In King’s Name, Homelessness Linked to Global Issues

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing . . . for the next generation. (We) will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. (We) will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. (We) will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as children of the living God.

Martin Luther King Jr.

April 4, 1967

Time may have obscured his message for some, and enemies of change may have sought to circumscribe its scope from the start. But witnesses to history cannot deny the truth of his words now, say organizers of Saturday’s rally at St. Vincent’s Catholic church in Los Angeles.

Prophetic Speech

The 7:30 p.m. rally, organizers say, will commemorate the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the prophetic speech he issued exactly a year before his death.

In that speech, called “Beyond Vietnam,” King issued his most profound critique of American racism and militarism and their effects at home and abroad. In doing so, organizers say, he linked the domestic struggle for civil rights with the struggle for freedom being waged by oppressed peoples in Vietnam, South Africa and Central America and called for an end to American military involvement in Southeast Asia and, obliquely, for a withdrawal of support for the repressive regimes in all of Southern Africa--Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, Mozambique and Angola were still Portuguese colonies--and the dictatorships supporting American economic interests in Central America.

And King said it was impossible to pursue the goals he sought domestically while America’s treasury was being drained by the military: “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube.” Because of that, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

Twenty years later, a coalition of social activists under the umbrella of the Southern California Ecumenical Council and Interfaith Taskforce on Central America, is using King’s speech and his radical critique of American society to rally Southern Californians around the issues of homelessness in America and what they say are its links to U.S. foreign policy in Central America and Southern Africa.

“The homeless question is some thing we don’t see as apart from what’s going on in Central America (and South Africa),” said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, pastor of Holman United Methodist Church and the man King once called the leading non-violent theorist in the world today. He is one of the organizers of Saturday’s rally.

“They are all instances in which you have violent structures that oppress ordinary people,” Lawson said. “They are what we call, in non-violent language, ‘cold violence.’ By cold violence we mean when people are tortured, brutalized, deprived, crippled in their human potential because of institutional forms--city or nation structures--that prevent them, from the beginning of their lives, from tapping into the opportunities that are available and from tapping the potential that’s within them. So in the case of the United States, homelessness is not an accident, nor is it because certain people on the streets are immoral or drug addicts.”

Instead, said Lawson, it is the result of economic and social injustice. “From the beginning in the United States, our economic structures have promoted slavery . . . poverty, people unemployed, people employed but who get very, very poor wages--the underemployed.” And instead of trying to eliminate these economic imbalances, economists try to accommodate it, he said, by “talking about certain levels of unemployment and underemployment being all right.”

Lawson, one of King’s closest friends and colleagues, was chairman of the Memphis campaign in which the city’s sanitation workers, 98% of whom were black, went on strike. The workers wanted union recognition, payroll deduction of union dues and pay increases. “What we do here,” King said at the time, “symbolizes a new phase of the civil rights movement, the Negroes’ fight for economic equality.” It was in that Tennessee city, at a time when King’s social and economic view of the country had moved decidedly to the left, that he was shot on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Lawson said the thrust of the movement King led was always toward “institutional change,” while the media “tended to exaggerate the sit-in campaigns. He said to me personally: ‘Jim, what you are doing in Memphis is what I expect to do with the poor people’s campaign, namely, link the economic question with the struggle for social change; concretely, go after the poverty issue.’ The point is,” Lawson said, “had King lived, there is no doubt in my mind but that the struggle would have gone on in intense ways toward restructuring” of American society.

King’s ability to meld the idealism of the visionary with concrete political goals is a strength progressive movements sorely lack now, said Father Luis Olivares, an organizer of the rally and a prominent activist priest. His Our Lady Queen of the Angels Roman Catholic church, known as La Placita, has the largest Catholic congregation in Los Angeles and is a center of the Sanctuary movement.

“It’s one thing to denounce and point out the injustices. We are very good at that. I am a good analyst of reality, but that is not enough. We need a strategy that is built into our working together--blacks, brown, white--and that means organizing around the issues. The weak link here is our inability to follow the example of Martin Luther King and others who were able to organize politically and socially around the Scriptures and around specific issues. We have not learned that lesson. The Catholic Church unfortunately continues to shy away from organizing the huge numbers of people that is its constituency around these social issues for fear of being labeled socialists or communists. . . .” That is particularly true in Central America where the church “tolerates tremendous injustices,” he said, for fear of being manipulated by the left. “That’s the big excuse for inaction. I think it betrays a lack of faith and the sinful nature of the church’s human side.”

The American Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter last year on the economy, however, is a welcome sign, Olivares said. The church called the current levels of poverty in the United States a “social and moral scandal,” and said people have “economic rights” well as civil and political rights, and that securing those economic rights is a moral imperative.

This is what King said, too, organizers of Saturday’s rally are reminding people.

“America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King said in speeches during the last year of his life. “Whether we realize it or not, our participation in the war in Vietnam is an ominous expression of our lack of sympathy for the oppressed, our paranoid anti-Communism, our failure to feel the ache and anguish of the Have-Nots. It reveals our willingness to continue participating in neo-colonialist adventures.”

Organizers of the Saturday rally believe those words in particular apply to America’s current support of the white minority regime in South Africa and the repressive governments in Central America. And in advance of Saturday’s rally have been holding teach-ins throughout Los Angeles to share information and answer question on domestic issues and U.S. foreign policy in Southern Africa and Central America.

At a recent teach-in at Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church, the Rev. Donald Lewis, a member of the congressional delegation that went to assess the political conditions in El Salvador this year, pointed to the parallels between America’s initial involvement in Vietnam and America’s involvement in El Salvador, where the first U.S. military adviser died in combat this week.

Olivares and Lawson, both of whom will speak at the rally, said they hope the coalition that planned it will work together on other projects. “For the first time,” said Lawson, this coalition has brought a broad group of people in Los Angeles together who are committed to the Central American struggle, the Southern Africa struggle and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” black domestic agenda. “We have lots of groups today in Los Angeles working on all kinds of issues. If some of those groups could one day find common cause and be willing to bend their energies around those common causes, we would have the foundation for a massive movement in this city to effect social change.” Pragmatically, “none of us is strong enough to do it on our own. We all have to learn linkage.”