Martin Luther King @ MindSay 
mlk
I used to be a huge fan of MLK, but I have come to realize that the man was a posturing opportunist. Reading through his speeches as a young 20-something can be very enlightening. One gets the sense of sitting in a blissful mountain pasture at a meeting of the world's races, surrounded by great thinkers who have made the meeting possible.
Unfortunately, the great thinkers were all there...ripped off by Dr. King. And yet, Dr. King didn't come to bring peace...he just came. The same movement that made King what he is has been usurped and reborn so many times that it's really hard to nail it down as having accomplished anything as a coherent movement in any sense. Yes, it has compelled us to make strides, but were they all strides in the right direction? I suppose that is a discussion for another day.
If anything, Dr. King proved one thing with his death: violence against public figures only helps them. Had Dr. King survived, the world would have discovered that he was a plagiarizing womanizer. Now, as with Kennedy, one mayn't point out the shortcomings of the man's behavior because he was killed.
And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate. I've seen to much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I've seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about Where do we go from here, that we honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace.
But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, Who owns the oil? You begin to ask the question, Who owns the iron ore? You begin to ask the question, Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water? These are questions that must be asked.
Now, don't think that you have me in a bind today. I'm not talking about communism.
What I'm saying to you this morning is that communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit—One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn't get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn't do. Jesus didn't say, Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying. He didn't say, Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that. He didn't say, Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery. He didn't say, Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively. He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic—that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, Nicodemus, you must be born again.
He said, in other words, Your whole structure must be changed. A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them—make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.
What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, America, you must be born again!
So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction. Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied.
Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout White Power! -- when nobody will shout Black Power!—but everybody will talk about God's power and human power."....
Read the FULL speech here.
Reclaiming King: Beyond "I Have a Dream"
People usually focus on the historic "I Have a Dream" speech, but it's the work King was doing at the end of his life that deserves more attention.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -- Dr. Martin Luther King jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", April 1963
The "I Have a Dream" speech has become a cliché. It's played every Martin Luther King Day and perhaps again during our so-called "Black History Month." With each passing year it feels more distant to me, more quaint. Its power has always been its simplicity and clarity, but its unassailable message has turned the man who delivered it into more of a myth than a human being made of flesh and blood.
I have vivid memories from my childhood of watching the famous speech in class and hearing an obnoxious white classmate of mine mock King's dramatic tones and rhetoric while other white students chuckled uncomfortably. Aside from wanting to strangle this kid, in part because I was so fascinated with King, I also felt far removed from the black and white images on the screen and from the dire times during which he and his supporters lived. Even his name -- the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., intimidated me. It felt more literary than literal.
My father is a Black Baptist preacher in the King tradition, he even attended King's alma mater, Morehouse College. As a child, I was encouraged to essentially worship King. His striking face adorns several walls of our home. The sound of his voice moved me to tears before I could even comprehend what he was saying. It was the sound of truth. Truth so deep it both hurt and inspired. As I grew older I was indoctrinated with the King story and was encouraged by my father to explore beyond King's 1963 plea for racial equality.
After his life was tragically cut short, as was a similarly honest and righteous Robert Kennedy a few months later, we, not just in the black community, but a nation as a whole, have spent the past forty years trying to grapple with his legacy. The mainstream media would like us to look at "I Have a Dream" and virtually nothing else. They can package that speech as a nice two-minute nostalgia clip. But I believe every good progressive American should look more to the King of '68 for inspiration.
By that time King's house had already been firebombed. He'd been wiretapped, stabbed, and assaulted with a brick. He was never uncontroversial and although he never officially claimed to be a member of any political party his positions and message were unapologetically progressive. These were in some ways darker times than his earlier more celebrated days during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the peace he helped achieve in Birmingham.
During the final two years of his life, King took on the far more complex de facto racism of northern cities like Chicago, addressed labor inequality, and took a very bold and highly criticized stance against the Vietnam War:
"As I have walked," King told the crowd assembled in Riverside Church a year before his assassination, "among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
By 1968, King's opposition to Vietnam and his unwavering commitment to nonviolence made him largely an outcast. The far right still despised him and everything he represented. But even more telling was the rejection he received from the left. He endured editorials from the Democratic establishment calling for a moratorium on civil rights and a break from marches. He was called a "disservice to his cause" and his people. New, younger voices in the Civil Rights Movement began ridiculing his non-violent stance, calling him out-of-touch and out-of-date.
Only the anti-war movement was prescient enough to see the wisdom of King's views at that time. In fact, there were efforts to recruit King to run for president on a ticket with activist and baby book guru Dr. Benjamin Spock, but King wasn't interested.
Now, forty years after his death, it seems like almost everyone wants to claim King. Mitt Romney got himself embroiled in controversy when he claimed to have seen his father march with King as a child, only to have to later admit that he didn't actually see anything of the sort and the "with" was most likely only in spirit as opposed to actuality.
On the Democratic side, Senators Obama and Clinton sparred when Obama tried to draw parallels between himself and King and Clinton tried to, in a characteristically self-serving way, suggest that King would not have been able to see his dream fulfilled (with the '64 Civil Rights Act, and '65 Voting Rights Act) if it hadn't been for legislators like LBJ (i.e. her).
The King they all hope to be identified with is the beatific, gloriously positive King of 1963, but I am fairly certain that none of them would be as comfortable linking themselves to the irascible, fiercely antiwar and increasingly radical King of 1968.
That King would most likely have just as vociferously opposed the Iraq War today as he did the Vietnam War then. This is the King who launched a "Poor People's Campaign," a thoroughly progressive campaign that was considered ambitious for its time and whose job has yet to be completed in part because King was killed, but also because its goal, of organizing America’s poor to fight for economic justice with regards to both compensation and treatment, was so large that no single leader could accomplish it on their own. The "Poor People's Campaign" extended beyond the African-American community. The goal was a "multiracial army of the poor" including whites, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans.
King traveled to severely impoverished communities with camera crews to shed light on poverty in America, knowing that there would be no symbolic victories or positive press coverage. King called for a "radical redistribution of economic power" in 1968, words that no establishment politician would be happy to associate themselves with expressing today.
During this period King was growing more certain of the inevitability of his own death. Only 39-years old, with young children and his wife at home, he put his life on the line every single day for nearly a decade. None of our current crop of candidates on either side can hold a candle to what he experienced in terms of burden and sacrifice.
Most of us know the vague details of Dr. King's murder in April of 1968, but few point out that he was in Memphis at the time in support of a racially polarizing labor dispute involving black sanitation workers. "All labor has dignity," Dr. King told the striking workers, "but you're doing another thing. You are reminding not only Memphis, but the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."
Right before his death he had been delayed getting on a flight because of a bomb threat and his mortality was very much on his mind when he delivered his final -- and some argue greatest -- speech, in which he said:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Even if the spiritual content and motivation of his words don't ring true for you, the essence of his bearing certainly should. King was a fighter and he would not relent in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Forty years after his death, our nation is in a state of crisis economically, socially, racially, internationally and environmentally. We may be looking at yet another election for the presidency where we may have little choice but to pick between the lesser of two evils.
And yet King's passion is still with us, only if we choose to access it. Just because he was motivated by love and peace, that doesn't mean that his message needed to be soft spoken and genteel. It can be and should be about reclaiming power. King himself said:
"There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love."
So this year, when the cable network repeat the "I Have a Dream" speech over and over again and intersperse it with the talking heads that bicker about whether or not King's hope for racial equality has been achieved, think of the King of '68 who fought for labor, fought against war, and launched a powerful movement that is very much still alive today and whose work is still not finished.
Today is Martin Luter King Day in the United States. Above is video of his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
King, who would be 79 years old if he were still alive, would surely see this year's US Presidential election as a sign of how far things have come since he lead the civil rights movement. Among the leading candidates this year: a black man, a woman, and a Morman.
Girl in my foods class: "What's a minority?"
My foods teacher to another person: "What are you doing on Monday for President's Day?"
Yes, these two rediculously uneducated utterances were heard by me today, within a half hour of eachother.
The teacher's old, but come on, you have to know that Monday is Martin Luther King day, and that President's Day is all the way in February. Sad.
But that other girl is really starting to piss me off. She always has a snide remark to me, but she's dumb as a doorknob! Like today I got a test back that I got a 95 on, and I simply said, "That's kinda dumb that she would take off a point for a grammar error, this isn't English class." Real calm, in a laughing sort of way, not that I really cared. Well she replies, "I hate when people complain when they get 95's!" Blah blah blah blah-dee blah. I said "I'm not complaining, I'm happy with my grade, hell no I aint mad" or something like that. But anyway, the bitch is annoying. Another time, she was complaining that she had to clean the whole kitchen, when meanwhile I helped her, and for almost EVERY SINGLE food lab, I wash the dishes, because none of their lazy asses will, and I actually want to get to my next class on time so I pick up the slack. The one day when I decide I'm not doing it, she gets allllll pissy. And also today, this guy in my class said something about the "wheel barrel" sex position. He described it, and she went, "Is that real or did you make that up?" I said, "Yeah, that's real. I've heard of it before." She replies, "Well thank you Jasmine, what do YOU do in your free time." or something to that affect. I should have said, "I'm a virgin thankyouverymuch." But I didn't even bother, it's pointless. It's called Cosmo magazine and having a porn addict boyfriend, dumbass. I liked her at first, but then I started to see what an airhead she was. She keeps talking about how she's moving in February, I wish she'd move now. What I can't stand most about her though is how she will criticize me and make nasty remarks, yet she is a dumb bimbo who doesn't know what a fuckin minority is!
Haha I went off into a rant about that dumb girl when that wasn't the point at all. The point was that people are sooo blissfully ignorant these days. I bet she wouldn't have confused it if it were Columbus Day, oh boy let's not start on that one, let's celebrate a man who invaded Native American territory and raped their women and claimed it as his, how American. But let's totally forget about Martin Luther King, one of the most influential figures in the Civil Rights Movement.
It's not just a race thing, it's a morality thing.
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