Breaking the Silence of Despair

by Bill Wylie-Kellermann

I spoke this January at my alma mater, North Central College, on the occasion of a Martin Luther King day breakfast. It was a gift to gather on the birthday of Dr King. I’m gladdened that the struggle to make his day a national holiday came to fruition and that it generates gatherings such as that.

It’s worth noting, however, that in Christian tradition, it is a person’s day of death, the day of their martyrdom, the day of crossing over to God, which is marked as a feast day in the church. For Dr. King that would be +April 4 (1968)+ which falls this year on Wednesday of Holy Week.

I remember precisely where I was when I got the news of his death. It was my freshman year in college and I’d just walked into the lounge of my dormitory when a bulletin broke into regular TV programing. The lone other student who was seated there, whose face and name I mercifully do not recall, muttered, “Somebody finally got that nigger.” I remember running the length of hall to the pay phone and calling my folks in Detroit, weeping into the receiver. In those tears, something shifted in me vocationally that day which bears on who I am.

One emblem of that was a decision to quit football. As a freshman I was starting as a defensive cornerback and was heir-apparent to an All-Conference wide receiver who would graduate. But Dr King’s assassination focused my heart in a new way. The freedom struggle was becoming a movement for economic justice and the war in SE Asia was in full fury. The time and energy which football demanded seemed suddenly more trivial, misplaced. It was difficult to tell my coach, but more vividly I recall sitting at a table before a small gathering of students in the union somehow arranged by the college chaplain and, again in tears, testifying to the turn of my heart.

In Christian theology it is often asked, “Why did Jesus die?” but seldom wondered, “Why was Jesus killed?” If we ask that of Dr. King, the answer would have to pass through his public opposition to the war in Vietnam. It would need to be traced in part to his speech at Riverside Church, forty year ago this holy week, exactly one year before his death. That address, variously called “Beyond Vietnam” or “Breaking the Silence,” was a courageous deed. A lot of people urged him to keep silent, not to take this public stand - other civil rights leaders among them, like the Urban League folks.  His own board at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (except for James Bevel) said: don't do it.  Don't jeopardize foundation funding, don't diffuse the focus.  Never mind complaints of his erstwhile political ally, Lyndon Johnson who was in trouble over the war, or the darker threats of J. Edgar Hoover. Don’t look deeper, they all say. And above all, don’t go deeper.

But deep he went. In the speech he says:  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 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, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Hereby Martin King names the principalities; he's calling out the three reigning powers in American life. In fact, he puts his finger on what Walter Wink calls the domination system, where the powers coalesce into a systemic configuration.

The flip side of that, of course, is that he’s making connections between three movements that even today remain separated from one another: the anti-racist freedom struggle, the anti-war movement, and the movements for economic justice, for ending poverty. While he would also forge links between the freedom struggle and those for economic justice – like supporting the Sanitation Workers’ unionization struggle in Memphis, or the organization of the Poor Peoples’ campaign which was to converge on Washington – he was in this speech summoning together the freedom struggle and the anti-war movement.

He spoke of the “vocation of agony” his decision provoked. Acknowledging that “silence is betrayal” he identifies seven reasons for which he is compelled to speak. His first three reasons are these: 1) that the war is an attack on the poor, dismantling programs of support in order to fund it, 2) that it is a racist war, sending young men in brutal solidarity to burn huts in Vietnamese villages who wouldn’t be able to live next door in Detroit, and 3) that he couldn’t preach nonviolence to young people on the street without opposing the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.” Notice that these are precisely materialism, racism, and militarism. Dr. King is viewing the war as an expression of the giant triplets, the ruling powers of domination!

His fourth reason is literally pivotal, dynamically cutting two ways. Backward to the list of powers and forward to his vocational identity. On the latter, the voices of constraint would hold him back with a narrowing definition of his call: “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” But even that compels him, since from the beginning the motto of SCLC had been, “To save the soul of America.” He understood the nation as a spiritual power, albeit a fallen one, but with a constitution and a vocation that could be called upon.

Last January, with friends elsewhere, we marked the fifth anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo prison with a public witness action here in Detroit, vigiling in the now familiar orange jump suits. One of the lines we uttered in that vigil came from Amnesty International: “The America I believe in does not torture.”

Dr King cited Langston Hughes: “O, yes,/ I say it plain,/ America never was America to me,/ And yet I swear this oath -/ America will be!” In his “concern for the integrity of life in America.” Dr. King could lead a march walking the nonviolent way of the cross, and carry the flag along in train - summoning the best of the American tradition and so it’s hope. Later in this address, however, after naming the giant triplets, he comes to a very strong point: “Any nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Dr. King’s reasons are also related directly to his own “vocation,” however agonized. The broadening and deepening of the sequence is noteworthy. Starting again with number four - he does base the opposition on his work as a civil rights leader and the task of healing the nation’s soul. But further, he feels it incumbent upon him because of the Nobel Peace Prize which he accepted as an internationalizing commission. It laid upon him a task of global nonviolence. And thirdly, reason six, he is compelled as a minister and disciple of Jesus. That is no small thing. For some, most religious, that would be the pinnacle of vocational cause, but Dr. King goes another step deeper: it is finally his solidarity with all humanity as a child of God. He speaks out of his vocation to be truly and fully human.

As he goes on to say, “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 love is perfected in us.’
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.”  And even, perhaps, that it be the foundation for a revolution of values.

His speech was prescient and prophetic in every sense. He says if we don’t take seriously the formation of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, we’re going to be forming Clergy and Laities concerned about Guatamala, Peru, Thailand, Cambodia, Columbia, Mozambique and South Africa – as a friend of mine puts it, “Six out of seven isn’t bad!” Dr King was looking down a sightline which leads straight to Iraq.

Consider these remarks from the speech: This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against [terrorism]. War is not the answer. [Terrorism] 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 anti[terrorism], but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against[terrorism] 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 [terrorism] grows and develops. I have, of course, substituted terrorism where Dr. King said “communism.” In ideological discourse, supporting war, they function exactly the same.

In 1967 the codeword for a big surge of troop strength was “escalation.”  It was being done for the sake of finishing what we’d started, and in the name of “Vietnamization,” (turning the war over to the government forces of South Vietnam). Dr. King, having done his historical homework, offered a five step program which included an immediate halt to bombing and a date for withdrawal of all foreign troops in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement. These were among the initiatives the U.S. was compelled to take “in order to atone for our sins and errors” in Vietnam. He saw the program as concrete steps in an act of repentance.

I don’t propose a plan of any points, though I know that any such need to begin with an immediate initiation of troop withdrawal – and I likewise see extrication from the mire of Iraq as involving certain acts of repentance. Let me name the landscape through which I believe it must pass: 1) Since this war has been based from the beginning on a series of lies, we need to begin by confessing the truth that there was never evidence of weapons of mass destruction or that there was any connection of Iraq to 9/11 terrorism; 2) International law must be honored and adhered to – how can we expect anything but lawlessness on the ground, when the invasion and occupation are themselves illegal by the UN charter and other international covenants, never mind rendition and administrative torture as American policy; 3) Any end to this war will involve honoring the US Constitution, be it in matters of habeas corpus, or above all in Congressional authority to declare war, fund (or defund) war, and holding the presidency accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors; 4) True repentance will involve publicly renouncing certain designs – on oil resources, for example, and on Iraq as the location of a US forward base for military operations in the middle east; 5) It will mean renouncing military solutions in favor of diplomatic negotiations – including direct talks with neighbors like Iran; 6) And repentance will implicate our vocaitons, as Dr. King suggests,  recovering who I am, who we are, as Americans, as people of faith, as human beings.

Here in Detroit we are mindful that this year is not only the 40th anniversary of the Breaking Silence speech, but also the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit riot, so called. A group of activists have begun to think how those events might be honored and connected among us. We are reflecting on that history and asking now where may be seen a revolution of values in building community and rebuilding the city from the bottom up. Where is the “positive thrust for democracy” already at work? Where do we see “offensive action on behalf of justice?” What are the transforming values we need to embody? Between April 4 and July 23, work already ongoing, along with events to be planned, will be woven together in naming Detroit as a City of Hope. At a level of spirit, the idea is to create a climate of hopeful action. To break the silence of despair. The project will certainly bear on our vocations, personally and communally - who we are. But even more, who we are to become.

“Detroit: City of Hope” will be launched with a time of reflection on Dr. King’s speech, April 8, 3pm at St Peter’s Episcopal Church (Michigan and Trumbull)