Posted on 01/16/2012 12:41:11 AM PST by No One Special
It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."
The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.
Why?
It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.
"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."
You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it. Life magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."
King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" — appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."
How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.
As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it's no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.
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Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and authors of Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits (Common Courage Press).
....just saying
Mr. Jones said (threatened?) that "2012 will be a turbulent, exciting year. It's important for us to get together and get ready."
turbulent adj. Violently agitated or disturbed; tumultuous: turbulent rapids. 2. Having a chaotic or restless character or tendency: a turbulent period in history. 3. Causing unrest or disturbance; unruly: turbulent, revolutionary undercurrents.
Or as the Van Joneses used to say in the 60s "Take ten!"
Given the myriad racial attacks like that on the 14-year-old girl in Portland, Oregon, maybe today's rallying cry would be "Take it to the MAX!"
Note: As I recall Van Jones said that something was going to happen about a month before OWS hit the fan. He knows.
Why talk about this? Let me ask, Who talks about this black-on-white violence -- except the mayor of Philadelphia, the only Democratic Party member that has been reported as denouncing the attacks. What are we? Punching bags?
-- and don't say that well, in the 1960s it was just the opposite. No! it was not. I recall Cincinnati where whites were blocked on city streets, dragged out of their cars and beaten. Some suffered permanent injuries.
A sensible criticism. Notes that MLK did good, then went elsewhere.
Both also used a sing-song cadence that one expects from the rabble-rousing "orators" of the Leftists.
abc ran a story this morning saying that MLK had unfinished work... to turn America into a communist state by demanding economic justice... aka stalinism. abc wants that result also.
LLS
He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor”.
Sounds like what Obama and media are doing.If you make more people poor the greater the army.
At 'one time' King may have been a registered Republican. But that all changed when first JFK and RFK, and then especially LBJ pushed 'Civil Rights' legislation. There's White House tapes of LBJ on the phone with MLK and King was behind Johnson and the RATS all the way.
(a) The History International Channel (now H2) and the Nat Geo Channel can be very enlightening.
(b) MLK wasn't all that 'non-violent' when he marched/protested. When he was in Chicago and marching into the Marquette Park neighborhood, behind MLK and the other 'Rev's' were black gang-bangers. And they always started 'something' with the white locals who lived there. Every march turned into a Riot. 'Non-Violent' he wasn't.
Poor beautiful South Africa. I stood in the Levubu Tropical Valley in 2004 speaking to a black man who was part of the “new government” and we discussed the land “re-purchase”. He said it would not be like Zimbabwe. I knew right there and then it would be exactly like Zimbabwe. God help the Afrikaners!
Some say that Marilyn Monroe suicided after JFK handed her off to MLK
Not just making people poor, but convincing the non-poor they are (witness the bulk of Occupiers).
Links to transcripts of these questionable speeches?
LOL, hadn't heard that one.
Personally I'm in the 'conspiracy camp'. The RFK offing her with Peter Lawford and 'others' help. For one, RFK lied about where he was on that night. He said DC, but was in fact, in LA. And a small hypo injection mark was found on MM and that was covered up (never reported) by the M.E. It was also a known fact that MM hated needles and would never inject herself. Add another body to the Kennedy family count.
King was with his mistress, Kentucky state senator Georgia Davis when he was shot. In fact, his handlers scrambled to make her go away as the media converged upon the Lorraine motel.
An absolutely outstanding book, Hellhound on His Trail details the final days of King's life and the world-wide manhunt for his killer, a small-time crook and aspiring pornographer who went by the name Eric Starvo Galt --but the world would later know as James Earl Ray.
By the time of his assassination, MLK was a has-been. A Time magazine poll didn't even list his name in the top ten most influential Americans. Many blacks, particularly younger ones had given up on "that old preacher" King and were gravitating towards the more militant black power leaders like Stokely Charmichael and Huey Newton. King was washed-up, womanizing and drinking too much while trying to plan a "million poor march" on Washington DC --an endeavor many of his increasingly fewer supporters believed was a quixotic pipe dream.
In April 1968, King was a fading star. James Earl Ray changed all that.
There is a good reason why his FBI files are not viewable.
I will confirm and verify your understanding.
It's a unanimous and anonymous group of sources that must be projected and protected, and therefore can not be relived or revealed {but for the right amount of cash I'd consider selling them out}. heheh
However, if I recall correctly, the King family has made most of what he said unavailable by using the copyright law, so there may not be much.
Another Marxist community organizer.
Someone to look up to by comparison would be Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams.
It has been documented that MLK, Jr. did attend CPUSA meetings. I don’t know if identified specifically with that form of collectivism but the op-ed pages were more or less correct since he wanted to get rid of the free enterprise capitalist system.
Both an audio recording and the transcript of King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech is found here:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
King’s speech was sponsored by “Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam “, a hard left antiwar group King belonged to that among other things accused American troops of war crimes.
“In February and April 1967 King delivered two speeches devoted entirely to Vietnam. On 25 February 1967, King delivered ‘‘The Causalities of the War in Vietnam.’’ He was eager to ensure his message would not be distorted and approached CALCAV to organize a public event where he could situate his position within the broader religious opposition to the war. CALCAV hired a publicist exclusively for the event, which was held at Riverside Church in New York City on 4 April 1967. King’s speech, which drew over 3,000 people, provided his most significant endorsement of the anti-war movement to date. CALCAV published and distributed 100,000 copies of the Riverside speeches and King accepted an invitation to be co-chair of the organization.
Later that month, CALCAV endorsed ‘‘Vietnam Summer,’’ a campaign promoted by King and the noted pediatrician Benjamin Spock to mobilize grassroots anti-war activists in preparation for the 1968 elections. Throughout the summer and fall, CALCAV chapters engaged in civil disobedience by protecting draft resisters, a departure from their more moderate tactics, such as petitions and vigils. The organization’s second national mobilization was timed to coincide with the February 1968 release of a study commissioned by CALCAV documenting American war crimes in Vietnam...”
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