Hallo,
am 4. April wurde Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee
ermordet. Ein Jahr zuvor hatte er in New Yorks Riverside Church am 4.
April 1967 seine berühmte „Beyond Vietnam“ Rede gehalten, in der er den
Krieg und Rassismus der US Regierung scharf angegriffen hatte.
Mumia nahm am 4. April 2013 eine Rede für die Gedenkveranstaltung in der
Riverside Church unter dem Titel „Honoring the Radical MLK“ auf, welche
als Tonbeitrag auf der Veranstaltung abgespielt wurde und hier im
original zu hören ist:
http://www.prisonradio.org/media/audio/mumia/martin-memory-and-life-413-mumia-abu-jamal-speech
Es folgt die Transkription:
Martin: In Memory and In Life
I come today to praise Dr. Martin Luther King not to berate him, for
though he has become in our modern life perhaps America’s only
indigenous saint, it is useful to remember how utterly bedeviled he was
in his final years of life, hounded as he was by the forces of the
state. It is worthy for us to recall that the highest levels of
government taped Dr. King’s phone calls, monitored the privacy of his
hotel rooms, steamed open his mail, and assigned anonymous informants to
his every move. What we have forgotten in this era is how the second
highest official in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one William
Sullivan, wrote in a now notorious memo that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King was „the most dangerous Negro in America.“
How was he so?
You, of all people, the congregation at The Riverside Church should know
best, for it was here at Riverside’s historic pulpit that Dr. King spake
the words that, in FBI parlance made him a „marked“ man. Here he called
his nation, the United States of America, „the greatest purveyor of
violence on earth,“ and he condemned „militarism, racism, and materialism.“
King felt common cause with the peasants of Vietnam who were being
bombed by the most powerful military in the world. To King, there was
something not just unChristian, but unseemly, when the wealthiest nation
on earth unleashed an unprecedented level of violence on an industrially
underdeveloped, agricultural society such as Vietnam. To King, follower
of a poor Jewish carpenter, the worship of wealth amidst immense poverty
in America deeply troubled him.
This is why the Reverend was marked by the state as „dangerous,“ a
socialist, and a radical. This is why his fair-weather friends departed
him and denounced him in his greatest hour of need. Martin Luther King
was an adversary of the military industrial complex and the mammoth
business interests that support it. . This is why, like the crucified
Jesus, state power marked him, quashed his voice, and gave him up to a
violent death.
But King did not oppose war, materialism or racism purely out of
ideological motivations. As a man and a child of God he felt these
things cheapened man’s relationship with man and degraded the divine
principle of life itself. He saw the dynamic of men fighting, bombing
and killing other men, women and children as the ultimate sacrilege.
King felt the pain of Vietnam because he truly believed in a beloved
community…one without borders.
For these principled impulses and for his words he breathed his last,
one-year-to-the-day of his Riverside address.
As we gather to remember Martin Luther King, we must ponder what this
towering figure would say about the behemoth of modern day mass
incarceration, of stop and frisk, of the death penalty, of the
bewildering violence of drones, and of the continuing hunger for wars
abroad in our name.
We know that the true Martin Luther King does not dwell in statues, in
ghetto streets bearing his name, or in schools where children are
violated daily in buildings erected in his name. His true spirit dwells
with the least of these, in communities of the poor worldwide, in
ghettoes north and south, and, yes, even in prisons.
In the revolutionary spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, we remember him
as he was, not as he has since become.
I thank you all.
From Imprisoned Nation this is,
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Mit solidarischen Grüßen