Dr. King, Non-Violence,And U.S. Policy Today
Moderator, Dennis Speed:
Our next speaker was in charge, as Deputy Attorney General, of the security in
1965, fifty years ago, for the Selma-to-Montgomery March, the third march, which actually got to Montgomery.
And I understand that he got a call from Dr.Martin Luther King after [King] gave his speech here [at Riverside Church], in 1967, because Dr. King was very concerned that the press would try to distort what he had to say, and he wanted to say. And he wanted to make sure that he had at least one reliable legal representative who would not misrepresent what his intentthat day was.
Besides those particular distinctions, he’s always stood for justice; matter of fact, he stood for justice in the case of Lyndon LaRouche, as many of you here know.
And he stood for justice over and over, all over the world. It’s always an honor to have him speak, and he can only be here for a few minutes with us today, so I’d like to introduce the former Attorney General of the United States, Ramsey Clark.
Ramsey Clark:
In his speech in this church in 1967, I guess it was—and I’ll correct myself if I search and find otherwise—Dr. King said some words that hurt him deeply and personally, but he felt had to be said, and they were these: “The greatest purveyor of violence
on Earth, is my own country.”
Conditions haven’t changed globally in that particular, I’m afraid. We remain thegreatest purveyor of violence on Earth. We glorify its powerand ignore its pity. Just look atour entertainment, our war films, and our crime films, and it’s like we’ve got a love
affair with violence.
On-Site in Alabama.
The first night out, I was sent down to Montgomery, Ala., about four days before
the march started. I was Deputy Attorney General at the time,
which is, on the organization chart, the second highest-ranking officer in the [Justice]
Department; And my assignment was to protect the order of a U.S. Federal judge who prescribed the fashion in which people could march from Selma to Montgomery, along a public highway. It was litigated for quite a while and came up with the solution that 50
people could be chosen and march two abreast. If you see the movie Selma, which I recommend, it’s about the courage and beauty of the people there who were tired
of the sheriff who liked to walk his horses over their bodies—a man named [Jim] Clark. No relation that I’m aware of! If there is, I disclaim it now. Not that had I been in his shoes, I might not have been the same.
But the march was an interesting occasion, a study in the character, the moral character, of our society.
TheFBI, which always requires someone who wants to know the truth to be carefully observed in his statements, told me that there were 1,200 men who had served lengthy convictions in prison for white racist crime against African-Americans, who had come to this Selma-Montgomery area—1,200.
They were out of prison now, and they had rifles on the rack on the backof the cabin of their pickup trucks.
And the Bureau,whose assumptions I don’tusually follow, was saying they intended to use those rifles if they got a chance.
But we had Border Patrol and U.S. Marshals, and to the extent wecould rely on them, some state and local agents and Army standing by—for 50 people to do under court order, which was litigated for about a year and a half, before you could undertake the project in a freesociety, to do something no-one in his right mind wouldwant to do, unless someone dared them to, and that is, walk from Selma to Montgomery.
A Beautiful Sight
And the fear was palpable. The first night, we got across the bridge. I nearly lost my job, because I was standing on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
by a Border Patrol car.
I was standing by this Border Patrol car, with anopen mic; there were about six other Border Patrol cars that were stationed all around so we could talk to each other immediately.
And they started to cross thebridge, and I made the enforcement error of saying, “Here they come, isn’t it beautiful?” This was Sunday [March 21]—Monday morning the New York Times headline is: Deputy Attorney General down there to be neutral—ha-ha—and protect the marchers from the public and the public from the marchers, at the point
at which the marchers started over the
bridge, said, “Look at that, isn’t it beautiful?”—for which some of my superiors were uncomplimentaryabout my verbiage. But it was beautiful.
And the first night, we got out—I talked to the farmer myself; we’d leased some land. We’d pay himsome money so we could stay on his land, because we didn’t want to have some conflict about, “Hey, get off my property.” There weren’t other places that were as convenient.
I forgot what I paid him, but maybe $500,for 50 people to spend the night on his land, on the ground; most of them had sleeping bags and something like that. We got there, and he said, “Can’t do it. You can’t come on my land. I’ve been threatened.” But it
was getting to be dark, and I’d been up and down that road so many times, I knew every foot of it, and there was a state park—it wasn’t a mile and a half or two
miles further down the road, so we just went on down there. And I set up sentries to march around the camp as we set up some four-foot side-wall Army tents, and had sleeping bags for the 50.
And we marched on.
It’s hard to believe, the palpable fear of violence and the actuality of risk. I have no idea of whether there were really 1,200 men with felony convictions for racist violence, all white, all the men that were there with their guns on racks behind them, most of them in pickups. They were there and had the will to shoot.
But I was flying a plane back that Friday, after we’d gotten to Montgomery, and all
the speechifying had gone on in front the Capitol. and the pilot came back and said, “I got a phone message for you.” So I went up to thecockpit and listened. They said that a woman had been killed on the way back to Selma; she was taking some of the people who had come over for the march from Selma, that lived in Selma, wanted to go home, back; and was shot and killed.
So we turned the plane around, flew back to Montgomery, and tried to see what we could do to show our sorrow and prevent further violence, under a pretty tense situation, still.
Dr. King’s spirit will prevail for societies, not just ours, in the spirits of many, many people, for as long as our form of communication endures.
We can hardly say that we’ve purged, or even meaningfully addressed, the capacity for violence that remains in our character.
All you got to do is, look at the military budget. We call it “defense,” butit’s all pointing guns against other people in other places!
So we’re “defending” on foreign shores, about as far away as you can get sometimes, and be on the same globe.
Our military budget is still a danger to life on the planet. It’s a measure of the moral worth of our people; our research and development for better ways of killing is as high was it ever was, as if we don’t have enough ways now, to destroy life on the planet.
We obviously do.
But if we want peace on Earth, we, the people, have to stand up and say, “Enough!” We want to demilitarize our country and demilitarize the world. And yet, as it was when Dr. King spoke those words, in this church, we remain the “greatest purveyors of violence on Earth.”
And we can overcome that. It’s a matter of will:
Until we address it, we may be singing good songs, but we’re not marching the road toward disarmament.
And the world daily becomes more dangerous.
Entire Transcript Here
So Is anyone going to see the movie?
