Johnson and others said the conflict between Israel and Palestine and Russia and Ukraine would have stirred King to declare that there was little difference between the demand for civil rights and the cry for peace.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. (Courtesy photo)
By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
(NNPA NEWSWIRE) — During his short life, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped on all kinds of powerful toes in his fight for civil rights, and he was a courageous and determined leader who refused to let prison or violence sway his end mission. He also never lost sight of the fact that civil rights—addressing racial and economic injustice—was inextricable from peace.
As the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King led a nonviolent movement to abolish the triple evils crippling American society: racism, poverty, and militarism. Associates said he believed those forces were contrary to God’s will for humanity and that they could only be opposed by a religious vision of nonviolent social change.
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In April of 1967, King spoke publicly against the war in Vietnam. Today, as the nation observes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, civil rights activists, including those who knew the slain leader, offered their thoughts on what his position might be on conflicts in the Middle East and Russia and on the twice-impeached and four-times indicted former President Donald Trump.
“At the March on Washington in 1964, Dr. King talked about Alabama Gov. George Wallace having his lips dripping with interposition and nullification,” said the Rev. Peter Johnson, who began working for the Congress of Racial Equality in Plaquemine, La., and later was recruited by Andrew Young to work for King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. “What’s the difference between George Wallace and Donald Trump? You’re not going to hear Trump publicly say the n-word, that’s the only difference.
He continued, “King would easily have seen that Trump is a bigot in the true sense of the word, who actually believes he is superior to people of color.”
Johnson and others said the conflicts between Israel and Palestine and Russia and Ukraine would have stirred King to declare that there was little difference from the demand for civil rights and the cry for peace.
“ Benjamin Netanyahu is on the wrong side of history,” legendary civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the Black Press. “What led up to Oct. 7 (when Hamas attacked Israel) is the issue, not what happened on Oct. 7.”
Jackson, like he said King would have, decried the mass killings taking place in the Middle East and the war strategy occurring in Ukraine. “Those captured,” Jackson demanded, “should be allowed to go home under the supervision of the United Nations and anyone tried should be done so in the World Court.”
Jackson noted that King spoke of a deeper malady in American society. His view was that presidential administrations have been embroiling themselves in conflicts across the globe for the wrong reasons.
“Dr. King was outspokenly anti-war and anti-racism,” said the Rev. Mark Thompson, a civil rights leader who recently joined the National Newspaper Publishers Association as the trade association’s global digital transformation director. “There’s no question King would oppose the war in Ukraine and seek diplomatic solutions. I believe he would also call for a ceasefire in Gaza.”
Thompson added that the reason for King’s cancellation of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1967—one year before his assassination—suggests King had an evolving posture on the Israel-Palestine question.
“In canceling the pilgrimage during the Six-Day War, King said, ‘I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt,’” Thompson said.
“I believe his posture on Congress’s dysfunction would be consistent with the words he used to describe segregationist intransigence in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech—interposition and nullification,” Thompson declared.
NNPA President and CEO Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., also an SCLC alum, concurred. “Dr. King was a nonviolent freedom fighter who believed that we all are members of one humanity. His concept of the ‘beloved community’ was all-inclusive and not discriminatory to anyone,” Chavis said. “Today’s world realities of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, oppression, war, hatred and bigotry are void of love for one another. We need Dr. King’s wisdom, inclusive theology and leadership courage today more than ever before.”
Johnson said there’s little doubt about where King would stand on today’s issues because the icon never wavered. He said, “I don’t think he would have changed his position fundamentally.”
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