Monday, January 16, 2023

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2023

This is from 2 years ago. Oddly, it seemed still appropriate, so I've just reposted it.

The video seems to have slipped away, but 10 [12 now. Ed.] years ago (or so), Chris Hayes was surprised to find out the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a universally beloved figure before his assassination and elevation to secular American saint.  He wasn't, of course.  King was jailed in Birmingham, but it wasn't just the South that jailed him, or rejected him.  Even WaPo turned against King after his famous anti-war sermon in Riverside Church.  And how soon we forget King's "I Have a Dream!" speech was offered at a march for social justice and economic equality:

The critics of the civil rights movement in America said much the same thing. Yet pre-eminent oral historian Studs Terkel, for his epic book RACE, interviewed dozens of African Americans for this seminal work, and suggested this ragtag element was one of the underpinning strengths of the civil rights movements. In fact, as one protester said, it really wasn't about 'blackness' or being allowed to sit in the bus or use the same toilets, it was about poverty and about class. " They play off one race against the other. That white kid on the picket line got the same problems as that black kid who don't have a job. He's on strike because his wages aren't what they supposed to be," said Union steel worker, Joseph Robinson.

And says Little Dovie Thurman, heavily involved in the civil rights struggle: "At first I couldn't understand why they hated Dr King so much. Then I began to see he wasn't just working with poor black and white. He was talking at unionizing, and against the war, all kinds of issues. That gave him a force of power that they didn't want him to have. They had to get him. He know that black power, white power, wasn't going to work. As long as he (King) was saying, "Let the black eat at the counter, let them go to the washroom," that was fine. But that didn't get at IT."

Little Dovie realised, as Martin Luther King did, that the struggle and the civil rights movement wasn't just about race, but rather a far bigger issue of understanding power and class distinction.

Which brings us back, doesn't it, to the "Twa Americas."

I've often done a post for this day.  I think today I'll leave it at this: 

Mostly relevant because: And because:

"I don't think we can ignore race," said Martin Luther King III. "What my father is asking is to create the climate where every American can realize his or her dreams. Now what does that mean when you have 50 million people living in poverty?"

"And when white Americans tell the negro to lift himself up by his own bootstraps, they don't look over and see the legacy of slavery and segregation," said MLK. "I believe we do all we can and seek to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps. Many negroes by the thousands of millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression and it was a result of a society that deliberately made color a stigma and something worthless and degrading."

Hasan claimed that many of the things King believed would be things that led leaders in both parties to flee, such as his support for democratic socialism. For example, as a 23-year-old, King said that he was more of a socialist than a capitalist because "capitalism has outlived its usefulness."

King echoed the same sentiment about a month before he died.

Gotta keep "white" supreme; at all costs.
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