 as well as commentary by various figures that appeared on a "Tavis Smiley Reports" documentary special on PBS. Click on link above or the link below marked "Episode Two" for the video
Kofi
Tavis Smiley Reports EPISODE TWO
MLK: A Call to Conscience This second installment of Tavis Smiley Reports examines the forgotten agenda of Martin Luther King Jr., whose famed "Beyond Vietnam" speech, given at Riverside Church in 1967, led to an abrupt loss of his popularity in the last year of his life.
The program explores the relevance of King's anti-war position to the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the significance of the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor bestowed upon both King and President Barack Obama.
Tavis Smiley Reports MLK: A Call to Conscience is based on dozens of hours of interviews with King's friends and with scholars who study his legacy, including:
Dr. Vincent Harding, drafter of the "Beyond Vietnam" speech Clarence Jones, King's legal advisor Dr. Cornel West, a leading expert on race in America Dr. Susannah Heschel, daughter of activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Dr. Clayborne Carson, director of the King Institute at Stanford University Marian Wright Edelman, Organizer for the Poor People’s Campaign with King Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning King historian
King's closest advisors discuss the divisions within the civil rights movement over King's opposition to the war in Vietnam—and the political and public fallout from his criticism of American foreign policy.
Dr. Vincent Harding, who is co-credited with writing the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, tells Tavis that King's inner circle worried about the ramifications of the speech, both before and after he gave it.
"We were concerned, he was concerned, but he had really come to the point, as the speech is trying to say, where if he was to be a man of conscience, a man of compassion, he had to speak," said Dr. Harding.
He added, "But it was precisely one year to the day after this speech that that bullet which had been chasing him for a long time finally caught up with him. And I am convinced that that bullet had something to do with that speech."
MLK: A Call to Conscience
Episode Two Premiered Wednesday March 31, 8pm/7pm
EPISODE TWO POSTS
MLK: A Call to Conscience What Does "Nonviolence" Really Mean? What's Suffering Got To Do With It? Whatever Happened to CALCAV? Why Clergy and Social Justice Issues Go Hand-in-Hand Nonviolent Peacekeeping: Pursuing King’s Dream SLIDESHOW: Inside Riverside Church TIMELINE: King's Final Year Clip: Taylor Branch, King's biographer Clip: Vincent Harding, "Beyond Vietnam" co-writer Clip: Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth professor Clip: Clarence Jones, King's legal advisor
The complete video text of Dr. King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech in front of 250,000 people gathered before the Lincoln Memorial in the nation's capitol in Washington D.C. following the legendary'March On Washington for Jobs and Justice" on August 28, 1963:
“If he was to be a man of conscience, a man of compassion, he had to speak.”
--Dr. Vincent Harding, credited with co-writing MLK’s Beyond Vietnam speech
Beyond Vietnam: What Martin Luther King still has to teach us by Paul Rosenberg Sun Apr 04, 2010 Open Left
Today is the 43rd Anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam, A Time To Break Silence". Earlier this week, I wrote a diary calling attention to a Tavis Smiley PBS special devoted to discussing this speech. He had an excellent cast of commentators who had some very good and important things to say. But he didn't focus as much on digging into the specifics of what King said as he focused on the broader implications, as well as the constraints King was struggling against. This isn't a criticism. Smiley has a lot more experience in doing television than I do, and it struck me as a very savvy and sensible use of tv time. It's just that it left me wanting to highlight something else I find most significant, which centers on the arc of arguments King made about why he had no choice but to speak out against the war. This diary is as selective in its way as Smiley was in his, and I invite all readers to join in with whatever seems most important to them in the comments.
The first thing I want to underscore is the way that King meets head-on the main criticism he knows that awaits him: What is he doing speaking out of turn, a civil rights leader speaking about peace? It seems like an utterly ludicrous objection to our ears today. But one of the reasons it seems so ludicrous today is precisely because of Martin Luther King, both his personal example, and the highly specific way that he answered that question. Of course, in the broadest and most profound sense, the entirety of the speech is his answer to that question, but the following passage is the tip of the iceberg, as it were. What's more, it ends by subtley standing the entire premise on its head, and-more in sorrow than in anger--calling into question the competence of those who would ask such a foolish question in the first place:
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
Paul Rosenberg :: Beyond Vietnam: What Martin Luther King still has to teach us
Rather than the press the point, and make a big deal about how foolish the question is, he simply lets the disturbing challenge hang there in the rhetorical background, as he quickly presses forward to begin explaining himself, which he does in part by reminding people that he is, after all, a preacher, and by implication it is quite natural for him to speak about just about anything under the Sun, so long as he makes a moral, spiritual and/or religious commentary upon it. That implication remains unspoken, but unmistakable as he proceeds:
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Not only is this a very direct and unassailable argument grounded in brute fact, it sets the direction for a progression of further arguments:
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.... And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.
And then, in turn, it also becomes a matter of taking seriously the arguments towards violence of those he would lead in a non-violent direction. Here he shows a degree of respect for the intellect of those he would influence that is virtually unheard of in the imperial halls of power:
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked 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 ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask 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. This is the logic that comes from taking other people seriously as equals. King was deeply influenced by Martin Buber's writings on the I-Thou relationship, and it shows through quite clearly here. But now his line of arguments comes to a pivot point, where he reflects on the founding conception of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and its reflection of the prophetic vision of Langston Hughes:
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath -- America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
Then he's on to the moral responsibility he carries as a Nobel Peace Prize winner ("Paging Barack Obama. White telephone, please."):
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 19541; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances...
and that pesky Jesus felluh:
but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
The arc of the arguments King offers for why he is compelled to speak out against the war prepare the way for an historical analysis of how we came to be involved that is far more sophisticated, and far more accurate than anything that was being offered in the "mainstream" political discourse of the time. But most importantly for my purposes here, that analysis-filled with significant moral and political observations as well-came to a place where it connected most clearly with sweep of his earlier arc of arguments:
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? ....
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
This passage resonates all the more for me today because of something I did not know at the time-that what King is saying here actually reflects a significant insight of George Kennan. As I've written about several times here at Open Left, in a remarkable paper, "Kennan's Long Telegram and NSC-68: A Comparative Analysis," East European Quarterly, Vol. 31, no. 4, January 1998, Efstathios T. Fakiolas analyzed two key documents from the formative days of the Cold War. As I wrote in one of those diaries, "Where's Obama? Questioning v Reinforcing [Foreign Policy] CW #3":
Fakiolas used the framework of foreign policy realism for his analysis, but he determined that the two documents employed significantly different models within that tradition. Although they seemed to many people to be kindred documents, Fakiolas uncovers striking differences. I'm going to do a separate diary delving deeper into his argument, but the bottom line for us now is this: Kennan's Long Telegram and Nitze's NSC-68 appear similar, they depend on different models of international relations within the same realist tradition.
Kennan relied on the "tectonic plates" model, in which there many other non-state actors, the world is not "zero-sum," and there is often opportunity for mutual cooperation. Nitze relied on the billiard ball model, which sees the international system as "composed solely of egoistic sovereign states interested in maximizing their relative power capabilities at the expense of others," and sees "world politics is a 'zero-sum' game in which national security conceived of in military and territorial terms is the one and only states' national objective."
As a result, Kennan favored a strategy of containment that emphasized strengthening the West socially, economically and culturally, addressing its flaws which the Soviets exposed. In contrast, Nitze ignored issues of the Wests internal flaws, and focused almost exclusively on military force to combat the Soviet Union.
Thus, King's perspective as man of God dovetailed with that of a leading realist foreign policy expert and actor-that we could triumph in the long run by taking seriously the exposure of flaws in our own conduct and the thinking behind it, and regarding that exposure as a gift leading us in the direction of perfection.
This is not the perspective of dreamer, who can be easily dismissed, as Obama sought to dismiss him, because he somehow doesn't know about evil. This is the perspective of possibly the greatest American of all time. And the shame is ours if we fail to heed what he still has to teach us.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
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