THE Martin Luther King Jr who was assassinated 40 years ago this Friday wasn’t quite the preacher who nearly five years earlier had shared his dream of racial equality with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the heart of Washington. His speech in August 1963 was indubitably among the most powerful orations of its kind in human history, but in the intervening years King had marched beyond his undying commitment to civil rights. The alleviation of poverty – and not just among blacks – acquired greater prominence in his list of priorities. Then there was Vietnam.

 

As the civil rights movement had been gathering momentum, so had the American involvement in Indochina. King’s conception of morality and his devotion to non-violence inevitably meant he was uncomfortable with this development. But he was persuaded to keep his own counsel in the matter. Many of his advisers were adamant that it would be sheer folly to throw himself open to charges of being a communist sympathizer. Eventually, however, King decided that the content of his conscience dictated otherwise.

 

On April 4, 1967, precisely a year before his assassination, in a speech at Riverside Church in New York, he eloquently expounded his position on Vietnam, having been “moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart”.

 

As he pointed out, “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

 

“So we have repeatedly been 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 they would never live on the same block in Detroit.”

 

Comparable sentiments had been expressed nearly two decades earlier by the actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson, who had been excoriated  and ostracized for questioning whether it made any sense to expect black Americans to take part in any war against the Soviet Union while they were deprived of basic human rights in their homeland. Red-baiting had prevented King from claiming Robeson as a crucial political forebear, but there can be little question that the latter would have agreed with King’s characterization of “my own government” as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. He went on to ask: “What do the [Vietnamese] peasants think … as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?”

 

Ten months later, in a sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King acknowledged: “We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world,” and raised the prospect of divine retribution.

 

To a considerable extent on account of King’s contribution to its upbringing, the American nation has come a long way from the days when its race relations echoed South African apartheid. The prospect of a Barack Obama presidency is a reflection of this change. At the same time, there are multiple respects in which the US still has a long way to go. As a consequence, King’s critiques of his nation’s role in Vietnam remain broadly applicable today in the context of Iraq. And – although Obama would be inclined to contest this assertion – Afghanistan.

 

Last month, the Democratic presidential hopeful found himself in the eye of a storm triggered by the contentious assertions of the former pastor at his local church, the reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had intoned shortly after 9/11, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost”, and who had suggested that “damn” ought to be substituted as the crucial verb in Irving Berlin’s hymn God Bless America.

 

Obama inevitably was obliged to distance himself from comments of this nature, but he managed to do so in a manner that enhanced his stature among most impartial observers. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said of the man who solemnized his marriage and baptized his children. “He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.”

 

He pointed out that the anger and bitterness that persist among blacks are not baseless, that slavery was America’s “original sin” and that “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” (a euphemism for apartheid) lingers on. The anger, he said, “is real, it is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.” 

 

Much the same argument could be extended to embrace the indignation and exasperation that predominate the rest of the world’s attitude towards the US, and there have been indications during the campaign that Obama is aware of the challenges posed by his nation’s deeply flawed assumptions and behaviour in the international arena.

 

“I don’t want to just end the war [in Iraq],” he said during a debate with Hillary Clinton on January 31, “but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

 

That’s a sentiment with which both King and Wright would have found it hard to disagree.

 

As Gary Younge commented in The Guardian on Monday, “Forty years after King’s death, the ability of America to both mythologize the man and marginalize his meaning is all too cruelly apparent. His symbolic likeness is effortlessly incorporated into America’s self-image as the land of relentless progress. Meanwhile, his legacy of struggling against poverty and imperialism is undermined with each passing day. Had he lived he would most certainly have been loathed. In order for America to love him, he first had to die.”

 

 This year, however, US citizens have a rare opportunity to privilege one of the great man’s dreams above his prophetic nightmares.

 

By virtue of his youth, Obama is not a veteran of the civil rights movement that led to a crucial, albeit partial, American transformation in the 1950s and ‘60s. But in articulating a vision for the future he has eloquently demonstrated that he cognizant of the past.

 

Like all human beings, he is imperfect, but that does not detract from his status as the most interesting and promising candidate to have been thrown up by the American electoral system in many a decade.

 

A thoughtful, intelligent young man, half Kansan, half Kenyan and all American, realistically vying for the White House: that is undoubtedly an idea King would have relished. Ultimate success would, in all probability, have occasioned an exultation – perhaps premature, but only slightly – along the lines of “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!”

 

One of the prime tests for Obama, should he make it into the White House, will be to hasten the day when Iraqis and Afghans are able to intone similar emotions.

 

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