Martin Luther King will be honored today throughout America as a champion of racial justice and racial harmony. That is a pivotal legacy for the United States of America, which for 87 long years was built on the lawful enslavement of one race by another, and for another century practiced the lawful Apartheid of Jim Crow.
But he was not the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize only because of his work on civil rights and integration. He was also a profound thinker in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi on peace. Not peace in the abstract, but peace as a practical political tool. Not only peace as a social movement but peace as a method in international relations.
King critiqued the typical use of "peace" by politicians as a distant ideal toward which they are working, even while they bomb and massacre and slaughter. In his Christmas Sermon, December 24, 1967, King made this point:
' And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.
What is the problem?
They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.
We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.
All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.' | 