Long live the king

Plans to erect a statue of Martin Luther King at the National Mall in Washington were blown away by Hurricane Irene a couple of weeks back. Hauling the 28-foot figure upright in 100mph winds was thought too hazardous an enterprise.

When he is finally in place, MLK will stand between Lincoln and Jefferson, ten feet higher than either. Which suggests he’s regarded as above all others in US history – or, alternatively, his legacy still spooks the political elite. I’m going with option two.
What still alarms the elite about King today isn’t his role as a civil rights leader but his record as an anti-war agitator. This aspect of his life is routinely ignored when paeans of praise are heaped upon his memory. Most accounts move directly from his “I have a dream” speech in Washington in August 1963 to his assassination in Memphis in April 1968. It was during this period, as he devoted himself to campaigning against war and poverty, that FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover labelled him “the most dangerous Negro in America.”
No-one except crazies from the badlands beyond the Tea Party now argues against the achievements of King’s crusade for equality for African-Americans. Nobody runs for office demanding that the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 be scrubbed from the statute book. But King’s opposition to the Vietnam War still excites consternation – not least in the White House of the first African-American to rise to the pinnacle of politics.

Obama’s awareness - and wariness - of King’s anti-war stance came through in his speech on acceptance of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. “I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace.’ But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by [King’s and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people...”
We should have known then how profoundly disillusioning Obama’s presidency would prove to be.
King’s first set-piece speech against the war came on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination, at the Riverside Church in New York. “My own government (is) the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”, he declared. “A time has come when silence is betrayal... Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam”. The people of Vietnam “must see Americans as strange liberators... We are taking the black young men who have been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in south east Asia which they had not found in south west Georgia or east Harlem”.

Say the like of that in Obama’s America and you’re likely to be locked up.
US Government institutions pause for a moment each January 13, Martin Luther King Day, to reflect on the occasion. At the Pentagon this year, Defence Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson suggested that, “If Dr. King were alive today, he would recognise that... our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.”
There is no reason to believe King would have recognised any such thing. But when you are out to convert an anti-war leader into a harmless icon, logic and truth are discarded.
Harry Belafonte better represents King’s legacy. At a Lincoln Memorial rally for jobs in October last year, the 83-year-old singer (now 84) urged a crowd of a quarter of a million to “rekindle his dream and once again hope that America will soon come to the realisation that the wars we are waging today in faraway lands are immoral, unconscionable and unwinnable.”
We do well to memorialise Dr. King in our minds. Barack Obama memorialises a misrepresentation of the man. The height of his statue is of no importance. What’s relevant is that Obama, the greatest beneficiary of Dr. King’s crusade against inequality, will forever stand head and shoulders beneath him.

“How ironic that The Clash should be on the cover of the NME in the week that London was burning,” writes Billy Bragg in a brilliant return to revolutionary form.
One of the few artists to see and support the anti-establishment instincts of the rioters (film-maker Ken Loach has been another), Bragg draws the bold, necessary lesson, referring to the “faces... staring out from the shelves as newsagents were ransacked and robbed by looters intent on anarchy in the UK. Touching too, that the picture (in the NME) should be from very early in their career – Joe with curly blond hair – for The Clash were formed in the wake of a London riot: the disturbances that broke out at the end of the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976.”
Singer-songwriter George Orwell, too, was on the side of the Engels, responding to criticism of his support for the anarchists against the dominant Stalinists in Barcelona in 1937: “When I see working-class people fighting the police, I don’t have to know any more. I know what side I’m on.”

A succinct and sensible man was Orwell.