photos from the edge 26 - OAKLAND'S BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN
Honoring the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Photographs by David Bacon
Every year in Oakland parents and teachers organize a children's village as part of the celebration of the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to help their children understand our history of struggle for equality and rights. Kids will be kids, though, and easily move from chalking sidewalks to sliding down the bannister into the amphitheater. One parent said to me, "They're who it's all really for, isn't it? I'm not just fighting against the deportations and the terror. It's for the better world we want for all of these kids."
These photographs honor the words of Dr. King at Riverside Church, spoken on April 4, 1967, over half a century ago. Some of those words follow the photographs.
I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men -- for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
The U.S. will never fulfill a commitment to ending poverty so long as it is addicted to war, he charges:
I knew that 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 demonic, destructive suction tube.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just."
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke the truth, and this is why we fought for many years to have his birthday made a national holiday, so that we would listen to these words, honor their courage and act on them. No edict from an illegitimate administration in Washington can rob these words of their truth and power.
