Day 5 of our Lenten Journey with Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” Speech

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
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Some highlights from Sarah Thompson’s MLK Day speech at Goshen College, January 16, 2017. Sarah is the executive director of Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Still dreaming the Beloved Community into reality, 50 years ago this April, King articulated the connections between the structures of white exploitation of black and brown people in this country, the exploitation of black and brown bodies and land through war, and the economic system that propelled it. Continue reading “In Brutal Solidarity” →