Dr. King's full dream: dignity for all

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is doing nothing more or less in this area than collective bargaining; bargaining for human dignity, bargaining for decency. He is fighting to redeem the soul of America.” - Jackie Robinson

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. 

He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor  people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have  tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Rioting, as seen by Dr. King

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.


Dr Martin Luther King said this over 50 years ago. Still relevant today.

"I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”

Confrontation is central to human rights movements

With Martin Luther King day coming not long after the death of Nelson Mandela, the fundamental essence of these two heroes has been saccharinized into something that completely misrepresents their struggle and that of their movements.

They both rejected or came to reject violence. But they both recognized that confrontation was essential to any sort of fundamental change. It would've been nice if they could simply have gotten on their knees and pleaded to their masters for basic humanity dignity, as the comfortable chastised them for not doing. But, as King rebuked them in Letter From a Birmingham Jail, this doesn't work in the real world.

Confrontation of injustice - those who tolerated it as much as those who inflicted it directly - was central to these movements and human rights struggles in this country and around the globe. It'd be nice if 'please' alone worked in these situations. But it never does.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Below is my annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day essay. Those who turn Dr. King into some sort of saccharine saint, as being solely about government equality under law for all skin colors, trivialize his struggle. He was about that, but about much more than that. His struggle was about the dignity of human beings, in the broadest sense. This New York Times essay says it best: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.

***

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Below is my annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day essay. Those who turn Dr. King into some sort of saccharine saint, as being solely about government equality under law for all skin colors, trivialize his struggle. He was about that, but about much more than that. His struggle was about the dignity of human beings, in the broadest sense. This New York Times essay says it best: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.

***

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

What Occupy can learn from Dr. King and the civil rights movement

I'm reading this really excellent book called Nixonland: The Rise of the President and the Fracturing of America (more details here). It's a fantastic analysis of the political career of Richard Nixon, who may well be the most brilliantly cynical and manipulative president in American history. The book gives great insight if you want to understand what's behind the 'Tea Party' movement and the right-wing's martyr complex politics in general.

Nixonland points out something interesting and still relevant. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may be a sanitized figure in death but, as I've written about in the past, he was hardly a consensus figure in life.

The strategy of his wing of the civil rights movement was to disturb the (illusion of) peace and draw out the hatred that was really there, but lurking just beneath the surface.

The book also points out that the civil rights movement was adamant in NOT being linked to a particular political party, but rather to an agenda. When some Democrats refused to push, or even obstructed, parts of their agenda, the civil rights movement did not hesitate in encouraging people to not vote for Democrats.

They recognized that threatening to withhold their vote - and being willing to actually do it - was the only real leverage they had on legislators. They refused to reward people who crapped on them. They were about their agenda, not about a particular party.

I wonder if Occupy sympathizers will heed this lesson.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Below is my annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day essay. Those who turn Dr. King into some sort of saccharine saint, as being solely about government equality under law for all skin colors, trivialize his struggle. He was about that, but about much more than that. His struggle was about the dignity of human beings, in the broadest sense. This New York Times essay says it best: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.

***

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Dr. King and the military-industrial complex

On tomorrow's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday, I will repost an essay I wrote a few years ago about Dr. King's real legacy, a legacy that shows him as a much bigger man than the one most Americans. Much like Muhammad Ali, Dr. King is now usually portrayed as a sacharrine figure, with ideas that are largely apolitical and non-controversial. However much like Ali, who famously declared "No VietCong ever called me nigger," the full range of King's beliefs are as controversial today as they were in the late 1960s. Or would be if people actually knew them.

The truth is that while some did indeed hate Dr. King for the color of his skin, many others came to hate him for the content of his character. Many applauded when he preached non-violence in opposition to American apartheid, but made him a hate figure when he expanded that non-violence into opposition to the US aggression against the Vietnamese people and to American militarism more broadly.

But in a poignant coincidence, tomorrow is also the 50th anniversary of Pres. Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, a speech almost entirely devoted to warning against the danger of the 'unwarranted influence' of the military-industrial complex.

He noted that: This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience [in 1961]. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Eisenhower made these observations not as a long-haired, anti-establishment troublemaker but as a widely acclaimed war hero and 'as one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war' first hand.

Sadly, the nation did not heed Pres. Eisenhower's warnings. The military-industrial complex drew stronger and stronger during the 1960s (and continues of course unchallenged to this day). It's against that plundering of resources, both material and human, that Dr. King devoted his latter days to fighting.

Dr. King was about more than legal racial equality

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday weekend, I always like to bring out the divergence between what Dr. King was all about and how he's generally remembered.

Nowadays, the Rev. Dr. King is typically remembered solely for the milquetoast (by today's standards) idea of legal racial equality. As important a first step as that was, the work of him and his colleagues was about much more than that. Much like Muhammad Ali, he's become a sanitized secular public saint stripped of their more meaningful and uncomfortable opinions.

King was also a vocal activist on behalf of social justice and against poverty and militarism. In fact, that's what he was agitating for when he was assassinated, the idea that workers (sanitation in that case) should be treated as human beings. He also became very controversial for speaking out about the injustices inherent in the US war against the North Vietnamese people.

Two recent pieces explore further the broader legacy of the Nobel Peace Laureate. This one by E. Ethelbert Miller on NPR.org and this one by Matt Funiciello on timesunion.com.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Martin Luther King Jr. ceremony in Glens Falls (and Johnsburg)

[From a press release]

January 12, 2009 – The Glens Falls Martin Luther King Day Committee announced today that the 2009 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Commemoration will be held Sunday, January 18, 2009 in Glens Falls.

The keynote speaker will be the Reverend Doctor Glorya Askew, currently serving as the Ministerial Program Coordinator for Ministerial and Family Services with the Department of Correctional Services. For 28 years, Reverend Askew has served as chaplain at four correctional facilities, the last, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, is the only maximum security facility for women in New York. Dr. Askew has co-edited two books entitled, Reclamation of Black Prisoners: A Challenge to the African American Churches and From Prison Cell to Church Pew: The Strategy of the African American Church.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most important leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Dr. King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech during the March on Washington in 1963. Dr. King vociferously opposed the Viet Nam War and became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Price. He was assassinated forty years ago this April 4 while in Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black sanitary public works employees, represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Dr. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.

Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986, but it wasn’t until 2000 that all 50 states officially observed the holiday for the first time. Before 2000 the holiday was not observed by New Hampshire, Arizona, or South Carolina and in Virginia, the holiday was added on to Lee-Jackson Day, a day meant to honor confederate generals, and became Lee-Jackson-King Day. Although the day is now a universally celebrated federal and state holiday, it is usually not observed by American corporations.

The event will begin at 3:30 pm on the steps of Glens Falls City Hall with remarks from local politicians, including Glens Falls Mayor Jack Diamond and State Senator Betty Little. At 4 pm, following their brief remarks, marchers will proceed to Christ Church at 54 Bay Street where a public program celebrating the life, work, and message of Dr. King will be held beginning at 4:30 pm.

The public event at Christ Church will feature the Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church Choir, the Christ Church United Methodist choir and the keynote speech by Dr. Glorya Askew. There will be a reception with free baked goods and beverages to follow. The Glens Falls chapter of the NAACP will be collecting non-perishable food items to be donated to local food pantries, as a community service project in honor of Dr. King’s call to action. You are encouraged to bring a non-perishable food item to the event.


Update: Adirondack Almanack reports that the town of Johnsburg will also have an event in honor of Dr. King.

Dr. King's real agenda was controversial... and remains so

When a great many Americans think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated 40 years ago last week, they associate him almost exclusively with efforts to bring down the apartheid-esque Jim Crow laws. The struggle to end government-imposed racism.

Many Americans are simply aware of this because the establishment wants his legacy to begin and end with the "I have a dream" speech. The standard modern narrative of King is "He won civil rights for blacks and then he was killed. The end." He was made into a secular saint based on this narrow view which is now, thankfully, uncontroversial.

The reason for this historical revisionism is because the agenda of King and his colleagues was much broader than legal equality for blacks, which was important but only a first step. King's goals were fundamentally about human dignity and the war against the poor.

In the later years of his life, he displayed this by his strong opposition to the US Aggression in Vietnam. An Aggresion of which poor and working class people, both American and Vietnamese, were bearing the human cost almost exclusively. The situation is little different in today's Aggression. So King is reduced to his "I Have a Dream" speech to make sure the masses don't draw any parallels.

King is a person whose anti-establishment agenda has been whitewashed by the establishment so they could bask in the reflected glory of something saccharinized. Much has been done to Muhammad Ali.

And let's not forget that the whole reason King was in Memphis on that fateful April 1968 day was to fight a form of oppression against darker-skinned human beings that may not have been state-mandated but was no less nefarious.

A good supplement is this piece from The Los Angeles Times. It points out King's increasing frustration with white America. A white America that expected blacks to lick their boots in gratitude after they were promoted from third-class citizens to second-class.

And after state segregation started to be dismantled, some of the greatest hostility toward blacks was found as much in the north as in the much reviled south.

The LAT notes: After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettos or to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 "were at best surface changes" that were "limited mainly to the Negro middle class." In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks "are now making demands that will cost the nation something. ... You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then."

In other words, non-southern whites may have had no problem in blacks gaining equal de jure political rights, because northern blacks largely had that anyways. Nothing changed. But once blacks started to demand a humane wage or move into 'white' neighborhoods or 'infiltrate' white schools, northern whites wouldn't be so calm and King knew it.

Much of the social tension of the 70s, from fair housing laws to busing, bore ought King's predictions.

Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration in Glens Falls

I recently received the following press release:

Contact: Matt Funiciello at mattfuniciello @ earthlink.net

The Glens Falls Martin Luther King Committee announced today that the 2008 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Commemoration will be held Monday, January 21, 2008 in Glens Falls.

Adirondack Native Dr. Alice Green will be the Keynote Speaker of the day’s events with a speech entitled “Doctor King: From Dreamer to Revolutionary.” Dr. Green is the co-founder and Executive Director of The Center for Law and Justice, a non-profit community organization that monitors criminal justice activities, provides legal assistance and criminal justice advocacy, organizes efforts to change social policy and empowers poor people and people of color. She entered the 2005 Mayor's race in Albany running as the Green Party's candidate in which she garnered an impressive 28% of the vote.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most important leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Dr. King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech during the March on Washington in 1963. Dr. King vociferously opposed the Viet Nam War and became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Price. He was assassinated forty years ago this April 4 while in Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black sanitary public works employees, represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

Dr. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.

Although James Earl Ray was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for Dr. King’s murder, in 1999 Dr. King’s widow Coretta Scott King, along with the rest of King's family, won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and “other unknown co-conspirators.” Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that “governmental agencies were parties” to the assassination plot.

Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986, but it wasn’t until 2000 that all 50 states officially observed the holiday for the first time. Before 2000 the holiday was not observed by New Hampshire, Arizona, or South Carolina and in Virginia, the holiday was added on to Lee-Jackson Day, a day meant to honor confederate generals, and became Lee-Jackson-King Day. Although the day is now a universally celebrated federal and state holiday, it is usually not observed by American corporations.

The event will begin at 4:30 pm on the steps of Glens Falls City Hall with remarks from local politicians, including Glens Falls Mayor Roy Akins and Assemblywoman Theresa Sayward. At 5 pm, following their brief remarks, marchers will proceed to Christ Church at 54 Bay Street where a public program commemorating and celebrating the life, work, and message of Dr. King will be held beginning at 5:30 pm.

The public event at Christ Church will feature an opening prayer, music and hymns by a community choir and local musicians, readings from Doctor King and the keynote speech given by Dr. Alice Green. A reception with baked goods and hot beverages donated by local businesses will follow.