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I haven’t yet written about Martin Luther King Jr. in this series because I have been saving him. He was without doubt one of the greatest orators of the twentieth century, as well as one of its moral heroes and—effectively—martyrs. To honor him, America marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day tomorrow, the federal holiday coinciding this year with the inauguration of President Trump. It’s strange to think that, were it not for the act of one man on a spring day in Memphis, King could feasibly have just celebrated his 96th birthday.
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” he said in the speech he gave on April 3, 1968. “But I’m not concerned about that now.”
“I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he told an audience in Memphis. “And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
He was assassinated the next day.
Many Americans can quote this, King’s final speech. Most are familiar with his earlier and equally famous “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963. Both reflect two of the things that have always stood out about King.
The first, of course, was his extraordinary skill as an orator—learned from the churches of his youth. Born in segregated Atlanta on January 15, 1929, King grew up going to the enormous Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both his father and grandfather preached.
The second is that King was unwaveringly committed to reforming America without violence. When you consider some of the hucksters and race hustlers and simple thugs who tried at times to divert the Civil Rights Movement in a more militant direction—Malcolm X, anybody?—it remains one of King’s singular achievements to have led a protest movement that was dignified and ended up winning by the sheer force of its appeal to justice.
Yet, there are aspects of his character and legacy that often get overlooked. It has become commonplace to point out that King’s vision of a color-blind, race-neutral America—where we “judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character”—has been overturned by some of those who have presumed to walk in his footsteps. In recent years, those claiming to stand for social justice have obsessively encouraged Americans to judge one another, again, based on race.
But even more interesting is that a part of his legacy has been almost completely overturned or ignored by many who wish to assume his irreplaceable mantle. And that is King’s profound belief in Zionism. And so today, I want to draw attention to a lesser-known but nevertheless extraordinary moment in King’s life.
He often stated that Israel’s right to exist as a state “is incontestable.” He looked with great favor on Israel’s democratic institutions and consistently resisted the Black Power movement’s drift towards antisemitism. He also highly valued the contribution of Jewish leaders to the Civil Rights Movement. And just over a week before his death, on March 25, 1968, King spoke at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly in the Catskills, where he was introduced by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a progressive rabbi who three years earlier had marched with King in Selma, Alabama.
“Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
King accepted the introduction gracefully. He told the assembled religious leaders: “I’ve looked over the last few years, being involved in the struggle for racial justice, and all too often I have seen religious leaders stand amid the social injustices that pervade our society, mouthing pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”
As he so often did, he then elegantly reinforced his point with a short, memorable sentence, rich in its imagery: “All too often the religious community has been a taillight instead of a headlight.”
And then, having pointed out a defect of modern America, King—again, as he so often did—followed up by observing that the defect was not universal. “But here and there we find those who refuse to remain silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows, and they are forever seeking to make the great ethical insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage relevant in this day and in this age.” This is one of the reasons King effected such great change: He never allowed despair to overwhelm hope.
He also believed in examining his own movement. After all, King was visiting the Rabbinical Assembly to answer questions. In his opening remarks he therefore said, modestly, “I am not going to make a speech. We must get right to your questions.” But then he issued a brief warning for the ages: “I simply want to say that we do confront a crisis in our nation,” he said. “We see on every hand the restlessness of the comfortable and the discontent of the affluent, and somehow it seems that this mammoth ship of state is not moving toward new and more secure shores but toward old, destructive rocks.”
“Our priorities are mixed up,” he concluded. “Our national purposes are confused, our policies are confused, and there must somehow be a reordering of priorities, policies, and purposes.”
King never shied away from even the most difficult questions. Later in the conversation, one of the assembled rabbis referenced the growing antisemitism in the racial justice movement. He asked King what he would say to those black leaders who mapped American race relations onto the conflict between Israel and parts of the Arab world—who saw Israel, as some parts of the left do now, as a “white” oppressor, with its enemies considered blameless because they were not white. How, one rabbi asked King, would he respond to those who reject Israel “because color is all important in this world?”
King was grateful for this question and issued a response that is as relevant now as it was during the last century. He acknowledged that “there are some who are color-consumed, and they see a kind of mystique in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned.” But those who believe in justice, he argued, should follow the example of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“We have made it clear that we cannot be the victims of the notion that you deal with one evil in society by substituting another evil,” he said. “We cannot substitute one tyranny for another, and for the black man to be struggling for justice and then turn around and be antisemitic is not only a very irrational course, but it is a very immoral course.”
He then gave a clear-sighted analysis of the conflict in the Middle East in terms of its effects on the region rather than focusing solely on how it was viewed from afar. “I think it is necessary to say that what is basic and what is needed in the Middle East is peace,” he said. “Peace for Israel is one thing. Peace for the Arab side of that world is another thing.”
“Peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need. These nations, as you know, are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy. I think that as long as these conditions exist, there will be tensions; there will be the endless quest to find scapegoats,” said King.
He continued, “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.”
As a shaky peace settles over Israel once more, it is imperative for all who believe in democracy to remember what King repeated then: “Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”
Dr. Paul Alexander Liberty Hour airs Noon ET, weekends on America Out Loud Talk Radio… Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on Apple, Android, or Alexa. All episodes can be heard on-demand on podcast networks worldwide. Visit Dr. Paul Alexander’s website: http://drpaulalexander.com, and his substack: https://palexander.substack.com/.
Image: AP
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