A call to conscience for this unique day
The moral clarity of Martin Luther King Jr. is a model for our times
Forgoing comfort, Martin Luther King Jr. called Americans to witness what their conscience demanded. (Photo by Bee Calder on Unsplash)
So many of you in The Upstate American community have expressed appreciation for the weekend column on Martin Luther King Jr. that on this momentous day – what would have been his 96th birthday, and as America is inaugurating its 47th president – it seemed right to share a few more thoughts.
Thank you for joining us; we’ll be back on Saturday with another edition of The Upstate American.
On a warm spring evening in 1967 — tragically, almost precisely to the minute a single year before he would be cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis — the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took his place at a lectern in the chancel of New York’s Riverside Church and, with eloquence and firmness, spoke for an hour about why he was taking a stand against the Vietnam war, which then still enjoyed the support of most Americans. Many of his backers had urged him to avoid alienating pro-war Americans who might otherwise support his work for civil rights. But King said he was compelled by the notion that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” So he had to “move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism,” he said, “to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”1
We cannot know what judgments history will render on any day’s events. So far, retrospect has affirmed the righteousness of both King’s call for peace in that conflict and his leadership in the broader struggle for the rights of all Americans. That’s why his birthday is a national holiday, and why a memorial to his short life was erected in our nation’s capital.
Setting up a monument in a public place isn’t about making amends for martyrdom; it’s about holding firm against history’s tendency to lose track of what’s right among us and what we hope will be valued for generations to come. We write in stone what we fear time might erase from memory.
The King Memorial stands aside the Tidal Basin and along a sightline to the Lincoln Memorial, which likewise honors a leader whose moral clarity we belatedly honor. In his lifetime, Abraham Lincoln was mocked and scorned, even by those whom he lived among. “I tremble for our country,” a prominent young woman in Springfield, where Lincoln practiced law, wrote in her diary after his 1860 election. “I hope foreigners will not judge us by our head. I hope that he will keep the peace but I am afraid that our union has commenced to break and will soon fall to pieces …”. She had hoped, she wrote, “that such a man as he… would not be chosen to represent this great nation, but so it is.”2
Many of us could have written words much like that just now, but not in reference to Lincoln, of course. They have resonance on a day when we are inaugurating a president whom millions of us consider uniquely unfit for the job. We worry deeply for our country. The peaceful transfer of power that the convicted felon Donald Trump today enjoys is a blessing of democracy that he tried to destroy four years ago; we should be determined not to let history forget that reality, for it underscored our democracy’s surprising fragility.
The young woman in Springfield — Anna Ridgely by name, the daughter of a banker who often played cards with Lincoln — was wrong about Lincoln’s capacity, history has shown, but not about the division of the nation that was shortly to come. Today we must hope that our most dire concerns about what Trump’s return to power will bring might turn out to be similarly overstated. Millions of Americans put their faith in Trump, despite his record of dishonesty, criminality and betrayal, and we all surely wish that his second term in office will not be marked by the attacks on decency and human rights and the threats to our national security that characterized his first.
But we ought to accept, as Martin Luther King Jr. decided that he must in 1967, that it is our obligation as patriots to speak out when conscience demands. What we know to be true must not be imperiled by any “alternate truth,” the notorious phrase of a top first-term Trump aide that aptly described his and his enablers’ hostility to reality. We need to energetically pursue the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable in our time.
“Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us,” King said at Riverside Church. “If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.” That was why, he said, he had decided “to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.”
Likewise, then, we each need to listen to our inner voices, and act upon what we know to be right. History will judge not only the 47th president, but also the millions of Americans who ultimately, as the citizen decision-makers of a democracy, choose the course of our nation and the world.
Today we honor Martin Luther King Jr. because even as he recognized the temptation to settle for “comfort, complacency… and our proneness to adjust to injustice,” he refused to yield to it. Indeed, he said, “There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.”
So must we all make such a commitment on this day, honoring the call to action of the great American whose birth is worthy of celebration today.
All MLK quotations in this piece are from “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence,” which he delivered at Riverside Church. The entire text is worth reading: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
This account is drawn from the latest volume by the bestselling author Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest (New York: Crown, 2024), which recounts the history leading up to the Civil War.
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MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN
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-Rex Smith