April 4: Remembering MLK "In The Name Of Love"

Today is April 4, a date to remember Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1967, King gave his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

In that speech, he stepped outside the boundaries which had been established for him as a civil rights leader and denounced the U.S. government's military involvement in Vietnam and other developing nations. He expressed his concerns that our government was on the wrong side of revolutionary movements, and that the huge sums of money being spent on wars would result in the underfunding of the anti-poverty programs which the civil rights movement had just convinced the federal government to begin:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

As both Tavis Smiley and Bill Moyers reminded us on two excellent PBS shows during this past week, the reaction against King's Riverside speech was swift and harsh. Newspapers which had supported King as a civil rights leader editorialized against his latest words the very next day, saying he had lost credibility. President Johnson saw this speech as a personal attack on him and refused any further meetings with King. Even some of King's supporters thought he would lose his focus by joining the peace and anti-military movements.

On April 4, 1968 - one year to the day after that speech - King was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee.

That date is memorialized in the U2 song "Pride (In The Name Of Love)":

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

Note the use of the word "they", not "he" - "they took your life". For even though the bullet that struck down King was fired by a single gunman - whoever he was, and whoever else was involved - the growing atmosphere of hatred towards King made such an act of fatal violence inevitable.

King was in Memphis in March and April of 1968 to support the black sanitation workers whose efforts to unionize were being resisted by the city government. The city's white establishment mocked the black workers' picket signs declaring "I Am A Man". After a March 28 demonstration in Memphis was brutally broken up by the police, King was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate the next day by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), who urged that "the Federal Government take steps to prevent King from carrying out his planned harassment of Washington, D.C. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Byrd was referring to King's planned Poor People's March on Washington; King was assassinated before that march took place. Senator Byrd reminded his fellow Senators that the "first duty" of government "is to preserve law and order."

Arthur Murtagh, an FBI agent in the Atlanta office, claims that when news of King's shooting reached them, there was celebration, with one supervisor yelling, "They got the son of a bitch! I hope he dies!".

The forces of law and order had apparently prevailed - and they chose April 4, the one-year anniversary of King's denunciation of the profitable but deadly military-industrial complex, to make their point.