Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution
Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution
By Anton Chaitkin. Copyright Anton Chaitkin
When Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his sermon in the nation’s capital on March 31, 1968, the coup d’état was in full swing.
President Kennedy had been murdered in 1963. King himself would be assassinated four days after the sermon. The President’s brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, would be killed two months later.
The transatlantic imperial faction moving the coup aimed to bury America’s historic identity, to crush the Constitutional commitment to the progress of its citizens. Fighting this faction, President Franklin Roosevelt had revived the spirit of the American Revolution. President Kennedy had resumed Roosevelt’s course towards universal progress.
After JFK’s death, Dr. King was in many ways the moral leader of the nation, the patriot summoning the nation to live up to its ideals.
King preached that Sunday on the subject, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution."[1] He called for America to fulfill its founding promise of equality: for Black people to finally receive the economic assistance which President Abraham Lincoln’s program had provided for farmers and workers, but which the betrayal of Reconstruction had denied to the freed slaves. Quoting John Kennedy, he warned that the U.S. war in Vietnam was leading toward the ultimate annihilation of mankind. He said he would soon be coming back to Washington with masses of poor people of all races, to demand national action against poverty.
Dr. King’s final Sunday sermon will be better understood by placing it in the mortal struggle of those years over the country’s strategic direction.
The Tumultuous Background to the Sermon
President Kennedy, like Franklin Roosevelt before him, had revived the 19th century American tradition of government intervention to promote U.S. industrial and scientific advances. And like FDR, JFK had sought peace with Russia and U.S. accommodation with the nationalist aspirations of colonial peoples.
Kennedy famously spoke for peace June 10, 1963,[2] explaining his actions to move away from the nuclear arms race.
The next day, June 11, Kennedy addressed the nation[3] on the great moral crisis that only full racial justice could solve. He then submitted to Congress civil rights legislation to free those who had only been partially freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation proclamation a century before.
The March on Washington two months later (August 28, 1963) called for Congress to enact Kennedy’s Civil Rights bill; there, Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. At that point, a strong majority coalition was forming behind Kennedy, involving civil rights and labor constituencies.
At the U.N. September 20, 1963, Kennedy spoke eloquently for global scientific progress to lift living standards. He proposed a joint U.S.-Russian Moon landing program. On October 11, he approved National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 calling for beginning the withdrawal of U.S. military advisors from Vietnam.
The President’s assassination six weeks later was soon followed by a radical change in America’s industrial, scientific and moral direction. War was pressed on Vietnam, killing and displacing millions. Though civil rights legislation was enacted, the historic U.S. commitment to material progress was repudiated with a new paradigm of “deindustrialization,” “ecology,” and “free trade.” The Black ghettoes were abandoned to despair and erupted in riots.
The imperial faction moving this murderous agenda sought to undermine and split the forces that might have resisted the coup process. This may be seen vividly in the actions of the perfidious McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Kennedy who stayed on after the murder to reverse Kennedy’s withdrawal and escalate the war. Bundy then became head of the Ford Foundation, where he funded “Black Power” advocates repudiating racial integration. Bundy simultaneously organized a New York City program of educational decentralization, pitting impoverished Black communities against the teacher’s union in a catastrophic struggle over limited school funding.
In this conjuncture, Martin Luther King took upon himself the responsibility to guide the nation back to its historic mission of progress. Despite grievous FBI harassment and establishment disinvestment in his organization, King became a leading opponent of the Vietnam War. He supported striking sanitation workers in Memphis, and he pressed ahead with plans for the Poor People’s Campaign designed to shake up Washington.
The Bootstrap Myth
In that sermon in Washington’s National Cathedral March 31, 1968, Dr. King refuted what he called the “bootstrap myth.” To explain the justice of the demands of Black people for serious national action on their behalf, King brought back to public view Abraham Lincoln’s 1860s program for national progress.
There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.
They never stop to realize . . . the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty four years.
In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life . . . It simply said, "You’re free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do.And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.
But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
King had introduced his theme by reference to Washington Irving’s story, “Rip Van Winkle.” Before Rip fell asleep in colonial America, he saw on a tavern sign the image of Britain’s King George III. When he awoke 20 years later, there was instead the image of George Washington. He had slept through the American Revolution – “a revolution,” as Dr. King said, “that at points would change the course of history.” Now, he preached, the world’s poor are seeking freedom from the terrible colonial legacy of poverty. And the poor of our cities are held bondage in a kind of internal colony, the slums being drained of funds by predatory financiers. He asked Americans to remain awake for this revolution, so they can fulfill their obligation to uplift their fellow men.
King called the ongoing Vietnam conflict “one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.” He quoted President Kennedy: "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind,” and continued that the Vietnam War must end, “because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of confronting China which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.”
++++++++++++
Martin Luther King Day will be commemorated this year on January 20.
What lesson is there for us today from King’s life, and his martyrdom?
The United States is now engaged in mass-murderous war through proxies, through Ukraine against Russia, and through Israel against the Palestinians. The U.S.-sponsored Israeli war in Gaza resembles in many respects the war that destroyed Vietnam and poisoned America’s soul.
Dr. King’s real voice should be heard, on his day. He can remind us who we are.
Dr. King speaks on behalf of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, March 18, 1968.
[1] Click here for the text of the sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”
[2] Click here for the video of President Kennedy’s Peace Speech (commencement address at American University).
[3] Click here for the video of President Kennedy’s Address to the Nation on Civil Rights.
Note by the author:
If you enjoy the articles, please consider supporting my work by being a paid subscriber to my substack.
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Free subscription: weekly posting of articles, videos of interviews, classes, or text of interchange with readers, who may post comments or questions to the author.
Paid subscription: as above, plus a PDF of Who We Are, Volume 1; admission to live Zoom discussions; selected posting of drafted chapters for Volume 2.
Regular subscription: $5 per month/ $50/year.
“Founders”: $300 or $1000/year, or the subscriber may designate any amount higher than the regular subscription