Service Remembers Dr. King

A crowd of mixed ages and races packed Memorial Church Friday afternoon to remember the life of Martin Luther King Jr., who would have been 60 years old this year.

A BSA member read from the Bible, a representative of Harvard/Radcliffe Hillel read a passage in Hebrew and Professor of Comparative Religion Diana L. Eck offered prayers along with a secular exhortation to keep working for greater justice.

Between speakers, Assistant Dean for Administration Lawrence Watson, of the Graduate School of Design, led his increasingly emotional audience in hymns augmented by rhythmic clapping.

Professor of Law Derrick A. Bell, who gave the central speech in the service, said King was "hated, feared and finally killed because he spoke in prophetic terms" against the Vietnam war and against the United States' "failure to continue its war against poverty and inequality at home."

"By the end of his life," Bell said, "Martin King recognized that the real challenge facing Black Americans was broadening the Constitution's protection to encompass the sacrosanct area of economic rights."

Urging his audience to fight worsening national racism, Bell questioned whether the United States had come very far since the Constitution confirmed the legality of slavery.

In a science fiction story, Bell asked whether white Americans living in a ruined world would choose to restore their economy and natural resources in return for enslaving their Black neighbors to extraterrestials. In Bell's scenario, Black Americans allowed a white-controlled constitutional convention to disenfranchise them, overriding their protests in the name of due process and majority rule.

Bell said Black student audiences did not find his story unrealistic. In fact, he argued that in the recent presidential election, both political parties showed a racism similar in kind if not in degree to that of the whites in the story.

Charging that the Democrats treated Black supporters as though they were dispensable, Bell said, "As a result, [Democratic leaders] were neither morally nor tactically ready for the blatant racism in the Republican campaign."

"Thus, 1988 marked the year when the two major American political parties signaled a readiness--differing only in degree from that of the Constitution's framers--to sacrifice the rights of Blacks in order to advance the political interests and alleviate the security concerns of whites," he said.