REAL MLK

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967

Martin Luther King Jr. was a radical--this is a fact. He opposed not only racism, but also militarism, war, capitalism, and materialism. But you won't hear much about that today. Today, King will be celebrated with bland, meaningless platitudes about how great his "I Have a Dream" speech during the 1963 march on Washington was. Don't buy it. King was a revolutionary; his work and message was, perhaps, even more suited to 2004 than it was to 1964. I wrote about this last year in my "MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. 2003: A WARM AND FRIENDLY MUPPET OF A MAN" post. This year, I'm going to bolster these views on Dr. King by linking to some great essays.

King's legacy: uniting the struggles

From Workers' World:

"During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons..."

So Lenin wrote about Marx and Engels in his preface to "State and Revolution." But a quite similar statement could be applied to the way the ruling-class media in the United States now treat Martin Luther King Jr., and especially the way they treat his holiday.

King, even though he represented the wing of the Civil Rights movement that sought liberation while rejecting armed struggle or indeed any militant response to the most severe racist provocations, was certainly no passive icon. King was immersed in the struggle for economic and political rights. He was in the forefront of many of these struggles.

Click here for more.

Martin Luther King: Terrorist

From WorkingForChange:

The literal whitewashing of King also serves another purpose: to locate American racism as safely in the South and in our historical past. The changes of the past half century are, indeed, remarkable; Jim Crow seems today as unthinkable as slavery itself. But struggles against racial equality happened in every state -- not just Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. As for our progress since then, consider: the persistently huge economic gaps between whites and non-whites; the horrific public health indices in some non-white areas, including the re-emergence of TB and widespread, endemic hunger among often non-white children; the shameful failure of public education in many predominantly non-white school districts; the War on Drugs and its imprisonment of a generation of non-white youth; the race-coded political attacks on welfare and workfare programs; the near-complete dismantling of affirmative action; and the still-striking disparity between how America looks and how its leaders look. We still have a long, long way to go.

If the King of 1955 or 1965 were alive today, he'd be talking about all of this. King would also have something to say about America's eagerness to consider every human being of a particular shading as a potential terrorist. He would be accused of treason for his pacifism, as he was reviled for "Communism" back in the day. Instead of the FBI trying to bring him down, he, and most of his associates, would be prosecutable under anti-terrorism statutes. And the moral outrage of Americans, that made his work so effective? These days, we prefer denial.

Click here.

Dr. King: The Remix

An essay from AlterNet on King and the hip-hop generation:

The paradox of overexposure of a particular image of Dr. King is his resultant inaccessibility to young people.

While we love to hear the story, again and again, well-intentioned teachers and less-benevolent revisionists have hidden from us much of the good stuff about the good Reverend Doctor. His legacy has been reduced by many interpreters to a still portrait of a pacific dreamer in a contextual vacuum. We have been conditioned to think that everything we need to know about King we learned in kindergarten. While we remember that he was born in Atlanta and became a timeless orator, nonviolent dreamer and national martyr, many in the hip-hop nation have yet to be introduced to the radical Martin Luther King, Jr.

Call in P. Diddy, or whoever invented the remix. The revolutionary King has been lost on the B-side for much of the last four decades, while the facts of this year in our nation's history accentuate the significance of understanding the true King legacy. Dr. King's "triple evils" of racism, poverty and war have emerged in all-too-familiar form: the Bush II government abandons American children to kill in Iraq and to perish in prison here at home, cuts off unemployment benefits and closes welfare centers, locks up innocent immigrants, and rewards the rich for their patronage of these policies.

Click here.

Now, a news item just to let everyone know that King's dream has most definitely not been achieved. From the Washington Post via the Houston Chronicle:

Segregation in schools at levels last seen in 1969

Half a century after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of American education, schools are almost as segregated as they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, according to a new report released by Harvard University researchers.

The study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, shows that progress toward school desegregation peaked in the late 1980s as courts concluded that the goals of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had largely been achieved. Over the past 15 years, the trend has been in the opposite direction, and most white students now have "little contact" with minority students in many areas of the country, according to the report.

"We are celebrating a victory over segregation at a time when schools across the nation are becoming increasingly segregated," noted the report, which was issued on the eve of the holiday celebrating King's birthday.

Stuff like this really pisses me off. That anybody would dare suggest that racism is a thing of the past is truly appalling. That affirmative action is all but dead is a national tragedy.

Click here for more.

Finally, here is a cool flash-animation courtesy of AlterNet that celebrates the real MLK: HONOR THE MEMORY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING.

Happy MLK day.

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