Historian: Vincent Harding (1931-2014)

[TexasTowelie]

"For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man."
-- Vincent Harding, who wrote MLK's 1967 anti-Vietnam War speech, to the National Catholic Reporter in 1997.

No, the name of Dr. Harding, who died from an aneurysm on Tuesday at 83, wasn't familiar to me. It's a shame that an obituary has to be the way we learn about people we should have know about, but better late than never.

In his Washington Post obit, Matt Schudel describes Dr. Harding as "a historian who was an influential behind-the-scenes figure during the civil rights movement and who wrote a controversial speech for Martin Luther King Jr. that condemned the war in Vietnam." That speech, Matt says later, "was seen as bringing together the two major tides of protest in the 1960s: civil rights and the antiwar movement."

Here's how Matt chronicles the speech that, nearly 50 years later, still provided the hook for its author's obit:

Dr. Harding, who said his service in the Army made him a dedicated pacifist, was a lay minister in Chicago when he began working for the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He moved to Atlanta in 1961, settling around the corner from King’s family.

Soon afterward, Dr. Harding and his wife founded the Mennonite House, one of the South’s first interracial gathering places for proponents of civil rights.

While teaching at Atlanta’s Spelman College in the mid-1960s, Dr. Harding began to explore the moral implications of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He wrote a letter to King and other civil rights leaders outlining a critical stance toward the war, then composed a speech for King that addressed Vietnam in the context of civil rights.

King delivered the speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis. The speech, often called “A Time to Break Silence,” was little changed from Dr. Harding’s original draft.

“A time comes when silence is betrayal,” King said. “And that time has come for us in Vietnam.”

He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and said it was morally indefensible to send African American troops to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

King concluded that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

An overflow crowd of 3,000 gave King a standing ovation, but his message was not well received in other circles. A New York Times editorial criticized King’s views, and the NAACP called the speech a “serious tactical error.”

Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.), who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech “could border a bit on treason.”

- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/05/vincent-harding-1931-2014.html#sthash.2drUFHZ8.D1Z2PZv9.dpuf

[2naSalit]

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