Joan Baez Not Afraid To Change Subject At Civil Rights Celebration

During the February 11 PBS broadcast of "In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement", artists including Smokey Robinson, Natalie Cole, and Bob Dylan sang some of the songs that had accompanied activists as they challenged racial prejudice. Joan Baez, as usual pushing the envelope of discussion, attempted to remind the audience of the connections between fighting injustice and violence at home and fighting our government's efforts to wage war in other countries.

After singing two verses of "We Shall Overcome", the anthem she memorably sang at the 1963 March on Washington, Baez recalled Martin Luther King, Jr.'s decision to speak out against the Vietnam War. She said they had sung the words "We are not afraid" to this tune, to help King overcome his fear of taking on such a controversial topic, then led the audience in singing that verse.

If the members of that audience, which included the Obama family along with members of Congress and the Cabinet, are curious about what King ended up saying, they should read the speech he gave on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. Titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence", it still has relevance today.

In answer to questions about why he was speaking out against the war, King said that "America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continue to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube." Substitute "Afghanistan" for "Vietnam", and contrast the vast sums of money we continue to spend on that war with the apparent lack of money available for domestic programs, and you'll see how little has changed.

King did not just focus on our government's war in Vietnam, however. He asked us to "look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America", and pointed to the U.S. military presence in Venezuela, Guatemala, Columbia, and Peru. Today our military is still active in Columbia, supporting the business-friendly Uribe government while workers are murdered for organizing unions. The Obama administration's refusal to strongly oppose last June's coup in Honduras seems to once again confirm that, as King said, "we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor." As President Obama continues to push Congress for approval of so-called Free Trade Agreements with Columbia and South Korea, he should instead heed Dr. King's admonition to not let "the need to maintain social stability for our investments" drive our foreign policy.

One can only guess how King would have reacted to the recent Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the same free speech rights as persons; but he seems to have foreseen such a distorted set of values in 1967 by warning that "when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

During his January 27 State of the Union address, President Obama called for a spending freeze on most government programs, but exempted the Department of Defense budget, for which he's actually proposing a spending increase. Forty-three years earlier, in his Riverside Church speech, Dr. King told us that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

President Obama should take this hint from Joan Baez, read King's 1967 speech, and consider what his administration's policies say about our nation's values. Otherwise, the election of an African-American President who merely perpetuates the policies of his white predecessors, while ignoring the need for what King called a "revolution of values", will be a hollow victory.