Dear Editor i know limit is 5,000 words. Hope you can allow some 200 over just this time. Huge list all black celebrities and important personages - that though most will scan tried not to leave anyone out. Appreciatively, jay.
At the Lorraine Motel, just before King was shotOwner: intenteffect
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Wow, what a surprise! An awards presentation telecast really worth listening to. On the last Sunday of 2013, some of the best jazz musicians in the world performed Carlos Santana's and Herbie Hancock's hit recordings to their composers obvious delight as Herbie and Carlos sat next to the President of the United States looking on. This was followed by a super fine and thrilling well sung and beautifully staged Triumphant Scene from Giuseppe Verdi's Opera Aida, as the TV lens captured the emotion in Met soprano Martina Arroyo's joyful facial expressions. All three artists were among this years recipients of the Annual Kennedy Center Honors for the Performing Arts.
As personal fate would have it, your musician author crossed paths with these three giant celebrities in circumstances that for me relate to Martin Luther King Jr.' now long betrayed and forgotten condemnation of "US atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents."
A few years later I was introduced to Carlos Santana by a mutual friend who had written a peace cantata staring Carlos' guitar playing and United Nations guru Swami Sri Chin Moi. Carlos was a disciple of guru Swami Sri Chin Moi. and would at that time usually be dressed all in white, a sign among Sri Chin Moi's disciples of purity of mind. Divadip Carlos Santana appears in spiritual white dress on jackets of his early CD's. His guru had gone on soulfully meditating during evenings sessions at the UN, throughout the relentless US war on the Vietnamese and Laotians.
Ten years earlier I had listened from my chair in the brass section of the Casals Festival Orchestra to Martina Arroyo sing the Verdi Requiem Mass, along with Placido Domingo, Zubin Mehta conducting.
Looking back from the perspective of today's unceasing programed genocide, I can't help but recall that in each of my encounters with these three music giants, great music was accompanying sorrow for genocidal acts of violence. That Verdi mass Arroyo sang in '72, was dedicated to sixteen Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims who had just died in a terrorist attack at a Tel Aviv airport, and I had just arrived from performing with the Zagreb Philharmonic in a Yugoslavia, whose embassies were being bombed by fascist Croatian groups (CIA support assumed [1]).
I had come into contact with these three great musicians during spiritual music responses to insane violence in the world. I imagine all three of them must of had their own share of less than sane personal experiences growing up Black, Latino or half-Black-half-Latina during the racial violence right up through the sixties.
These three simpatico hero musicians had become internationally famous about the same time that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. went international with his campaign for justice for non-whites overseas as well as in the United States emphasizing that social progress at home was hopelessly impossible while Americans were denying the very right to live to millions of the poor in countries overseas. [2]
King was vilified in all of corporate media and shot dead within the year. During that 1968, when a mainstream media disparaged King was silenced with a bullet to his head, Martina, after singing in Europe's opera houses, was being hailed as the first black person to have ever portrayed a role in Wagner's Opera Lohengrin , not just at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, but in all of opera history. One year after King's assassination, Hancock already an internationally popular artist, dedicated, with Miles Davis, a mournful jazz album "The Prisoner" to the slain Martin Luther King. In the same year Santana brought Latin Rock Fusion to Woodstock, and his first album with CBS Records "Evil Ways' sold more than 4 million copies.
After the frightening week of riots and terrible loss of life with police firing on wild destructive demonstrations in dozens of cities across the nation in response to King's assassination, one imagines the white establishment began to think it better to rehabilitate the name of Martin Luther King Jr.; raise King not only up to having been a good American, but up to celebrity and national hero status in order to both pacify black anger and at the same time get King's image as a revolutionary off the streets and make it easier to bury King's bad for business as usual, condemnation of America's "atrocity wars and covert genocide on three continents in maintenance of unjust predatory investments"
King's world shaking outcry, "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own government" [2] became for the ensuing forty-four years taboo to mention in America's owned CIA fed conglomerate owned mainstream media. The many Black Baptist churches, which had not concurred in condemning the war in Vietnam, had little problem with going along with the establishment blackout of the sermon Beyond Vietnam a Time to Break Silence which had made headlines in every newspaper around the world the next day.
I feel sure that Hancock, Santana and Arroyo in private conversation have talked about King having America and Americans, including King himself, responsible for the atrocities on three continents for predatory investments, about King accusing Americans being fully capable of the non-participation, non-support, non-acquiescence and conscientious objection that would make such atrocity wars unacceptable and inoperable. [2]
However, this peoples historian of a white colonialism that for centuries savagely occupied and mercilessly plundered wealthier civilizations (and is still very much alive), has been unable to locate a record of any attempt by any of America's beloved African American celebrities, to break this near half-century boycott of King's blistering condemnation of US wars in former colonies on three continents.
For four decades, America's famed Black celebrities, somehow, either out of fear or lack of interest, have cooperated by their silence with America's total blackout of Martin Luther King's anguished cry of "silence is betrayal!" and have remained silent, mercilessly silent, while non-white men, women and children by the millions have perished in harms way of Americans in uniform, or incognito in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Congo, Cuba, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran (Reagan funding aiding arming Saddam Hussein's eight year invasion thereof), Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria and causing immense suffering and death by overthrowing or seeking to overthrow governments in almost every country in Latin America and many elsewhere in the world.
America's black celebrities and government officials are even silent when candidates during election campaigns are hailed in their ads and in mainstream media as heroes!! That could not happen if Americans knew what King cried out about the war in Vietnam, which continued for eight genocidal years after his assassination, "They languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers."
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops." We have cooperated in the crushing in the crushing Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men."[2]
Black leaders in all areas of America society have helped America and the world to forget the powerful last teaching of the politically mature King. In spite of careful research, have not been able to find one African American celebrity's public effort to redress the cruel blackout of King's condemnation of America's genocidal predatory wars on the poor non-white and formerly colonially enslaved populations overseas.
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