April 04, 2012

Remembering MLK: The Things We’ve Forgotten Would Guide Us

"...King was a radical. Not the venomous kind that promotes reckless violence against innocent people; quite the opposite. King was a radical in his criticism of the root causes of injustice, and in his brilliantly imaginative vision of a different, more just and humane world."

On the 44th anniversary of the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, we remember the important legacy of this brave man, through several items:

From COLORLINES,  Barbara Ramsby wrote in January 2011:

"First of all, King was a radical. Not the venomous kind that promotes reckless violence against innocent people; quite the opposite. King was a radical in his criticism of the root causes of injustice, and in his brilliantly imaginative vision of a different, more just and humane world. For example, King did not just urge protesters to be non-violent, he urged politicians and governments to be non-violent. In 1968 he took a brave stance against the war in Vietnam, in a speech in New York City’s Riverside Church, that cost him some of his liberal supporters. He criticized the injustices of capitalism: persistent poverty, inadequate aid to workers and the poor, and growing wealth disparity. Let us remember he died demanding not simply integration, but labor rights for striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

Secondly, King was not a king. He was not a superhero who rushed in to singularly rescue black people from the evils of American racism. He acted in concert with others, many others, some of them with longer careers in social justice struggles than himself. There is a famous analogy in King’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, one he used many times, in which he compares his work to that of a pilot guiding a plane. The pilot is important, King concedes. However, that safe journey could not be achieved without the sometimes invisible work of a very skilled and committed ground crew. I might chose a slightly different analogy, but the point is an important one. As Ella Baker was fond of saying, “King didn’t make the movement, the movement made King.”

King understood this. We cannot build a movement for social justice by hanging our hopes on a single charismatic leader, no matter how articulate, committed, and brilliant he or she may be (not King and not Obama)."
Read full text here.

What MLK Would Do: How to make labor organizing a civil right.
By Richard Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit
posted on April 3, 2012, on Slate

Excerpt: "More than four decades later, while progress on King’s vision of racial justice is hardly complete, the United States has become a far more racially inclusive society. By contrast, we’ve lost ground on reaching the goal of economic justice, as inequality has reached record heights.  Along the way, the American labor movement King traveled to Memphis to support has essentially collapsed, representing just 7 percent private sector workers, compared with more than one-third in the 1950s"... more

And from Grace Lee Boggs: The beloved community of Martin Luther King
an article in Yes! Magazine from May 2004:
"On the 75th anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth, an elder stateswoman of the Black Power movement reflects on what might have been different if we'd taken King's most radical teachings to heart-and what might still be possible."