STANISLAUS CONNECTIONS

Working For Peace, Justice, and A Sustainable Environment

A Modesto Peace/Life Center Publication

Danny Glover Speech

Marin Luther King Jr. Celebration

2002, Modesto

The Long Road to Modesto

Danny Glover’s Speech at the Martin Luther King Day Celebration

Modesto, January 19, 2002

Good Evening. I am so happy to be with you, all of you, this evening. I would especially like to thank again, I’d like to acknowledge the Martin Luther King Day committee and your efforts in organizing this eighth annual event.

I wanted to set the tone for this evening’s celebration by bringing Dr. King’s voice to the room. And an amazing, powerful voice it is. He said, “We’re going to work with you and on your behalf.” In this particular clip I was always moved because of the compassion that comes across. Mind you, this is thirteen years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott; thirteen years in which Dr. King had been constantly oppressed, constantly struggling. With very few words, he simply says, “My, my, my,” in the face of suffering that has been laid out before him. This tape was done three days before his assassination.

Let me again just say I’m really happy to be here tonight. I’d especially like to thank brother Tommy Muhammad, who has been after me to come to Modesto for a couple of years. After me is just putting it mildly. We could actually say he’s been hounding me and my office for the last couple of years, but that’s all right because sometimes I need to be pushed a little. Sometimes when it comes to be it means pushing a whole lot, and it’s necessary. I would also personally like to thank each and every member again of the Modesto Martin Luther King Day Committee for your courage under fire and for your steadfast commitment to principle. I would also like to thank the Modesto Peace Life Center for agreeing to sponsor this event when it looked as if it might have to be cancelled. Thank you. I would like to thank the student body association of the Modesto Junior College who stepped forward after the Junior College and Modesto Bee and others pulled out. And a special thanks to student body president Brian Justin Marks. And last but certainly not least, I would like to thank the members of the Christ Unity Baptist Church for your courage, and for your integrity, and especially the Reverend Nathaniel Green.

And Tarik Muhammad. I was thinking about something that the great historian John Hope Franklin once said, he was born in Kansas. He was really disturbed by the fact that racism had kept him from learning another language. He was arguably one of the great American historians of our time, of any time. And I thought as Tarik stood here that he was speaking another language. He was disappointed that the schools that he went to as a child did not have languages available for him to learn. Imagine what he could have been if he learned Spanish, French, or other language. To all of you, I would sincerely like to thank…especially this choir here.

There is another person in the audience that I would like to acknowledge. I grew up in San Francisco, and she is one of my elders. She is one of my mentors and she has been not only a close friend of my family’s, but one of my teachers. Dr. Raye Richardson. I learned recently that she was my father’s secret girlfriend. She said it. She put it out there. Dr. Richardson and her late husband, who was a very good friend of my father’s—both of them—are the founders of Marcus Bookstore in San Francisco and Oakland, the oldest African American bookstore in the country. Thank you for being here.

Finally I would just like to thank everybody who is associated with my company Carrie Productions, but I would especially like to thank Sarisa Middleton who is my vice president of operations, for your personal commitment to saying, “We have to go to Modesto.” All of you, thank you.

But most of all, I’d like to thank all of you for being here. I’d also like to express a profound note of gratitude for Reverend Dr. Elouise Oliver, and all the members of my religious and spiritual community in the East Bay Church of Religious Science.

The title of this speech tonight should be The Long Road to Modesto, but we are here this evening to honor and to celebrate the life of a truly great American. A man whose journey carried him from a small church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 to Riverside Church in New York City in 1967. From sharecropper shanties to the Nobel Peace Prize, from Alabama and Mississippi in 1968, organizing poor people’s march, to his death in April of that year, supporting poor garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

We are gathered here this evening to celebrate the life and legacy of a man whose words, whose voice and whose vision resonates as clearly today as it did at the time of his tragic death in 1968. We are gathered to honor an African American preacher or social activist and human rights activist from the South.

We are gathered here to remember a man who, to the best of his ability, with all his limitations as a human being, tried to live his beliefs. All over the country, and all over the world, people are gathering to honor a man who died committed to defending the principles of non-violence, social justice, and equality for all. People around the globe are gathered to honor, to remember a man who is no longer with us because of his unflinching commitment to peace, reconciliation and redemption. And as I said, we are here to honor a truly great American—not a perfect one, but great. A great American in the tradition of men like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas. A great American in the tradition of women like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Eleanor Roosevelt. What makes all of these people for me is their desire to create a more perfect union, a more inclusive vision of social possibilities.

In a lot of ways, he was a man ahead of his time. In other ways, he was very much a man of his time. One of those ways in which he was very much a man of his time had to do with the gender in which language was used. But one of the things that I’m really confident about, because King was an evolving human being, is that he would have been receptive to input and consciousness raising for women like Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, Dr. Johnetta Cole and Dr. Raye Richardson. These women, as we all know, would have taught him to use the language in a much more inclusive way, because I’m certain that where King says “men,” I know today he would say “men and women.”

Dr. King comes out of a tradition of extraordinary Americans, many of whom unlike him are unheralded and unsung. I was thinking about that as I was reflecting on a conversation I had with an iron worker, a welder, that I met on a train between Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City, a week or so after the tragic events of September 11th. He, like so many other workers in the region, was working non-stop, around the clock, at ground zero. He was in his early 40s, he had become a welder in part because his father had been a welder. His uncles had also been welders. He had become the occupation of choice and of necessity of many of the men in his family. He was of Irish descent, of descendants, men and women who had immigrated here. Yet he had a job to do, and was challenged in ways that neither his father, and others who came before him, in ways that were perhaps unrecognizable, unimaginable to them.

As we traveled, swept along by the relative calm in syncopated rhythm of the train moving along the track, we talked about our lives, our dreams, our hopes. I spoke of my father, who had just recently passed, and had worked as a postal worker, and of my close relationship with him. He talked about his daughters, whom he had not seen in a week, because it was impossible for him to come home after ten or twelve hours daily working on the site of the World Trade Center. I can imagine it was emotionally difficult for him as well, but he was returning after having gone briefly to see his family and to get clean clothes. He slept and I slept, in between talking on our way to our destination.

As our train sped toward New York City, I had this intense feeling of traveling into the abyss of the new unknown. One in which we needed to stop and listen and speak a different truth, a new language, a higher calling. A truth in language that we could not ignore, and a calling we could not avoid or dismiss. Dr. King’s prophetic words and deeds embraced this language. We must become a people willing to shape, reshape and shape the world in our dreams, our imagination, and fight religiously, righteously to realize it.

We arrived at Penn Station and it became apparent that we were among a sea of men and women who were now traveling back and forth. The station was now merely a waystation, a refuge emotionally for men and women who were there on their way to do a job. A man of Hispanic descent walked up to us as we disembarked and he began to cry uncontrollably, and began to mumble about what he had experienced. As I reflected on that moment of compassion and vulnerability, of three of us physically and emotionally embracing one another, I’m reminded of King’s words on love and independence and I quote: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent.” Those were the words that I remembered that day.

Love harmonizes, we are interdependent, hatred and bitterness cannot cure disease. Only love can do that. Life, love, releases it. Hatred confuses life. Love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life. Love illumines it. Martin, as he was affectionately known in his day, has left an incredible resource of knowledge and wisdom in his books, his speeches, his sermons, his essays. It would be wonderful for each of us in part of celebrating King’s life if we would go to a bookstore or library and get just one volume of Dr. King’s work, not what someone had written about him, but something written by him. What did he actually say? What did he actually believe? It seems that if we truly wish to honor him, we should at least do that.

I’m reminded of a speech given by June Jordan about Dr. King at Stanford in 1987. And I quote: “In the 20th Century, except perhaps for Mahatma Gandhi, who could stand beside Martin Luther King Jr., and say to the believing multitudes, ‘I have a dream.’ In the history of these United States, who shall sit in front of Dr. King saying, ‘I despair, but I will not give up. I continue to believe in our collective capacity to love justice more than the sliding ease of compromise, or the glittering profits of unearned privilege. I continue to believe in our collective capacity to test non-violence as the alternative to species annihilation.’” His is the voice of a Black man, who had himself been clubbed and stabbed and shoved and shot at and jailed and spit on, and who repeatedly and repeatedly dared the utmost power of racist violence to silence him. That was the voice of a leader who did not tell others to do what he would or could not do.

In one of his most famous sermons, Dr. King left us with an important question: “Where do we go from here?” In his eloquence, he left us a clear roadmap in another sermon when he said, “The arc of the physical universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” As we all know Dr. King was an amazing wordsmith, an orator who, in his eloquence, would put many rappers to shame with his mastery of language.

In that one sentence, his words and imagery conjure up the vastness of the physical universe in time, and in space. It conjures up the notion of infinity, of vastness beyond our abilities as mere human beings to even begin to grasp; a vastness beyond the stratosphere, beyond the planets known and unknown, discovered and undiscovered, beyond outer space, beyond even the black hole. And even within the continuum of reality as we can only imagine, there is ever so slight of a curve. An arc. Imagine that. And what Dr. King tells us is that even that arc bends toward justice; bends toward compassion; bends toward forgiveness; bends toward love and reconciliation. Even that arc bends toward redemption.

So where do we go from here? One of Dr. King’s messages it seems is that we don’t have a lot of choice about where to go. The only real choice we have left to us, which is the only choice that he had left himself, has to do with our individual responsibility and our collective action in the service of justice, in the service of caring, in the service of compassion.

We must choose our words carefully at all times, but especially in times of crisis when fear gives way to a hardening of our hearts, and a clouding of our vision.

He could never boast of an election war chest of millions of dollars because he never held public office, and yet he worked for the public interest, for the public good as he understood it, every single day of his adult life.

Dr. King’s birthday celebration, of course, is always tinged with sadness, because however much we celebrate Dr. King’s life and legacy, the very act of doing so reminds us that he is no longer with us. Even as we pause to celebrate his life and his legacy, the fact that we have occasion to reflect and remember is a painful reminder that not everyone shared his philosophy of non-violence; a painful reminder that not everyone shared his vision of social justice and equality for all. Not everyone shared his deep commitment to ending the widening disparity between rich and poor, which is one of the reasons that he was in Memphis on that fateful day, April 4, 1968. 

Not everyone shared his dream of peace, his dream of reconciliation, his dream of redemption, and certainly not all of us agreed with one of his most radical beliefs, the idea that we should somehow find it within us to try and love our enemies. In fact, one of his most famous sermons was entitled, “Love Our Enemy.” It would certainly be something at this time to consider, and certainly be one of the most controversial things to consider. We are daily reminded that not everyone shared his commitment to the guarantees of the constitution, even the right to dissent. We must not forget that most of his ideas were considered so controversial that he was placed under constant surveillance by the FBI. He, of course, took solace in the fact that the authorities, in another time and another era, had also considered the views of another man of peace—a lowly carpenter, a Nazareth—dangerous to the established order of his time.

As we gather this evening, celebrating his life, it would be naïve to assume that everyone today shares his philosophy of non-violence and compassion, his vision of social justice and equality, his dream of peace, his commitment to reconciliation and redemption. What do these words, which are the core of Dr. King’s beliefs speak? Non-violence, social justice, equality, peace, reconciliation, redemption…what did they mean to Dr. King? What do they mean to each of us individually? What do they mean to us as a national collective? These are some of the questions that come up as we once again gather to celebrate, to remember, and to honor Dr. King’s life and legacy. In spite of the fact that Dr. King has left us with a very clear and well-documented body of work outlining his core beliefs and philosophy, I’m often shocked, as I’m sure many of you are, at how fashionable it has become to use Dr. King’s words out of context. To attack and undermine the basic tenets of his vision. I think we all are shocked when we find our words taken out of context.

I’d like to take a moment to address the controversy surrounding my speech at Princeton more directly—or directly. This is my first time doing this publicly since November 15th, but I feel that you are an audience that deserves a response. In commenting on the fallout surrounding my speech at Princeton, writer Michelle Chirara points out that, and I quote, “Everyone professes to love freedom of speech, but just not on their time, not on their campus, not in their backyard. Not when it disrupts or upsets.” She goes on to point out that, and I continue to quote, “Everyone is all for free speech but a closer look at a number of recent cases suggests that when right-wing pundits stir up controversy—which it’s important to mention, they have every right to do—people in power from city councils to boards of trustees are responding by silencing the trouble-makers. And a trouble-maker these days is anyone who dares to criticize any aspect of the war on terrorism.” In my opinion, which in this instance also happens to be the view of the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is not possible to have a healthy democracy in the absence of ongoing and spirited public debate and public dialogue.

Unfortunately, the climate for healthy dialogue is, in lots of ways, much worse than when King was alive. All too often what gets passed off as a public dialogue now, your run-of-the-mill TV and radio talk shows, is show business at best, and bad entertainment at worst, devoid of any real intellectual content, with little or no respect for the truth.

I have a few copies of the speech that I delivered at Princeton, and despite what you have heard, read or have been told, it might shock you to learn that nowhere in it is Osama bin Laden’s name even mentioned. For those of you who don’t get copies of the complete speech, it is available at Yes! Magazine’s web site at www.yesmagazine.org.

The thrust of my comments at Princeton, in an appearance sponsored by the local chapter of Amnesty International, and also a group in support of the moratorium on the death penalty in the state of New Jersey, had to do with the death penalty and the disproportionate numbers of young African American and Hispanic men on death row.

In all of the reporting about what I said and didn’t say, nowhere has that fact been reported. Also not reported was my observation that since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in the 1970s, 743 people have been executed in the United States. At the same time, 101 people, or about one out of every seven scheduled for execution had walked off of death row after new evidence had proved they were absolutely innocent. We’re not talking about people who had been absolutely absolved of any wrongdoing, whose sentences or convictions were overturned on what some might say was a technicality, in other words, what had been prevented was the execution of innocent people.

Look at the numbers. If there was a drug on the market that was responsible for the deaths of one out of every seven people who took it, the Food and Drug Administration would have banned it a long time ago. I also pointed out that the United States was one of only two countries that regularly executed retarded people. What I didn’t say, but would like to say tonight, is that I believe that if King were alive today he, like the leaders of the European Union, would also be on record publicly condemning the disproportionate numbers of African American men executed in the United States, as a gross human rights violation. He would be adamantly opposed to the death penalty in principle. As death penalty abolitionist members of the European Union have pointed out, African Americans make up 12.1% of our nation’s population, but comprise 43% of the people on death row across the United States. Something’s wrong. African American men, of course, constitute less than 12% of the population probably somewhere in the vicinity of 6 or 7%. And so no wonder human rights advocates in the United States and nations around the world are shocked, because something’s wrong.

There are of course a lot of things that Martin would be extremely happy about and extremely proud of in terms of the progress that Civil Rights Movement has reached. Those statistics, however, and the social justice implications of those statistics, would not be one of them.

If I was prone to cynicism or to a conspiratory view of reality it might appear that the hoopla about bin Laden was a smoke screen to detract attention from the real focus of my comments, which had to do with the racial implications of the death penalty as it is carried out in the United States. I commend the efforts of the European Union particularly for trying to keep this issue before the world community. In all of the fervor right-wing talk show hosts have been strangely silent on that aspect of my presentation.

As most of you know I have been an anti-death penalty advocate for over ten years. My opposition to the death penalty is nothing new, and whether anyone agrees with me or not, it is my right as an American citizen to have it and to express it. So at the end of my presentation at Princeton, during the question and answer period, someone asked if my opposition to the death penalty included bin Laden. My response was that I was opposed to the death penalty in principle. I am an abolitionist of the death penalty. I consider that a fairly innocuous response. Never anticipating that the response in the hands of various right-wing pundits and talk show hosts would be turned into everything from me being pro-Taliban, to my having made a personal appeal to the U.S. government to spare Osama bin Laden’s life.

Despite widespread documentation of media manipulation and distortion, I must confess that I was even shocked. Never was there any mention of my support for the women of Afghanistan over the past several years, and my outspoken opposition to the genocidal practices of the Taliban. Is fairness, some sense of balance, too much to ask? Apparently, it is.

It is true I mentioned and have been critical of military tribunals. One of the commitments that we made after we provided Japanese Americans reparations and apology for their treatment during the war, was that we promised never again. Is that a commitment we are prepared to honor? As someone who grew up in a state in which Japanese Americans were incarcerated and hauled off to internment camps during another time of war, because they were the wrong nationality and the wrong color, I did express my opposition to a policy I felt unfairly targets all Muslims and people of Arab descent in America. Again, that is my right as an American citizen. It is a right that my father the uniform of this country to defend and to insure. It is a right I feel that my ancestors earned for me in the belly and bowels of vermin-infested slave ships. And it is a right that Dr. King reminds us of.

What I did not say, but would like to point out tonight is that Timothy McVeigh was a young, white, blond-haired, blue-eyed survivalist who committed a terrorist act. Would it ever had occurred to us to target every young, blond-haired, white, blue-eyed survivalist in this country? I’m not suggesting that all tall, blond, white male survivalists who are unhappy with the government should have been targeted. I’m not saying that. I can just see the headlines: Danny Glover calls on the government to incarcerate all tall, blond, white male survivalists.

What I am saying though is that the discrepancy is the problem. The fact that it’s OK to target Japanese Americans or Arab Americans during a time of war and crisis, but not German Americans or Italian Americans under some similar circumstances isn’t the issue. Again, I’m not suggesting that it should have been done. I’m merely pointing out the discrepancies violating the very principle of equal protection under the law. It was that principle that was the very heart of the Civil Rights Movement. It was for that principle that many people, including Dr. King, gave their lives.

It was that principle of fairness and justice that three young Civil Rights workers Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, gave their lives; one white, one Jewish, and one African American. The question of equal protection for all is the legacy that Dr. King left us. And that’s as real today as it was when he was assassinated 34 years ago. If we know of the basic principle then anybody and everybody can coop the image. In that sense, we could end up with Martin Luther King hamburgers or M.L.K. chicken nuggets. But what is that? Does it extend Dr. King’s vision?

As we all know, Dr. King agonized long and hard over whether to come out against the war in Vietnam. But he finally bowed to the dictates of his conscience in consultation with his creator. I believe that he would not have to agonize over whether to stand up and speak about the official targeting of Arab Americans. We can always find reasons and justifications for what to do. Hitler’s rationale was that the Germans were in economic crisis. The roadmap that Dr. King left is clear it’s just not an easy one to follow. We must admit, it’s not.

One of the other criticisms has been that I use my celebrity status to talk about issues. For the record, I was a social activist before—as Malcom used to say—I was a so-called celebrity. I was an anti-apartheid activist in the late 60s in college. And I joined thousands of other people at the time who protested around the world, alongside Dr. King, not to mention celebrities like Maya Angelou, like Harry Belafonte and Ozzie Davis and Ruby Dee, and others. When Mandela was a prisoner on Robben Island, labeled a terrorist by the U.S. State Department because that is how he was labeled by white minority government in South Africa, and it was that opinion and not the opinion of the African majority that mattered in terms of how we viewed him.

Everybody professes to love Nelson Mandela now, but the irony is that that same level of concern and lobbying and support by students, churches, and concerned citizens that helped him win his release would today, under these new regulations, have landed us all in jail. Like Nelson Mandela, even Dr. King’s detractors are forced to honor him even as they work to undo the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, to which he gave his life.

I would like to point out something that you already know, that Dr. King was a man of deep conviction who was not afraid to speak his truth. That meant of course there were times when he didn’t seem to make anybody happy. He challenges us even now to look at, and to embrace, the totality of his work, his beliefs, his vision, the totality of who he was as an evolving human being, a human being who was as flawed as the least of us. Some of us are happy to talk about his social activism and his opposition to the war in Vietnam without wanting to deal with his absolute belief in God or the fact that the teachings of Jesus Christ provided a spiritual grounding out of which both his social activism and his pacifism emerged.

On the other hand, there are many of us who only want to deal with him as a man of the cloth, devoid of any commitment to social justice. His words are instructive when he says that peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice. His words are instructive when he says, “As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich even if I have a billion dollars. As long as there is disease, the diseases are rampant and millions of people in the world cannot expect to live more than 28 or 30 years, I can never be totally healthy, even if I just got a good checkup at the Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made, no individual is a nation, no nation can stand out boasting of being independent, we are all interdependent.”

I would like to close by reminding us that part of the strength of Dr. King’s vision revolves around the unconditional love and the faith that he had in us. His absolute and unconditional faith in the collective moral will of organized collective people. In honoring and celebrating the dream, I believe that all of us must find the Martin within us, must find the Dr. King within ourselves. In doing so, we become not one, but many. Each of us must decide in the fire of our own heart, relying on the greatest guidance, how we respond to the highest dictates of our conscience.

He taught us not to be afraid to stand alone, not to shy away from being the lone dissenting voice, if that is what our personal sense of morality and conscience dictates. He left us an important example of what it means to be of service. He says an individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know how to play the piano to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart and soul of grace and a soul generated by love to serve. When we find it within ourselves to be of service, we honor the best of who we are, and the best of Dr. King’s dream for us. Dr. King’s legacy is ours to claim, it is ours to own. I believe that it is the gift of his words and his vision, and the incredible legacy that he has left us. In short, he left us with a mirror in which to better understand our highest reflection. It is by looking in that mirror and claiming the best and most compassionate parts of ourselves that we honor Dr. King, and keep his dream alive.

Thank you.