This Monday the nation recognizes the legacy of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a host of festivities. Although he will eternally be linked to non-violence, not to be lost is his revolutionary stance against how capitalism and racism was exploiting African-Americans.
Born Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta, he followed his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps into Christian ministry and social activism as a teen and young adult. At 26 years of age he rose to national prominence during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott while combating the racist Jim Crow segregation laws that were prevalent in the South then.
“Dr. King’s policy was that non-violence would achieve the gains for Black people in the United States,” said SNCC chairman Stokley Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture. “His major assumption was that your opponent will see your suffering and be moved to change his heart. He made one major fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
The mainstream media tends to focus on a segment from his “Normalcy, Never Again” dissertation delivered Aug. 28, 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he mentions the dream he had for a colorblind American society, but ignores when he addresses reparations, saying “America has given us a bad check marked insufficient funds.” Most are unaware because it is incorrectly called the “I Have a Dream” speech, and they fail to listen to it in its entirety.
As King matured, his ideas and vision also grew, which was reflected in some of the speeches he gave during the later stages of his life.
“America freed the slaves in 1863 through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, but gave them no land, or nothing in reality, as a matter of fact, to get started on,” Dr. King assessed during a May 1967 NBC interview. “At the same time America was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest, which means there was a willingness to give the [Caucasian] peasants from Europe an economic base. Yet it refused to give its Black peasants from Africa, who came here involuntarily in chains and worked free for 244 years, any kind of economic base. So emancipation for [Blacks] was really freedom to hunger, freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate. Therefore, it was freedom and famine at the same time.”
Nationwide opposition to the Vietnam War was occurring at this time as the U.S. military industrial complex sucked the country’s economics and young men into another capitalistic, colonizing conquest overseas.
King’s assessment on the war was not unique. However, because of the international public platform he stood upon, he opened the eyes of many.
On several occasions he explained the exploitive and racist practices being implemented by the U.S., most notably at Harlem’s Riverside Church, April 4, 1967, exactly 365 days before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.
“There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” he stated. “I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and attack it as such. It became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, brothers and husbands to fight and die in extraordinary high proportions relative to the rest of the population.
“I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having spoken first clearly against the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”
Several local events are scheduled. Tuesday, Jan.15, Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture held its “Crusader: Martin Luther King Jr.” exhibition opening reception. The exhibition is slated to run for several weeks.
Sunday, Jan. 20, (3 p.m.-6 p.m.), The Apollo Uptown Hall (253 W. 125th St.) hosts “Unsung Champions of Civil Rights From MLK to Today.”
Monday, Jan. 21, John Brinkley and the Frontiers International Plainfield Area Club will host their 43rd Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast at Plains field High School (Plainfield High School, 950 Park Ave.). Amsterdam News Editor Nayaba Arinde will deliver the keynote, following the real deal footsteps of notables such as Gill Noble, Regent Adelaide Sanford, Dr. Joy DeGruy, Dr. Ron Daniels, Amiri Baraka, Ras Baraka, Dr. Ivan Van Sertima and Larry Hamm.