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Martin Luther King, Jr. August 28, 1963, Smithsonian<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.<\/p>\n As we predicted last week, there has been a fair amount of coverage as the day came near and arrived, but virtually nothing compared to what should and would have happened in any normal universe.<\/p>\n And of course, most coverage, as we\u2019ve been commenting on for many years along with a handful of others compared to the majority of commentary, avoids the core of what King stood for. Radical revolution to create a world in which there was equality for all, guaranteed by right and policy. An end to classism, racism, poverty, war. Basic needs and rights for all. No sentiment of equality, but a demand and a reality of equality by social contract, legal right, political and economic policy.<\/p>\n It would mean the entire world order turned on its head.<\/p>\n As we noted in the following excerpt from our post on\u00a07.18.17:<\/p>\n \u201c50 years ago, 1967, was the year the storm clouds gathered in a new way. And the storm began to break out in a new way. Then, 1968. And by the end of that year, nothing was ever the same again.<\/p>\n A 50th anniversary has just passed that needs more attention.<\/p>\n Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s speech at Riverside Church. The most important, most prophetic speech he ever gave.<\/p>\n One year to the day before he was killed.<\/p>\n It set the world on fire at the time. Rejected by many who had supported him. Then within a short time after he was killed, virtually universally praised as his penultimate call to accountability for every individual and for all humanity.<\/p>\n And then, for some time now, the most avoided speech he ever gave by many.<\/p>\n How is that possible?<\/p>\n Who does the US have national holidays for in their name?<\/p>\n One person.<\/p>\n Even Washington got morphed into President\u2019s Day (Lincoln too as part of this, although he never had a federal holiday)\u2013and how many now even know the origin of that?<\/p>\n Even Jesus, who has Christmas, isn\u2019t the center in practice of the holiday of his birth in the US (and many other places.) The \u201cChrist\u201d in the holiday name would seem to be clear\u2013but for separation of church and state reasons in the US, because the churches are less and less attended, and because the holiday was utterly taken over by consumerism driven by emotion-targeted advertising long ago, the name of the holiday is more an echo of its origin than not.<\/p>\n One person has a national holiday in the most powerful nation in the history of the world named after him.<\/p>\n Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t necessarily deserve it more than some of his allies and contemporaries, not to mention those who came before. He treated women as sex objects at times at the further expense of his wife and family. He was sexist and homophobic with some of his closest allies who made the movement and made him possible in many ways. He also associated with the above at a level many didn\u2019t at the time. And no one who was out front on the principles he was would have failed to move past the above limitations as the culture did after he died in no small part because of the principles he died for.<\/p>\n In any event, he\u2019s got the holiday. The only one who does.<\/p>\n So how do we avoid the greatest call to accountability ever from the prophet we gave this unique position?<\/p>\n Because it was the holler of truth that went way past discomfort\u2013it called (and calls) everyone to accountability with no veneer. We Americans especially. Although it was about his opposition to the Vietnam War, it wasn\u2019t because he would never advocate fighting\u2013he did against Hitler days before he died, as we\u2019ve noted before. And his call for and acknowledgment of world revolution wasn\u2019t naive. He hoped to avoid violence as much as possible by calling the greatest purveyors of it to account. But he understood just violence if unavoidable. Further he, and Alice Paul and Gandhi all knew well that non-violence was also a purposeful strategic provocation of violence as needed to achieve justice. It was all the unjust and unnecessary violence that King railed against in his Riverside speech opposing the Vietnam War. Especially what it did to children.<\/p>\n Riverside 1967 was an anti-war speech for all times. About a war and a time that was tearing America apart as nothing had since the Civil War. But it was about something much bigger. It was about the future of humanity, if there was to be one. Which if there was to be, must be free of racism and greed and exploitation and poverty and hunger\u2013must mean equality for all. He had preached this for a long time. He had praised the democratic Scandinavian models for instance that provided all basic needs for all people. But he was going further now. Going global. A different globalism than the one he condemned that was in place even then.<\/p>\n Many have commented on the speech and its majesty. And on the hypocrisy of drowning out the real King and his increasingly angry and radical message, a further evolution of his showing the fullness of what love and justice really mean\u2013as all truth-tellers like him have done. Many have called out the co-opting of the King brand to avoid the real message on the holiday. Of trying to focus on the dream speech (also avoiding its ultimate radical message) as a feel-good drug to misdirect from the very principles in the speeches. Because that would mean changing everything. Starting with our own lives.\u201d<\/p>\n We went on to post the article on the 50th anniversary of the speech, by Benjamin Hedin, in The New Yorker:\u00a0\u201cMartin Luther King Jr\u2019s Searing Anti-War Speech, Fifty Years Later\u201d<\/a>. As we said then; \u201cThere are no adequate superlatives of necessity to read it, again and again..\u201d<\/p>\n Today, in The Guardian in London, Gary Younge writes the following in an indispensable article,\u00a0\u201cMartin Luther King: how a rebel leader was lost to history\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n On 15 January 1998, what would have been Martin Luther King\u2019s 69th birthday, James Farmer was awarded the presidential medal of freedom<\/a> in the White House\u2019s East Room. \u201cHe has never sought the limelight,\u201d said the then president, Bill Clinton. \u201cAnd until today, I frankly think he\u2019s never got the credit he deserves. His long overdue recognition has come to pass.\u201d<\/p>\n Farmer, who ran the Congress of Racial Equality and led the Freedom Rides through the segregated south in 1961, was by that time blind, diabetic and a double amputee. He died the following year. When I spoke to him a few months after the ceremony, he said it was the best day of his life. \u201cIt was just like the old days. But this time, I felt like I was finally being vindicated; that the years of invisibility were over.\u201d<\/p>\n And what, I asked, had rendered him invisible? Having a white wife, he said, had been an issue. But the main reason, he believed, was that the US had only enough room to remember one civil rights leader. \u201cI was in the shadow of Martin Luther King<\/a>,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd that was quite a big shadow. It was King who made the \u2018I have a dream\u2019 speech. And King was assassinated \u2013 and that always enlarges a person\u2019s image.\u201d<\/p>\n In so doing they will wilfully and brazenly omit the fact that before his death in 1968, King was well on the way to becoming a pariah. In 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavourable opinion of him as a favourable one. Life magazine branded his anti-Vietnam war speech at the Riverside church, delivered exactly a year before his assassination, as \u201cdemagogic slander\u201d, and \u201ca script for Radio Hanoi\u201d. Just a week before he was killed, he attended a demonstration in Memphis in support of striking garbage workers. The protest turned violent and police responded with batons and teargas, shooting a 16-year-old boy dead. The press and the political class rounded on King. The New York Times said the events were \u201ca powerful embarrassment\u201d to him. A column in the Dallas Morning News called King \u201cthe headline-hunting high priest of nonviolent violence\u201d whose \u201croad show\u201d in Memphis was \u201clike a torchbearer sprinting into a powder-house\u201d. The Providence Sunday Journal called him \u201creckless and irresponsible\u201d. He was back in Memphis supporting the strike when he was killed.<\/p>\n Half a century after King\u2019s assassination, there is value in reflecting on that shadow. The angle at which King\u2019s body of work caught the light after he was killed tells us a great deal about how a black radical preacher came to be so big and what else may be hidden in the darkness.<\/p>\n This week, the US will indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation, selectively misrepresenting King\u2019s life and work, as if rebelling against the American establishment was, in fact, what the establishment has always encouraged. They will cite the \u201cdream\u201d speech as if it were his only one \u2013 and the line about wanting his children to be \u201cjudged not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character\u201d as if it were the only line in it.<\/p>\n This was the last time King received national coverage when he was alive, and so he died a polarising and increasingly isolated figure. Just six days after his death, the Virginia congressman William Tuck blamed King for his own murder, telling the House of Representatives that King \u201cfomented discord and strife between the races \u2026 He who sows the seed of sin shall reap and harvest a whirlwind of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n But in the intervening decades, the mud slung at him has been cleaned off and his legacy shined to make him resemble a national treasure. In the two years before his death, he did not appear in the Top 10 of Gallup\u2019s poll of most admired men of the year. In 1999, a Gallup poll<\/a> of the most admired people of the century placed him second behind Mother Teresa. In 2011, King\u2019s memorial was opened on the National Mall in Washington DC, with a 30ft statue sitting on four acres of prime historic real estate: 91% of Americans (including 89% of white people) approved. Even Donald Trump has thus far refrained from besmirching his legacy<\/a>, hailing just a few months ago King\u2019s \u201clegacy of equality, justice and freedom\u201d.<\/p>\n The process by which King went from ignominy to icon was not simply a matter of time and tide eroding ill feelings and painful memories. \u201cHistory\u201d does not objectively sift through radical leaders, pick out the best on their merits and then dedicate them faithfully to public memory. It commits itself to the task with great prejudice and fickle appreciation in a manner that tells us as much about historians and their times as the leaders themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cThe facts of history never come to us pure,\u201d wrote EH Carr in his seminal essay The Historian and His Facts. \u201cSince they do not and cannot exist in pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder \u2026 History means interpretation \u2026 It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar\u2019s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Today\u2019s understanding of King is the result of a protracted struggle and strategic reckoning involving an ongoing national negotiation about how to understand the country\u2019s racial narrative. White America did not make the journey towards formal equality willingly. A month before the March on Washington in 1963, 54% of white Americans thought the Kennedy administration \u201cwas pushing racial integration too fast\u201d. A few months later, 59% of northern white Americans and 78% of southern white Americans disapproved \u201cof actions Negroes have taken to obtain civil rights\u201d. That same year, 78% of white southern parents and 33% of white northern parents objected to sending their children to a school in which half the students were black. According to Gallup, it was not until 1995 that a majority of white US citizens approved of marriage between black and white people.<\/p>\n To discount King would be to dismiss the most prominent and popular proponent of civil rights. That in turn would demand some other explanation as to how the US shed the stigma of segregation and imagined itself as a modern, nonracial democracy. For while the means by which codified segregation came to an end \u2013 mass marches, civil disobedience, grassroots activism \u2013 was not consensual, the country did reach a consensus that it had to end. But there was no plausible account for how they travelled from Rosa Parks to Barack Obama that does not have King front and centre, even if the gap between black and white unemployment is roughly the same now<\/a> as it was in 1963, southern schools are resegregating and the wealth gap is widening.<\/p>\n So, white America came to embrace King in the same way that white South Africans came to embrace Nelson Mandela: grudgingly and gratefully, retrospectively, selectively, without grace or guile. Because, by the time they realised their hatred of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which loving him was in their own self-interest. Because, in short, they had no choice.<\/p>\n \u201cOur country has chosen the easier way to work with King,\u201d the late Vincent Harding<\/a>, who wrote a draft of King\u2019s Riverside speech, told me. \u201cThey are aware that something very powerful was connected to him and he was connected to it.\u201d<\/p>\n It has not been a straightforward journey for black America either. King was always popular with black Americans, though not always with black political leaders \u2013 younger activists mockingly referred to him as \u201cde lawd\u201d because he was so grand, while his contemporaries criticised him for parachuting in on conflicts to great media attention. But the victories for civil rights soon came up against the legacy of several centuries of oppression and the realities of capitalism. In short, what does racial equality look like in a country where economic inequality is deeply ingrained into the system \u2013 what is the value of being able to eat in a restaurant of your choice if you can\u2019t afford what\u2019s on the menu?<\/p>\n At a meeting in Chicago in 1965, King was shaken after he was booed by young black men in the crowd: \u201cI went home that night with an ugly feeling, selfishly I thought of my sufferings and sacrifices over the last 12 years,\u201d he recalled. \u201cWhy should they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young men. For 12 years, I and others like me have held out radiant promises of progress, I had preached to them about my dream \u2026 I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing me because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n So the King America has chosen to remember stands at Lincoln\u2019s feet talking of a dream \u201cdeeply rooted in the American dream\u201d. But by the long, hot summer of 1967, which saw riots in Newark, Cincinnati and Buffalo, and tanks rolling down the streets of Detroit<\/a>, King had, in the midst of the cold war, moved on to questioning capitalism<\/a>. \u201cWe must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society,\u201d he said in August 1967. \u201cThere are 40 million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, \u2018Why are there 40 million poor people in America?\u2019 And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy \u2026 when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question: \u2018Who owns the oil?\u2019 You begin to ask the question: \u2018Who owns the iron ore?\u2019 You begin to ask the question: \u2018Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that\u2019s two-thirds water?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In 2002, when I first interviewed the late poet and author, Maya Angelou<\/a>, about a volume of her memoir which covered the assassinations of King and Malcolm X, I asked what she thought they would be focusing on had they lived. My normally loquacious interviewee sat silent before shaking her head and releasing a long, helpless breath. \u201cI can\u2019t,\u201d she said. \u201cI can\u2019t. So many things have happened since they were both assassinated. The world has changed so dramatically.\u201d<\/p>\n Reputations forged in revolutionary periods can rarely be sustained through calmer times. In moments of social turmoil and sharpened conflict, the stage yields to the declarative, decisive, emphatic and bold; to those who can rally their own side and face down their tormentors. Revolutionary moments favour not just the single-minded but the reckless, which, in King\u2019s case, meant a man who was prepared to wear his funeral clothes to work.<\/p>\n I once asked Jack O\u2019Dell, one of King\u2019s long-term aides, why King had delivered his speech about Vietnam when he knew it would ruin his relationship with the White House and cost the movement a lot of support and funds. \u201cHe had the Nobel prize,\u201d said O\u2019Dell, \u201cand he didn\u2019t know how long he was going to live. He wasn\u2019t but 39, but he wasn\u2019t going to live much longer, and that meant he didn\u2019t have but maybe a few more speeches to give. So he had to say what he was going to say.\u201d<\/p>\n But once the conditions that make those periods possible evolve, so do the leadership skills necessary for the new moment. Those who are most effective at the barricades aren\u2019t necessarily best equipped for the boardroom, which is why the transition from guerilla to government is so fraught for so many movements. That evolution never stops.<\/p>\n So Jesse Jackson, who was with King in Memphis the day he died, reinvented himself as an electoral contender<\/a> during the 80s, channelling the spirit of the civil rights movement into a broad-based coalition embracing unions, feminists, gay rights activists and environmentalists that posed a challenge to the Democratic party. But, 20 years later, he was heckled<\/a> by black protesters against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri. In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, one of the Black Lives Matter founders, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, berates those \u201cblack pastors and then the first black president [who] preached [about personal responsibility] more than they preached a commitment to collective responsibility\u201d.<\/p>\n And many turn the pages of history quicker than they can read, let alone understand them. John Lewis, the sole living speaker from the March on Washington in 1963, questioned Trump\u2019s legitimacy given the alleged involvement of Russia in the election. Lewis, who was bludgeoned by bigots in Birmingham, Alabama in 1961 and by police in Selma in 1965, was criticised by Trump on Twitter in January last year<\/a> for being \u201call talk, talk, talk \u2013 no action, no results\u201d.<\/p>\n So in life, King\u2019s one-time contemporaries struggle, as he did, with a white America that is dismissive and a black America that demands more than their movements can deliver. In death, the struggle is to ensure that King\u2019s legacy isn\u2019t eviscerated of all militancy so that it can be repurposed as one more illustration of the American establishment\u2019s God-given ability to produce the antidote to it\u2019s own poison.<\/p>\n This contradiction was most blatant in February<\/a>, during the Super Bowl, when Ram trucks used a recording of a sermon King delivered<\/a> about the value of service to sell its product \u2013 \u201cBuilt to serve\u201d.<\/p>\n [We take a brief interlude here from Younge\u2019s piece today to an excerpt from our own post on the above on 2.10.2018:<\/p>\n \u201cThe Super Bowl itself is an archetypal modern example of the gladiatorial using and destroying of humans by humans for mass human entertainment from projected individual and tribal aggression to extraordinary performance to emotional manipulation (well, then there\u2019s the Olympics\u2013sexually abusing and in every other way using and abusing children and adults in service of the same, as we, Bryant Gumbel on \u201cReal Sports\u201d and many others have been expressing for some time\u2013but at least this year the peace fakery may possibly have some real impact). In a hopeful sign, the pro-football audience is waning (although still huge) and parents increasingly refuse to send their boys to the slaughter of the farm leagues. Boys who are abused physically and psychologically by the process and are taught violence and power are a requirement of self-worth (the whole culture teaches these things), while girls are taught to enable this and seek power by being sex objects on the sidelines (the culture teaches this too, and that women seeking power should emulate the above, exemplified by adult women increasingly screaming for blood on the field as loudly as anyone).<\/p>\n So, what follows is a Rorschach test of your basic sense of awareness and conscience. And a wakeup call of a scream through the ages.<\/p>\n One of the hallmarks of the Super Bowl is that it\u2019s also the Super Bowl of advertising\u2013that medium generally used to feed every most base impulse we have to consume.<\/p>\n So, we\u2019re watching, live, as monitoring media and culture is a critical part of our work, which public service advertising has also been a critical part of.<\/p>\n The image is of a Dodge Ram truck. The voiceover sounds so familiar. But its instantly brain-exploding and you don\u2019t at first know why.<\/p>\n NO! That is NOT the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr.!<\/p>\n NO! that is NOT his famous \u201cThe Drum Major Instinct\u201d speech of exactly 50 years before to the day!<\/p>\n NOT at the start of this 50th anniversary year of that year of years in the US and around the world\u2013Vietnam (this is the 50th anniversary of the second week of the Tet Offensive) and Civil Rights and King and Kennedy and on and on\u20131968.\u201d<\/p>\n We then referred to, among other commentaries, Younge\u2019s excellent article then, \u201cBig business is hijacking our radical past. We must stop it\u201d<\/a>. Now back to today\u2019s commentary.]:<\/p>\n The insult to King\u2019s memory could not have been more absolute. In another part of the sermon<\/a> Ram used, King literally tells the congregation not to be fooled into spending more money than necessary on cars by sharp advertisers. \u201cThese gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion,\u201d he says<\/a>, \u201chave a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying \u2026 In order to make your neighbours envious, you must drive this type of car \u2026 And before you know it you\u2019re just buying that stuff.\u201d In a week that will see almost every stratum of American society \u2013 the society that voted for Trump \u2013 mourn King\u2019s passing and hail his contributions, this may well be the most important message of all.<\/p>\n This article includes material excerpted from Gary Younge\u2019s book, The Speech: The Story Behind Dr Martin Luther King Jr\u2019s Dream<\/em><\/p>\n Linked are many other articles, such as Michael K Honey\u2019s, \u201cMartin Luther King\u2019s forgotten legacy? His fight for economic justice\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cKing early on described himself as a \u201cprofound advocate of the social gospel\u201d who decried a capitalist system that put profits and property rights ahead of basic human rights. Beyond his dream of civil and voting rights lay a demand that every person have adequate food, education, housing, a decent job and income.\u201d<\/p>\n And Cornel West\u2019s, \u201cMartin Luther King Jr was a radical. We must not sterilize his legacy\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cT<\/span><\/span>he major threat of Martin Luther King<\/a> Jr to us is a spiritual and moral one. King\u2019s courageous and compassionate example shatters the dominant neoliberal soul-craft of smartness, money and bombs. His grand fight against poverty, militarism, materialism and racism undercuts the superficial lip service and pretentious posturing of so-called progressives as well as the candid contempt and proud prejudices of genuine reactionaries. King was neither perfect nor pure in his prophetic witness \u2013 but he was the real thing in sharp contrast to the market-driven semblances and simulacra of our day.\u201d<\/p>\n And video of King\u2019s last public appearance the night before he died, the last part of his last speech that displays a kind of proof of God\u2013in the sense that believers to atheists alike can understand. A sick man rousted from his bed to speak to those who waited to hear him\u2013and whose body, heart and mind converge in all the power a human can muster to evoke or create the eternal: \u201d \u2018I\u2019ve been to the mountaintop\u2019: an excerpt from Martin Luther King\u2019s final speech\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are no more words after seeing this, fifty years ago last night. The last night Martin Luther King, Jr. was on this earth with us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Martin Luther King, Jr. August 28, 1963, Smithsonian Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. As we predicted last week, there has been a fair amount of coverage as the day came near and arrived, but virtually nothing compared to what should and would have happened in any normal universe. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2879"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3429,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879\/revisions\/3429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}