Amid all the commemorations of Martin Luther King’s civil-rights campaigns, one of King’s cohorts (pictured) came to New Haven to remind us of another King crusade that resonates today: his antiwar crusade.
The Rev. Richard Fernandez commemorated Martin Luther King Day on Friday at Yale’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life. He helped write King’s famous 1967 speech in which he opposed the war in Vietnam. That’s a part of King’s legacy often ignored in the annual tributes to the man always referred to as a “civil rights leader,” but it’s a part of his work that resonates today, as America is engaged in another brutal war.
Fernandez, a minister in the United Church of Christ, served as executive director from 1966 to 1973 of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, the most significant religiously-based movement against the war. Dr. King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel were two of the group’s co-chairs.
Fernandez’s talk drew on his years of close collaboration with both King and Heschel, whom he called prophets who “used religious idioms and stories in the public square in projecting a new vision for our common life.”
All three men played instrumental roles in the gathering at Riverside Church, exactly one year before Dr. King’s murder, at which Dr. King said:
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
Today it is religious voices on the right, not the left, that predominate in the public square: religious voices that speak out in support of the war in Iraq, against evolution, gay rights and a woman’s right to abortion. To a question about why there is no comparable mainstream national religiously-based voice against the war today, Fernandez replied, “I built up a huge national organization because of the front page of the newspaper, and body bags. A lot of people got killed. It was in my living room every night on television.”
The current administration is one that famously won’t allow photos to be taken of coffins holding the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq, much less soldiers in body bags —” the latter being one of the quintessential images of American losses in the Vietnam War. And even though today we hear daily reports of Americans and Iraqis —” including civilians —” being blown apart by roadside bombs, the images from Vietnam that conveyed the immediacy and brutality of war are this time sanitized and somehow more removed and distant, despite all the advances in communication technology in the past 40 years.
That’s only a part of the explanation, of course, and touches on the radical transformation in American politics and life from the values articulated by King and Heschel —” who refused to demonize their opposition —” to religious leaders on the right who specialize in exactly that.
“When you look at the front page and see crime and war,” Fernandez concluded, “you see corporate and political leaders into all kinds of mischief and crime. It can be very depressing. Being a witness today is not a journey for faint-hearted people.”