April 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

King's Spirit in Memphis, Seattle, and Quebec

Jim Douglass is a peace activist and author who lives in Birmingham, Alabama. His most recent book is The Nonviolent Coming of God (Orbis 1991).

The spirit of Martin Luther King was alive in the streets of Seattle during the November 1999 nonviolent resistance to the World Trade Organization. So, too, we can hope, will King's spirit fill the streets of Quebec City on April 21-22, 2001, in resistance to the free trade policies of the Summit of the Americas. King gave his life for resisting such policies.

I was conscious of that connection during the battle in Seattle because of a trial happening simultaneously in Memphis. While the world watched fifty thousand demonstrators confront the WTO, I was in Memphis attending the only trial ever held for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At its conclusion on December 8, 1999, twelve jurors, six black and six white, decided King had been assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.

What we could see in the Memphis trial and the Seattle movement in the streets was a double apocalypse. The first revelation in both Memphis and Seattle was of the power of nonviolence, a revelation that happened in spite of systematic efforts to cover it up. The truth revealed in Memphis was that what Dr. Martin Luther King was doing in the Spring of 1968 so threatened the power structure of the United States government and corporate powers that government agencies assassinated King. The truth revealed in Seattle was that a nonviolent movement against corporate greed, following in King's footsteps, could prophetically bring the WTO meeting to a halt.

There was a second revelation in Memphis and Seattle, a revelation complementing the power of nonviolence. That second revelation was of the violence of the system. In the Memphis courtroom, I heard seventy witnesses reveal the details of a prophet's murder by the same system that was at that moment tear-gassing, pepper spraying, and shooting rubber bullets at thousands of nonviolent witnesses in the streets of Seattle. In Memphis, in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Martin Luther King's family against tavern-owner Loyd Jowers and other "unknown" co-conspirators, the witnesses revealed how security had been systematically stripped from Dr. King on April 4, 1968. Thus when King was summoned onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a knock on his door, a gunman waiting in the bushes across the street (not James Earl Ray) shot King easily and escaped unchallenged with the assistance of government agencies. In Seattle, in the demonstrations to shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organization, the witnesses in the streets revealed, by the police reaction to their sit-ins, the massive government security supporting free trade agreements.

Martin Luther King gave his life for confronting nonviolently the same evil that is embodied today by institutions like the World Trade Organization: a system of exploitation, poverty, war-making, and environmental destruction. His life was taken because the ruling powers knew the same secret King knew and was trying to share with us all: that a system of poverty and war would turn into ashes, and a new US and world would rise from those ashes if we the people discovered within and among ourselves the power of nonviolence. King was murdered to keep the world of nonviolence from being made flesh among us, to keep that transforming vision from being embodied in Washington, DC, in the militantly nonviolent Poor People's Campaign he had envisioned for tens of thousands of impoverished people from every race and background.

The final purpose of King's life has been forgotten. His hope was to shut down Washington in the Spring of '68 by massive civil disobedience until the United States government agreed to eliminate poverty. He was in Memphis, supporting the sanitation workers' strike there, as a prelude to the Washington project. Both King's economic goal and his revolutionary means to dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it are analogous to what happened in the streets of Seattle.

King's program to abolish poverty in the US acknowledged the structural resistance to such a plan. He crafted a strategy of overcoming entrenched power by creating a crisis of conscience, as he had done before in a series of civil rights battlegrounds. "We've got to find a method," he said, "that will disrupt our cities if necessary, create the crisis that will force the nation to look at the situation, dramatize it, and yet at the same time not destroy life or property...I see that as massive civil disobedience." King was killed before he could get to Washington to carry out such a plan.

A second reason for King's assassination was his resistance to the Vietnam War, marked especially by his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church Address in which he identified "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as "my own government." With the war at its peak in the spring of 1968, King told his staff organizers, "After we get [to DC] and stay a few days [we'll] call the peace movement in, and let them go on the other side of the Potomac and try to close down the Pentagon if that can be done." (David Yarrow, Bearing the Cross, p.593)

In the background of Martin King's assassination is that of his brother Malcolm X three years before. Their murders are linked by their lives. The two men were coming together. On February 4, 1965, seventeen days before his death, Malcolm met with Coretta Scott King in Selma, Alabama, and told her he wanted to visit Martin in the Selma Jail. That Selma meeting between the two greatest prophets of the sixties did not happen, because Malcolm had to travel to London before a jail visit could be arranged.

But let us reflect for a moment on the implications of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King embracing each other in the context of that 1965 struggle. It almost happened--and would have happened had Malcolm lived. Instead, Malcolm was murdered at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965, by Nation of Islam intermediaries.

Yet some things can't be stopped. From 1965 to 1968, Martin was in a sense "Malcolmized" by his experience of the northern urban ghetto and the Vietnam War. In that sense Martin and Malcolm did come together, in the deepened spirit and widened understanding of the man later martyred by his own government in Memphis. Had we been keeping pace with our prophets, we would not have been surprised by any of this.

Martin like Malcolm had come to realize that US troops and weapons weren't only to keep the Vietnamese in line. He saw they also reinforced a chain link fence surrounding most Americans. The fence was unseen by those in the middle of the society but stood in clear view of those at its margins whose experience encouraged rebellion. King recognized that in the outer shadows of the fence were not only police and National Guard units but the full might of the Pentagon and the covert power of intelligence agencies (which would end up killing him).

But Martin Luther King invites us into a deeper reality that can transform that fence. He called it the Beloved Community. The Beloved Community is a profound blessing because it includes all the people on the other side, whether they're holding weapons or not. It includes every police officer, soldier, and intelligence agent. It includes every general, CEO, and head of state. Everyone is a member of the Beloved Community. No exceptions.

The very real killing power that lies behind the fence is in the hands of brothers and sisters, all members of the Beloved Community. No exceptions. So the Beloved Community transforms the chain link fence into a bridge, a bridge of nonviolence. There is a new world on its other side. We can say yes with our lives to the Beloved Community by being willing to walk across that bridge of nonviolence to its other side.

Martin Luther King did so on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, just as many practitioners of nonviolence were willing to do in Seattle in November 1999. Many more seem to be willing to take that walk of active love in Quebec City in April 2001.

A longer article on the King trial, and a full transcript, are available at <www.thekingcenter.com>

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