How Vipassana Meditation influenced Martin Luther King. Jr.
To this day, we continue to get feedback from the tremendous interview that Clyde Ford graced us with. An anti-racism trainer who led sessions for teachers and old students in the vipassana tradition of S.N. Goenka, he spoke eloquently about the intersection between spiritual liberation and social justice, while also honestly addressing the organization’s failure at reaching communities of color. In the following excerpt, he describes how the speechwriter for Martin Luther King, Jr. was influenced by his vipassana meditation practice.
“I learned about what it means to live a life that is also deeply spiritual [and] at the same time is deeply committed to social justice.”
“What [and who] has been important to me, and I think this was a surprise to many of the people at the training, is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speechwriter, my dear friend, my teacher, my mentor, the late Dr. Vincent Harding, the man who actually wrote King’s 1967, Riverside Church, New York City speech, the beyond-Vietnam speech, the speech that probably more than anything marked King as someone who had stepped outside of simply engagement with the causes of the South, moving into the anti-war movement. [This was the speech that] some people said [had] set him up for his assassination later.
This powerful speech came from a man, again, Vincent Harding, who was a Vipassanā meditator, who sat 10-day courses, who actually led his students to say, ‘Hey, I think you would really benefit from doing a 10-day sit!’ And some of them actually went on to do more than 10-day sits. And so, when I look back at that, and again, Vincent was a dear friend, during his life, someone who took me under his wings, and I learned about what it means to live a life that is also deeply spiritual [and] at the same time is deeply committed to social justice.
So that, to me, is a really clear example, not just in general of using spirituality in terms of social justice, but specifically of Vipassanā, taught by S. N. Goenka in this case, as the basis for the spiritual underpinnings that allow you to continue the work that Vincent was doing in the world. And Vincent's work is just tremendous - to be the person who wrote the words that King delivered - [it] speaks in a very beautiful way about what is possible when somebody has these spiritual teachings beneath them.
Now, the other the other thing is, there's a long tradition, beyond just Buddhism, of social justice movements in the United States, deeply connected with Eastern spiritual traditions. And I don't know how much of that I remember getting into in that presentation for the Vipassanā community. But for others that I've spoken to about this connection, that has been important, to understand that social justice and spiritual practice don't have to be separated. And the importance of bringing one’s spiritual understanding to the work of social justice can be tremendous in terms of what it can do to give you a balanced way of going about tackling some of the most challenging issues in our culture in our society today.”