Jesse's Café Américain: Those Who Murder the the Prophets and the Innocent, Thinking They Will Not Be Judged

"And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."

Martin Luther King, A Time to Break the Silence, Riverside Church, 4 April 1967

"It is a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced.

God has a way of standing before the nations with judgement, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America 'You are too arrogant! If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power! And I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still, and know that I am God.'"

Martin Luther King, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam, Riverside Church, 30 April 1967

"Wherever you are going this morning, my friends, show the world that you're going with truth. You are going with justice, you are going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship.

And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow.

But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, But If Not, Ebenezer Baptist Church, 5 November 1967

“Now the problem is not only unemployment. Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income...

If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.”

Martin Luther King, 18 March 1968

"We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place.

But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Martin Luther King, 3 April 1968

The next day, 4 April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, exactly one year to the day after his sermon, A Time To Break the Silence.

The sermons given at Riverside Church in April 1967 began his year long march towards the mountain top, and his murder in Memphis in April of the following year. He was a threat to the moneyed interests, the political establishment, and the captains of industry.

And, some might observe, the message had also been given to the elite in the deaths of John F Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, all of whom favored negotiations over war, and wanted peace rather than endless war.

As it was then, so it is now.

The suppression of speech and the stifling of dissent in the media and the schools has freedom in a deadly grip of money, secrecy, lawlessness, and power.

Hypocrites, their cursed hands dripping with the blood of lawlessness, wars of aggression, and crimes against humanity, thinking that they will not be judged.

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now."

Aaron Bushnell