Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Last Years

[martingale]

Perhaps the reason may be that King, in his last years, developed a class-based analysis of American society and became an opponent of U.S. imperialism:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid...4/01/15/1710221 (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/15/1710221)

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Today, January 15, is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. He was born in 1929. He would be 75 years old today.
It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of his birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
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The speech where King calls the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" can be found here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm

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A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense (or is it offense) than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
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[SonofRage]

Here's a great Dr. King quote:



"We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with capitalism . . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism."

[Hampton]

It would have been intresting to see how the Poor People's Campaign worked out. Good thing Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy continued it after he died. Whoops! nevermind.

[j.guevara]

well that makes him a greater threat to those in power, what do you guys think about his assassination? believe the mainstream explanation?

[Marxist in Nebraska]

King was a figure, a leader in U.S. history too big for the Establishment to pretend never existed.

If the Establishment cannot erase a progressive, they move next to co-opt him or her. King's belief in non-violence is useful and demand for civil rights is no longer controversial, so it is useful to channel the memory of King into a non-violent champion of civil rights.

That King championed a more radical, socialist vision in his final years is an inconvenient fact. Thus, it is forgotten. This is not surprising, since it has been done before: Helen Keller is a popular, mythical figure in our grade schools. The brave girl who overcame blindness, a symbol... you too, can overcome any obstacle.

Of course, the schoolbooks forget about Helen about the time she reaches adulthood. Why? Keller looked into the causes of blindness... she found that the poor were terribly overrepresented among the blind. She became a socialist, and kept a Soviet flag on her desk after the Bolsheviks came to power there.