We typically commemorate the Martin Luther King holiday with his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. This time around, it would behoove us to pay attention to his powerful 1967 speech at Riverside Church, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” opposing the war in Vietnam.
The moral principles he affirmed, with Rabbi Abraham Heschel, himself a great moral leader, at his side, apply with piercing relevance to the upheaval facing our democracy today.
State terrorism against the immigrant community confronts us daily. Agents with face masks and no identification inflict harm on families as men masked with white hoods once did when perpetrating evil on the nation’s minority communities.
People have been killed, families broken up, and small children handcuffed. There has been long-term detention in disgusting facilities, and people dispatched to countries which are foreign to them. We see attacks on boats, killing people with impunity. Congress is lamer than ever in asserting the rule of law.
Amnesty protections have been abandoned, regardless of how severe the persecution and oppression that immigrant families had to flee or the economic disaster they faced. There have been mass deportations, no matter how many years immigrants have lived as our neighbors and supported our country. Never mind the risk to them if they return to their former homeland.
Dismantling the safety net for vulnerable America’s seniors and poor is underway. The world’s wealthiest country now denies aid to poor countries facing immeasurable poverty and rampant violence. Free speech and dissent are on the Administration’s and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s chopping block.
We are replicating those dark days of American history from which we thought we had emerged.
Fort Bliss in El Paso, a major immigrant detention facility, was a Japanese internment site 80 years ago. The national security rhetoric used to justify mass incarceration today is the same used for the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans.
The Administration’s actions are against people of color—the same grievance Dr. King articulated about the Vietnam war.
Dr. King understood the retaliation he would suffer for his speech, but his moral challenge to the government was necessary, and correct. He lost significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, and the powerful media. His popularity sank because he did not stick to the “civil rights script” expected of him.
Howard Thurman, the premier Black theologian, in his 1946 essay, “The Fascist Masquerade,” faulted the Christian church for “the bitter truth” of permitting hate-inspired groups … to establish squatter’s rights in the middle of believers because there has been no adequate teaching on the meaning of faith, the faith in terms of human dignity and human worth.”
Faith groups are finally heading his warning. For religious folks, as for non-believers, this current struggle is about the inherent dignity of people and fairness, or, as Pope Leo has forcefully framed it, the core values of democracy.
At a January 9th candlelight vigil for Renee Nicole Good, two days are an ICE agent killed her, Bishop Rob Hirschfeld of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire announced he had advised his clergy, “that we may be entering into that same witness,” and to get their affairs in order and write their wills because “it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world, and the most vulnerable.”
Dr. King put his body on the line, as had countless others for a more just society.
For Dr. King’s holiday this year, we must jettison our comfort zone and not rest on the laurels we thought that society had accomplished, but which our federal and state governments are steadfastly discarding with abandon.
The call for us is to accept that moral challenge and shed our complacency and, as Dr. King put it in 1967, “go down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land” before “America's soul becomes totally poisoned.”
It is time to break silence and put our bodies on the line.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by James C. Harrington, retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project and an Episcopal priest in Austin. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author.
