Dr. King, Muhammad Ali hit Vietnam war with strong combination

EDITOR'S NOTE: Dr. Martin Luther King's holiday and Muhammad Ali's 69th birthday coincided on Monday and both were celebrated at the Ali Center in Louisville, Ky.)

Dr. Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali were about as far apart on many societal issues as any men could be in the tumultous year of 1967.

King was the trailblazer for racial integration, a fearless preacher/teacher who went to jail and evenutally was assassinated for his efforts to bring black and white together.

Ali, the former Cassius Clay, had ditched his "slave name" was the superstar athlete who dogmatically followed and echoed the sgregationist beliefs of the despotic leader of the Nation of Islam, the whack job named the Honorable (?) Elijah Muhammad.

Elijah, who dodged the draft in a morally correct war (WW II, which America was propeled into by Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Habor) and he commanded that Ali sidestep the Selective Service when he got a draft notice.

Ali was not going to be sent into combat in the steaming jungles of Vietnam but he and the Nation opposed military service per se.

Which is why the month of April, 1967, saw a tidal wave of change in American emotion against the Vietnam "conflict" as it was superciliously referred to by the US government and most of the media.

(See Yahoo, by Kevin Iole, Manny Steward, Bernard Hopkins reflecting on MLK.)

On April 4, at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, King delivered one of his most brilliant speeches, entitled "A Time To Break Silence," in which he said that "God told me to tell you this morning..." that the war was racist and unjust.

King lashed out against the "triple evils of racism, militarism and economic exploitation" and bemoaned "the fact' that some Americans wanted to "equate dissent with disloyalty...

"I oppose the war in Vietnam," King said, "because I love America."

Ali was no trained minister, no polished orator but he said that he had "no quarrel with the Vietcong" and that "no Vietcong ever called me nigger."

He refused induction in Houston on April 28, 1967, and the bigots at the World Boxing Association shamefully stripped him of his title, of his right to earn a living at his chosen trade.

So Ali stayed firm and was charged with draft evasion, facing a five year prison sentence until the US Supreme Court handed him a 12-0 unanimous decision reversing his conviction on the basis that the boxer was, indeed, a legitimate minister for his chosen religion.

King's dream and the Nation Of Islam's dreams were diametrically opposed. The Nation sought blacks only states within America, perhaps Mississippi among them.

King had a magnificent dream of racial integation and tolerance.

But Dr. King and Ali combined for a powerful, 1-2 punch against the shaky underpinnings of the horrible war in Vietnam and their actions are part of US history.

Except from the text of King's address:

"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 a 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."

(mlcmarley@aol.com)