photo by lindsey kolb At EMU, Vincent Harding explained that being “we, the people” means being active as citizens because, in the absence of this, our leaders will always be happy to step in and take things in self-serving directions.
VINCENT HARDING
Close friend of MLK encourages struggle for ‘true democracy’ MORE THAN 50 YEARS after his first MLK’S STANCE AGAINST visit to campus, social activist and scholar VIETNAM WAR Vincent Harding returned to EMU on In the ’60s, Harding worked closely Feb. 26 and 27, 2014, where he urged with King and other Civil Rights packed audiences to engage fully in the leaders, playing important behindstruggle to build a real participatory the-scenes roles in the movements to democracy based on justice, equality, challenge segregation in Albany, Ga., and sustainability and spiritual fulfillment, Birmingham, Ala. Harding also drafted rather than on militarism, materialism King’s famous and highly controversial and racism – or indeed on any form of speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to discrimination. Break Silence,” delivered in New York Harding and his late wife, Rosemarie, City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to were close friends and colleagues of Mar- the day before King’s assassination. tin Luther King Jr., during an era when In it King called for the U.S. to the Hardings were active members of a “undergo a radical revolution of values,” Mennonite church. adding: “When machines and computers, “I am absolutely obsessed with the profit and property rights are considered question of how you build a deep demore important than people, the giant mocracy in this country,” said Harding, triplets of racism, materialism, and miliwho played an active leadership role tarism are incapable of being conquered.” during the civil rights movement and King also explicitly linked capitalistic continues to work toward a more just, socio-economic practices to the absence participatory society through his nonof “fairness and justice” both at home profit organization, Veterans of Hope. and abroad. These passages – evocative He lives in Denver, Colo., where he was of current questions regarding the U.S.’s a professor of religion and social transrole in Iraq and Afghanistan – show the formation at the Iliff School of Theology strong stance and unequivocal language from 1981 until his retirement in 2004. in that Harding/King speech: 62 | crossroads | spring 2014
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. 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.” . . . A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences 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.