10 Awesome Things MLK Said That You Won't Hear This Weekend

From AlterNet:

Right-wingers, after attacking, mocking and marginalizing Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime, and then assassinating him, have posthumously adopted him as one of their own.

It seems like most conservatives have memorized a single statement MLK made in his long and celebrated history of compelling oratory: "Judge a person not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their heart," which they interpret as a call to abolish affirmative action programs, or to stop calling out people who make racist comments or something like that.

More here, with video!

I have an irrational fear that if I die before my father and brothers, they will give me a Southern Baptist funeral. I'm afraid that, as is typical with such funerals, I will be called a born again Christian who wanted his legacy to be you coming down the aisle and accepting Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior. I'm afraid that the preacher will say that Jesus made me happy and whole or something along those lines. In short, I'm afraid that the final celebration of my life will be a total lie, about the person I am today, and my attitudes about religion in general, as well as the bigger lie obscuring the fact that Christianity is a social opiate distracting popular energy away from useful action and toward social repression.

If this happens, it will be, of course, my own fault for not being more frank with my family about my personal beliefs. I mean, I cut myself a lot of slack about this because opening up a dialogue with my father and brothers about fundamentalist Christianity would do nothing but cause tension. But still. I wish I could be more myself with them.

Dr. King, however, unlike my pussified self, was always quite frank about his beliefs, which makes what has happened to his legacy all the more astonishing. The political and media establishment's conceptual reconstruction of MLK makes him out to be not much more impressive than Elmo the Muppet, a warm and fuzzy presence who wants us all to love each other. Seriously. Just watch television news coverage of MLK Day Monday night and you'll see. But really, you've got to be in the schools, where I was for six years as a high school teacher not so long ago, in order to see just how meaningless one of this nation's greatest radicals has been rendered: it's all "I have a dream," all "black children and white children," perfectly sanitized for this era of near total depoliticization of the American citizenry.

But make no mistake about it. The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior was indeed a radical, a socialist, a real socialist, not that fake Obama kind, who believed, and strongly asserted that without economic justice there can be no racial justice, and that without justice there can be no love. That America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. That war, poverty, and racism are inextricably intertwined. You know, the kind of shit that today automatically disqualifies you from county dog catcher, let alone any more meaningful political office.

I'm convinced that if King were alive today, they'd kill him again, not for saying nice things about black children and white children, but for calling the political establishment what it actually is, a morally bankrupt, oppressive, elitist, exploitative and mendacious regime which should be overthrown immediately. Remember that as you witness on Monday the vacant celebration of the man's style sans his substance. Remember that they would shoot him dead today just as surely as they shot him dead forty three years ago.

Don't believe me? Check out this speech he gave a year before he was assassinated. It's great stuff.

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