Martin Luther King Jr. Was a Radical and a Socialist

  

Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Moderate,

 

King called himself a democratic socialist. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power."

In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King proclaimed, "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."

Post up on DSA’s  North Star blog by Peter Dreier. 

 

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/martin-luther-king-was-a-radical-not-a-moderate

 

Socialism in Black America

by Rev. Andrew J. Wilkes

We live in strange times. We have a black president using race-neutral framing for social justice, alongside a Black Lives Matter movement using structural racism framing for participatory democracy. Killer Mike, a Southern rapper best known for his work with the Grammy Award-winning superduo Outkast, has endorsed a sitting U.S. senator and self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders. Some black preachers, apparently, are tripping over themselves to cozy up to Donald Trump or reposition themselves within the arc of Hillary Clinton's historic candidacy. Strange times indeed.

Today, presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders launches a tour of historically black colleges and universities (The HBCU Tour) in states where Clinton holds a clear advantage with black voters. He’ll be carrying a message of democratic socialism, one that rarely gets a hearing among any voting bloc.

Given the unique character of our political moment, I would argue that freedom-loving black folks should consider socialism as a viable political strategy for ameliorating the massive human misery in America. The reasons are embedded in our history and situation.

Socialism has deep roots in African American political history. The most famous and revered black person in America--Martin Luther King, Jr.--was a democratic socialist. Many of the most effective organizers and grassroots theorists of that era --folks like Ella Baker and A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, for instance--held to a political vision of what may be called socialism. I appeal to black history to rebut the often-made claim that socialism has no lineage in communities of color and therefore is either untested or not to be trusted. 

Selma Trailer, the Movie. Martin Luther King Jr.

Good historial references.

http://flavorwire.com/498002/white-people-are-flipping-out-because-selma-isnt-about-them

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/selma-portrays-true-martin-luther-king-jr-radical-despised-political-establishment

Zinn Educational site.

Ten Things You Should Know About Selma Before You See the Film

http://zinnedproject.org/2015/01/selma-ten-things/

Selma's Truthful Martin Luther King

 A Radical Despised by the Establishment

This is not your sanitized, Hollywood version of Dr. King.

Alternet

December 26, 2014

Selma trailer

As "Selma" opens in a number of cities this week and expands to nationwide release in a couple of weeks, the country is given a chance to assess the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Doing so is particularly relevant right now, in light of boisterous protests against police brutality that have been going on since the summer.

 

Selma has won nearly unanimous praise from film critics – it is currently perched at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with dozens of reviews in – partly for its unflinching look at King as a true radical who upset not just a fringe of racists in the South, but the entire political establishment. Writing in Time Magazine, nonprofit leader Salamishah Tillet praises the film for reclaiming “Hollywood's sanitized versions” of Dr. King as simply part of a “simple story of American racial progress.”

 

In the conventional wisdom, King was a beloved figure who worked with national politicians to defeat a fringe group of Southern racists; Selma upends this narrative by showing King facing off not only with Alabama governor George Wallace but also the Democratic president Lyndon Banes Johnson (LBJ) and his FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. King, and all those who stood alongside him in the demonstrations in the South, are shown not as conciliators looking to simply make racial harmony through dialogue, but as both agitators and lawbreakers – in the most righteous ways.

Dr. Martin Luther King- Race Riots and The Other America

"The Other America" - Speech by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Grosse Pointe High School - March 14, 1968]

Rev. Dr. Harry Meserve, Bishop Emrich, my dear friend Congressman Conyers, ladies and gentlemen.

I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight and to have the great privilege of discussing with you some of the vital issues confronting our nation and confronting the world. It is always a very rich and rewarding experience when I can take a brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned people of good will all over our nation and all over the world, and I certainly want to express my deep personal appreciation to you for inviting me to occupy this significant platform.

I want to discuss the race problem tonight and I want to discuss it very honestly.  I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. And I do not see how we will ever solve the turbulent problem of race confronting our nation until there is an honest confrontation with it and a willing search for the truth and a willingness to admit the truth when we discover it.  And so I want to use as a title for my lecture tonight, "The Other America."  And I use this title because there are literally two Americas.  Every city in our country has this kind of dualism, this schizophrenia, split at so many parts, and so every city ends up being two cities rather than one. There are two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. In this America, millions of people have the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality flowing before them. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America children grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.  In this other America, thousands and thousands of people, men in particular walk the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. In this other America, millions of people are forced to live in vermin-filled, distressing housing conditions where they do not have the privilege of having wall-to-wall carpeting, but all too often, they end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. Almost forty percent of the Negro families of America live in sub-standard housing conditions. In this other America, thousands of young people are deprived of an opportunity to get an adequate education. Every year thousands finish high school reading at a seventh, eighth and sometimes ninth grade level. Not because they're dumb, not because they don't have the native intelligence, but because the schools are so inadequate, so over-crowded, so devoid of quality, so segregated if you will, that the best in these minds can never come out. Probably the most critical problem in the other America is the economic problem. There are so many other people in the other America who can never make ends meet because their incomes are far too low if they have incomes, and their jobs are so devoid of quality.  And so in this other America, unemployment is a reality and under-employment is a reality. (I'll just wait until our friend can have her say) (applause). I'll just wait until things are restored and. . .everybody talks about law and order. (applause)

RIP Vincent G. Harding, Historian Who Co-Wrote MLKs Beyond Vietnam Speech

RIP Vincent G. Harding, Historian Who Co-Wrote MLKs Beyond Vietnam Speech



Today we spend the hour remembering the pioneering historian, theologian and civil rights activist Dr. Vincent Harding. He died on May 19 at the age of 82 in Philadelphia. He lived in Denver, but was in Pennsylvania where he had been teaching at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center. Harding was a close adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote King’s famous antiwar speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." King delivered the address at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 — exactly one year before he was assassinated in Memphis.

Martin Luther King Jr., Economic Justice, Worker's Rights, and Multiracial Democracy

by Thomas F. Jackson

In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300 municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their existence.

That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in Atlanta to support Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and racial groups,” the delegates declared.

So when King came to Memphis to support the strike, a local labor and community struggle became intertwined with his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong enough to reorient national priorities from imperial war in  Vietnam to domestic reconstruction, especially in America’s  riot-torn cities. To non-poor Americans, King called for a “revolution of values,” a move from self-seeking to service, from property rights to human rights.

King’s assassination—and the urban revolts that followed—led to a local Memphis settlement that furthered the cause of public employee unionism. The Poor People’s March nonviolently won small concessions in the national food stamp program. But reporters covered the bickering and squalor in the poor people’s tent city, rather than the movement’s detailed demands for waging a real war on poverty. Marchers wanted guaranteed public employment when the private sector failed, a raise in the federal minimum wage, a national income floor for all families, and a national commitment to reconstruct cities blighted by corporate disinvestment and white flight. And they wanted poor people’s representation in urban renewal and social service programs that had customarily benefited only businesses or the middle class. King’s dreams reverberated back in the movements that had risen him up.

March on Washington - A success

Join DSA at the March on Washington

“You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of the slums. . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth . . . and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speech to the SCLC staff, Frogmore, S.C., November 14, 1966

                                                              Why We March

DSA is an official partner organization sponsoring the August 24, 2013 March on Washington 50 years after activists, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., marched on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  That march, and the years of organizing which preceded it, built public pressure and helped lead to landmark civil rights legislation and later the expansion and protection of voting rights.

    Democratic socialists Bayard Rustin, Walter Reuther and A. Philip Randolph (above)

helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 50 years ago.

   They knew that ending legal segregation and winning political rights for African Americans were essential, but not sufficient, to ensure justice and freedom for all. Without access to good education, to health care and above all to decent jobs that paid living wages, the vote was not enough.

MLK March

March on Washington - for Jobs and Justice

The Radicalization of Martin Luther King

MLK. Black and proud

MLK speech.

In the video MLK delivers a speech urging everyone to sign their own emancipation proclamation:

I come here tonight and plead with you. Believe in yourself and believe that you are somebody. I said to a group last night, — Nobody else can do this for us. No document can do this for us. No Lincolnian emancipation proclamation can do this for us. No Johnsonian civil rights bill can do this for us.

If the Negro is to be free, he must move down into the inner resources of his own soul and sign with a pen and ink of self-assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation.

http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/01/on_his_birthday_watch_mlks_black_is_beautiful_speech.html

Martin Luther King and Economic Justice

Martin Luther King, Economic Justice, Workers’ Rights,

and Multiracial Democracy

by Thomas Jackson

In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300

municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for

black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant

and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They

demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their

existence. That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in Atlanta to support

Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and racial groups,” the delegates declared.

So when King came to Memphis to support the strike, a local labor and community struggle became intertwined with his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong enough to reorient national priorities from imperial war in Vietnam to domestic reconstruction, especially in America’s riot-torn cities. To non-poor Americans, King called for a “revolution of values,” a move from self-seeking to service, from property rights to human rights.

King’s assassination—and the urban revolts that followed—led to a local Memphis settlement that furthered the cause of public employee unionism. The Poor People’s March nonviolently won small concessions in the national food stamp program. But reporters covered the bickering and squalor in the poor people’s tent city, rather than the movement’s detailed demands for waging a real war on poverty. Marchers wanted guaranteed public employment when the private sector failed, a raise in the federal minimum wage, a national income floor for all families, and a national commitment to reconstruct cities blighted by corporate disinvestment and white flight. And they wanted poor people’s representation in urban renewal and social service programs that had customarily benefited only businesses or the middle class. King’s dreams reverberated back in the movements that had risen him up.

Remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

by Thomas F. Jackson

Almost 40 years ago, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300 municipal  sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union  recognition, and respect for black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant and welfare unions, discovering pervasive  hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and  medical establishment blind to their existence. That same  month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in  Atlanta to support Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor  people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete  demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or  Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor  people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established  powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor  people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and  racial groups,” the delegates declared.

So when King came to Memphis to support the strike,  a local labor and community struggle became intertwined  with his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong  enough to reorient national priorities from imperial war in  Vietnam to domestic reconstruction, especially in America’s  riot-torn cities. To non-poor Americans, King called for a  “revolution of values,” a move from self-seeking to service,  from property rights to human rights.

Martin Luther King in Memphis

April 4 marks the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, murdered in 1968 while fighting for the rights of striking Memphis sanitation workers. This event is brilliantly chronicled in the acclaimed documentary, At the River I Stand. This year's anniversary will be marked by protests and events nationwide in support of unions and workers' rights. Join in the events by visiting www.we-r-1.org.

"The struggle and triumph of dignity over injustice is the luminous tapestry of all great social movements. At the River I Stand is an inspiring visual testament and a call to witness to every viewer." 
--Gerald McEntee, President, AFSCME

See the video. http://www.newsreel.org/at-the-river-i-stand-preview.htm

King: All Labor Has Dignity

In light of the clash of wills in Wisconsin, we should remember the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of King’s slogans that we rarely hear is this one: “all labor has dignity.”

King spoke these words in Memphis on March 18, 1968, in the midst of a strike of 1,200 black sanitation workers that had lasted over a month. After rousing them to a fever pitch, King called for a general strike by all workers to shut the city down on behalf of the sanitation workers.

What was the demand of these workers? Improved wages and benefits, yes, but their key demand was that the City of Memphis grant collective bargaining rights and the collection of union dues, without which they knew they could not maintain their union.

These are the very two items that Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker wants to take away from public employees. He knows, as did Mayor Henry Loeb in Memphis, that if you can kill union bargaining rights and dues collection, you can kill the union.

Also like Loeb, Walker is a fiscal conservative. As he cuts taxes for business he raises costs for workers and says ending union power will benefit the fiscal health of the state. Walker wants to end the right of public employees to bargain collectively, even though the workers have accepted a tripling of their health-care costs and a wage cut to help offset the state’s fiscal crisis.

In nearby Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to take away the right to join a union for 14,000 state-financed child-care and home-care workers, among the most overworked and underpaid of public servants. In other states, Republicans want to adopt “right to work” (for less) laws that would take away the requirement that workers in unionized jobs pay union dues. This would undermine the unions while, in King’s words, providing “no rights and no work.”

Even in Midwest states that have been union strongholds, Republicans now have public-employee unions in their cross-hairs. This is the latest and potentially most deadly phase of government assault on unions. Ever since the Reagan counterrevolution, government policies joined with private sector profiteers have vastly worsened racial-economic inequalities, created a gambling casino on Wall Street and paved the way for the current economic crisis.

Conservatives rationalize their attacks on unions by saying unionized public workers are unfairly privileged. But they only look privileged by comparison to the rest of the working class, which is suffering economic catastrophe and has almost entirely lost the benefits of unionization. Yet class envy is an easy means to divide and rule.

Racism is another part of the Republican arsenal of divide and rule. Thanks to the destruction of manufacturing jobs and unions, black and Latino workers in manual occupations have disproportionately suffered high rates of poverty and incarceration as many of their families disintegrate. The one toe-hold many black and minority workers (and especially women among them) still have in the economy is in unionized public employment. Now, the Republicans want to take that away.

Dr. Martin Luther King - Last Speech

Jesse Jackson on Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King led an organizing session for his last campaign--the Poor People’s Campaign, demanding a job, income and health care for every American.  He felt strongly about building this multi-cultural, multi-racial coalition; no one side of town would diminish another.   People would come by train and plane, bus and walk to engage, if necessary, in civil disobedience, to get the attention of Congress.    He was determined to put a focus on gripping poverty.

Sharing a birthday cake brought him by Xernona Clayton, we all laughed and talked through lunch, and then returned to work.   Al Lowenstein led a workshop on strategies and plans to end the war in Vietnam, on linking the civil rights movement at home, to ending the war abroad.

Today we’ve come full circle. There are five terms you rarely hear in Washington--poverty; racial equality; economic justice; reconstruction; peace budget.

Today, more than 50 million Americans have no health insurance.  Insurance premiums continue to rise.  Nearly 47 million are still in poverty.  Unemployment continues and these numbers will rise.   41 million are on food stamps. Nearly 30 million are unemployed and underemployed.  Foreclosures continue to rise, outstripping loan modifications.  Student loan debts are now greater than credit card debt, endangering a whole generation of our youth.

Were he alive today, he would be organizing a Poor People’s Campaign to redirect our nation’s priorities to providing jobs, health care and economic justice at home. He never wavered in his passion to end poverty, to achieve economic justice and racial equality.  This was his vision, not limited to Harlem or Memphis in the United States, but a global view aligned with the desires of the world’s people.

Read King's Beyond VietNam speech

http://sacramentopa.blogspot.com/