BlackPerspective.net
Discussing the Diaspora as seen through an internal Black lens
The Real Martin Luther King Jr.
January 21st, 2008
I have grown enormously tired of the sterile, cropped, diluted version of Martin Luther King that has been force fed me all my life, and hence have compiled some broader informaition and perspective on his life that you will not get from corperate media or from most of your church pullpits.
I’ve got another post coming with some MLK quotes that they won’t be playing this week.
Edited to add: Also check this inteview with Mychael Eric Dyson about a book he wrote on the subject.
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The Martin Luther King You Don’t See On TV
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
It’s become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s 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.
Why?
It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
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.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
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.”
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”
How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life.
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and authors of Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits (Common Courage Press).
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/950104.html
posted in News & Events, Social Commentary | | | View blog reactions |
7 Responses to “The Real Martin Luther King Jr.”
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Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net. I’m a writer, activist and political watcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve also been know to do some spoken word and MCing in my day.
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Great post. Based on this article I now wonder if Dr. King’s plans during those last few years are specifically what made him a target for assassination. Especially when one talks about mobilizing the poor. I think that is the greatest threat to those in power.
Ehav, I’m sure that that’s what made him a target.
As much as their is race imnity, nothing trumps money. Adn as much as many white people might not have wanted to live next to Black folk or ride the bus next to them; they could live with that changing.
He didn’t get killed until he started messing with rich folks money.
Also many Negroes were if not outright denouncing him in those last three years, they were putting distance between themselves and him. Those sames ones don’t talk about it now, they just wear his mantel and pretend it didn’t happen instead.
Yobachi, I am really happy that you printed this post. Towards the end of Dr. King’s life, his thinking had radically changed. I became actively involved in the Civil Rights movement about three years before his death and I was in Washington DC when the Poor People’s campaign was organized. Poor people came from around this country, setting up tents, sharing food and water and anything else that they could. Where these poor people were located in DC was actually call Tent city. A lot of these people left their meager belongings to follow Dr. King, because they believed in his vision.
This is one of the reasons that DC is a predominantly Black city. This his how a majority of these people got there, through The Poor People’s campaign. I do believe Martin Luther King was assasinated because he did organize this movement, in addition, he was forming unions with more radical leaders of the day. Believe me, White folks were afraid. They felt not, that MLK had outlived his usefulness, but that he was becoming dangerous. While he preached, turn the other cheek, Whites were fine with this. The Poor People’s campaign was not a turn the other cheek story, this was why he organized all of these poeple. This was concerted effort to force the rich and our government to recognize that there were people in this country barely existing. They were living in terrible conditions, and our nation’s capital closed their eyes to the conditions these people were living in.
What people do not understand, is that rich people were not about to give up their money to poor people. I recall that so many Black Brothers joined the armed services because it was the only way to make a living. So many Brothers died in the Viet Nam war. Conditions for the poor and people of color did not get better, they actually got worse. The poor people who had followed Dr. King’s dream of a better life and came to DC were left with nowhere to go when he was assasinated. They settled in DC. Have we realized Dr. King’s dream? Not by a long shot. I am witnessing some of the same atrocities which was happening back then. We still have a lot of work to do. But just as you have indicated, this is a side of MLK that history does not want to be told, I believe; because it might stir up the masses.
The media keeps playing MLK’s I Have a Dream Speech, however no one wants to comment on the fact that his dream has become almost a fantasy, yet everyone pretends that they are honoring this man. I would suggest that all Blacks should consider reviewing Dr. Martin Luther King’s The World House essay, which he gave at his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture. It is an important work by him, very insightful and almost like a premonition, however, we hear nothing of this speech.
Thank you again Yobachi, for espousing some truth about this great Leader of all people.
I made a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day video that I think EVERYONE will enjoy. It’s really short, and should put a smile on your face.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=AtugYg42mmc
Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day everybody
David Spates
http://www.youtube.com/davidspates
Barbara, I did know the poor peoples movement contributed to DC becoming majority Black.
“The Poor People’s campaign was not a turn the other cheek story, this was why he organized all of these poeple. This was concerted effort to force the rich and our government to recognize that there were people in this country barely existing.”
This is how true revolution is going to come about, not by putting a politician in the head seat of a corrupt system and think something has changed just because he has darker skin. This is a point I was making in the podcast on my side panel called “Black Folk Mad At Me”.
I’ll have to look up that essay you suggested.
Yeah, that was pretty funny David.
I get the day off from my job so I didn’t have to have that conversation early this morning. I could just sleep in.
The more research and illustrations I do on the Iraq war and black America the more I come back to Dr. King. if our country doesn’t get behind what he spoke on, our nation is truly doomed.
As for the I Have a Dream speech, I often shock people when I denounce it every year in January. That speech has been hijacked by white people so that we only focus on getting along with them.