{"id":2822,"date":"2018-01-11T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2018-01-11T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=2822"},"modified":"2018-01-11T06:00:48","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T11:00:48","slug":"robert-gooding-williams-the-riverside-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/robert-gooding-williams-the-riverside-event\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Gooding-Williams | The Riverside Event"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Robert Gooding-Williams<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I initially began thinking about my contribution to this week\u2019s Uprising 8\/13<\/a> event, I happened to be at home, recovering from back surgery and watching TV.\u00a0 One of the things I watched, that I binged watched, was the Ken Burns\/Lynn Novick Vietnam War series, and it will come as no surprise that I was especially interested to see how the Novick\/Burns documentary treated Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s speech \u201cBeyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it turns out, the Burns\u2019s and Novick\u2019s film completely omits to discuss the content of King\u2019s speech; rather it folds a few references to King into a extended discussion of Dr. Benjamin\u2019s Spock\u2019s opposition to the war.<\/p>\n

According to Peter Coyote\u2019s voice-over, Spock wrote the preface \u201cto an article in the leftist magazine Ramparts on the impact of American napalm on South Vietnamese children.\u201d\u00a0 King had agonized over the war for months, but had been reluctant to break with Lyndon Johnson.\u00a0 But after reading Spock\u2019s preface, Coyote tells us, King could \u201cno longer stay silent.\u201d\u00a0 No sooner has Coyote uttered these words than the scene shifts to an image of King speaking at Riverside Church, after which we see him with Spock 11 days later, participating in a march against the war organized by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Sandwiching King\u2019s Riverside speech between his reading of Spock and his marching with Spock, Burns and Novick ignore the central point of the speech, which was to connect King\u2019s earlier career, his civil rights activism, to his opposition to the war.\u00a0 In King\u2019s own words, \u201cto state clearly\u2026why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church\u2014the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate\u2014leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burns\u2019s and Novick\u2019s omission of the content of King\u2019s speech points to a general flaw in their emotionally gripping film: namely, its disposition to portray the war as a self-contained drama, ultimately a tragedy, that the soundtrack of its final moments, the Beatles\u2019 \u201cLet It Be,\u201d encourages us to mourn and let go without further interrogation.\u00a0 In contrast, King demanded that we look \u201cbeyond Vietnam\u201d to the \u201cdeeper malady\u201d in the American spirit of which the Vietnam war was a symptom: \u201cwhen machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my Uprising 8\/13 remarks, I will examine the philosophical content of the commitment that led King along the path from Dexter Avenue and the Montgomery Bus Boycott to Riverside Church and the anti-War movement.\u00a0 Specifically, I will argue that \u201cBeyond Vietnam\u201d extends to the topic of the Vietnam War two ideas that had shaped King\u2019s commitment for years; two ideas that explain why the leader of the Bus Boycott and the author of \u201cLetter from Birmingham Jail\u201d would feel obliged to come to the sanctuary of Riverside Church and declare that the time to break silence about the War was \u201cnow.\u201d The first is the idea of human dignity.\u00a0 The second is the idea that mistaken views of time can deceive us into underestimating the importance of moral agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Robert Gooding-Williams When I initially began thinking about my contribution to this week\u2019s Uprising 8\/13 event, I happened to be at home, recovering from back surgery and watching TV.\u00a0 One of the things I watched, that I binged watched, was… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38973],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-8-13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}