My Father's Posts

I returned home last Sunday, inspired, and stirred after a trip to North Vietnam. During the time I was there, enjoying the lush landscape, the rich history, the value of lasting friendships and the resilience of the Vietnamese people, the question that kept coming back to me was “What was the point of the Vietnam War?” (By the way, the Vietnamese refer to it as the “American War.”)

My return to the U.S. coincided with the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s courageous speech “Beyond Vietnam,” which he delivered at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, exactly 365 days before he was assassinated. It was courageous because in speaking out against the war, many – from the White House to the black civil rights establishment – denounced King for veering off script. But King’s point was that injustice at home and military aggression in Southeast Asia were morally intertwined.

Here’s an excerpt:

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Journalist and author Tavis Smiley visited the campus of Stanford University on April 4 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of King’s speech. The program included a screening of his 2010 PBS documentary “A Call to Conscience,” which provided a political context for King’s anti-Vietnam speech in 1967. Scholars and activists who lent their voices to that documentary included Marian Wright Edelman, Harry Belafonte, Cornell West, Clayborne Carson, Clarence B. Jones, Susannah Heschel and the late Vincent Harding. Smiley threw a bit of shade on former President Barack Obama, who acknowledged in a clip of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that he owed his political ascendence to King’s nonviolent movement, but that as commander-in-chief, he could not rule out the use of force. “Make no mistake, evil does exist in the world,” Obama said.

We were reminded of such evil this week after Syria launched another brutal chemical attack against its own people and President Donald Trump responded with a bombing raid.

These are unsettling times, but my trip to Vietnam reminded me that human beings have a capacity for unspeakable cruelty but also, yes, the audacity to hope.

But King warned us from the pulpit at Riverside Church 50 years ago of the “fierce urgency of now.”

I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Blown away and humbled. The first piece of fiction I’ve ever gotten published wins an award. The story is published here.

I was going to watch the OWN Network’s Greenleaf, no matter what, since my nephew Lamman Rucker is a principal character. The fact that Keith David and Lynn Whitfield star in it too and Oprah Winfrey is an executive producer and has a recurring role were attractions.

That writer and producer Craig Wright, whose credits include Lost and Six Feet Under gave the show some cred for me.

After watching the premier last night, though, what is most intriguing in my mind is that the story about a Tennessee megachurch, and an uber wealthy black family, centers around Grace Greenleaf, a disillusioned preacher prodigy, prodigal daughter, and (yay!) a truth-seeking journalist. She seems to be the only one, aside from her Auntie Mavis, played by Winfrey, who is interested in getting to the bottom of her sister Faith’s death. She and Mavis are the only ones willing to confront the open secret that a family member is a sexual predator.

Until Spotlight, the Academy Award-winning  film based on the true story of my former Boston Globe colleagues who uncovered a massive international scandal about child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and the complicity of the Catholic Church, I hadn’t seen a movie or television show that portrayed journalism in a way that rang true.

I’m counting on Oprah, a journalist at her core and a victim of sexual abuse herself to get it right. And in the meantime, I’ll be watching it as a proud auntie too.

In his New York Age column in 1934, my father wrote, “President Roosevelt in an address to more than 50,000 persons on Memorial Day, denounced three groups as those capable of retarding the country’s progress.”

He then quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech delivered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on May 30, 1934, titled “The Selfishness of Sectionalism Has No Place in Our National Life.”

 “These groups are those who seek to stir up political animosity or to build political advantage by the distortion of facts; those who, by declining to follow the rules of the game, seek to gain an unfair advantage over those who are willing to live up to the rules of the game; and those few who, because they have never been willing to take an interest in their fellow Americans, dwell inside of their own narrow spheres and still represent the selfishness of sectionalism which has no place in our national life.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt

My father continued: “These groups, optimistically observes the President, ‘grow less in importance with the growth of a clearer understanding of our purpose on the part of an overwhelming majority.’

“Obviously, Negroes might wish they could subscribe to the Chief Executive’s optimism, but existing conditions are hardly conducive to such. With unyielding prejudice of the South not content with its morbid environment but rearing its head in the allegedly democratic North, Negroes fail to observe to an appreciable extent the decline of those whites who represent the ‘selfishness of sectionalism.’” Ebenezer Ray

Ebenezer used FDR’s words as a jumping off point to talk about just why black Americans might be less optimistic than their president. He cited as examples the barring of blacks from the House Restaurant in Washington, DC. and the refusal of Blumstein’s, the largest department store in Harlem in his day, to hire “Negro” clerks, despite the fact that 75 percent of their patronage was from blacks.

This column came up while I was searching my father’s writings for some Memorial Day wisdom.

Things have changed. Many of those who have witnessed an African American family residing in the White House for the past eight years might find it hard to imagine that black folks were once barred from eating in the House of Representatives dining room.

Harlem now has Magic Johnson movie theaters, Starbucks and a Whole Foods, who hire plenty of black folks and other people of color, even as many of those workers are being priced out.  Earlier this week, Michael Henry Adams, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, titled, “The End of Black Harlem,” in which he examines the gentrification that has rendered this cultural Mecca increasingly unaffordable to those who have made it their home for decades.

U.S. President Barack Obama, right, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shake hands fter laying wreaths at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, western, Japan, Friday, May 27, 2016. Obama on Friday became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site of the world’s first atomic bomb attack, bringing global attention both to survivors and to his unfulfilled vision of a world without nuclear weapons. (Kimimasa Mayama/Pool Photo via AP)

But some themes in Roosevelt’s Memorial Day speech, are frighteningly resonant. Far from Americans gaining a “clearer understanding of our purpose,” as the president put it, those who represent “the selfishness of sectionalism” appear to be gaining ground. The presumptive Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump, epitomizes those who “seek to stir up political animosity or to build advantage by the distortion of facts,” while his supporters “dwell inside of their own narrow spheres.”

Ebenezer likely thought FDR’s speech did not, in today’s parlance, “go hard enough.”  But perhaps the president was trying to appeal to his country’s better nature.

That’s what presidents do.

On Friday, President Barack Obama laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and delivered a speech reflecting on the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 at the end of World War II.

“We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell,” Obama said.  “We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow.”

Obama went on to say: “My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family –  that is the story that we all must tell.” Barack Obama

We must not surrender our ideals to those who distort facts to gain unfair political advantage or  dwell inside their own spheres.