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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.
-------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and authors of Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits (Common Courage Press).
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
where you will find such gems as:
"What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?":
more of King’s speech, which must have given aid and comfort to Ho Chi Minh’s communist regime:
“I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:
Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.”
In other words, King wasn’t just a fraud but a Communist.
“It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
Thanks. I can almost excuse him because of racism and the way the communists used that wedge to work for power. Doubt he would have changed had he lived to see Pol Pot. None of the other lefties did which to me is unfathomable.
“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.”
Marquette Park was the only large park left on the south side at the time that wasn’t in a Black neighborhood, and King wanted to “integrate” it. Strange how the Bridgeport neighborhood where the Daley family lived, which was right in the path of the Black migration of the 60’s and 70’s never suffered the same fate as Englewood and other neighborhoods....
MLK had been making soft on Communism speeches since the early 1950s, when Uncle Joe Stalin was still running the show in the USSR. I once found some juicy quotes from those speeches at a website run by the King foundation, but it’s hard to pull quotes from that site.
John Kennedy and his attorney general brother Robert approved of the FBI wiretapping King, in part because of two associates that King refused to part with. They were Hunter Pitts O’Dell and Stanley Levison, both members of the Communist Party:
“The Cold War was in full swing in late 1963 when Bobby Kennedy authorized the first King wiretap. On JFK’s watch, Khrushchev had put up the Berlin Wall and had almost provoked a nuclear exchange by introducing atomic-armed missiles into Cuba. “Wars of National Liberation” were being fully stoked by the shoe-pounder in the Kremlin. Yet King, already a powerful civil rights figure, had surrounded himself with several radical advisers, including at least two long-time members of the Communist Party.
Stanley Levison was one of them. He may have been, as King’s friendly biographer, David Garrow sometimes suggests, King’s most trusted adviser from 1956 until the civil rights leader’s death in 1968. Levison, an important CP member, was also responsible for placing on the board of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference Hunter Pitts (Jack) O’Dell, who became a member of the national committee of the U.S. Communist Party in 1959. These were the indisputable facts that eventually impelled the Kennedy Administration to wiretap King.”
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=12701
Gee, and I thought I wasn’t naive. Thank you.
It was based on a poorly-researched article trumpeted by a Black Republican and frequently trotted out (despite having been debunked). MLK Jr. had absolutely zero use for Conservative Republicanism, calling Goldwater (his candidacy in 1964) a tool of Southern racists. Had he lived past 1968, I think he would’ve followed down the same route as so many of our “well respected” Civil Rights leaders (such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, John Lewis, et al). Personally, I’d rather celebrate leaders like Booker T. Washington. He identified these race-hustler charlatans we see today more than a century ahead of time.
I didn’t see many Republicans working to end racism in the US back then although they worked mightily to end racism from 1860-1865
You might find this essay by Paul Gottfried of interest; he is pondering why conservatism, which once enjoyed a clear-eyed assessment of MLK, has now swallowed the MLK koolaid whole:
“It is significant that the worst distortions about King’s life are not found in the standard leftist biographies. Such as those by David J. Garrow and Taylor Branch. Despite the spin that these authors put on political events and the triumphalist tone of their narratives, they still show King’s personal defects and dependence on Communist mentors and give accurate accounts of his radical leftist politics.
The most ridiculous accounts are found not on the left but in the neoconservative-induced propaganda about King the conservative Christian. The mythical figure who emerges from this propaganda opposed Affirmative Action quota programs, although from interviews—and most palpably in comments printed in Playboy in 1965—it seems clear that King favored the remedies that he is supposed to have resisted. In the Playboy interview King went beyond affirmative action remedies to call for a government compensatory program of $50 billion to be paid mostly to blacks but also to other groups that had been subject to past discrimination.
In contrast to Kirchick’s account, Ronald Reagan yielded only reluctantly to Congress (and especially to the importuning of GOP Congressmen Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich) when he signed off on the King Holiday.
Reagan undoubtedly held the same doubts about King’s character and politics as a Democratic predecessor, Jack Kennedy, according to recently-revealed interviews of Kennedy’s widow. (See for example Jackie Kennedy Onassis not a fan of Martin Luther King Jr., Politico.com, November 9, 2011) Indeed, Paul’s observations about King are perhaps generous next to those of Jackie Kennedy and the Kennedy Administration—and a fortiori National Review, before it fell into neoconservative hands.”
“... the King Cult provides a sort loyalty test for those “conservative” activists, fundraisers, and journalists who hoped to enjoy neoconservative patronage. This test also became a dividing line (albeit not the only one) between the neoconservative Realm of Peace and its enemies on the right, who had to be marginalized and ostracized. Only those who swallowed the King myth whole could be trusted to serve their overlords.
Unlike most popular historical narratives, the King myth is not a mixture of facts and hyperbole. It is entirely manufactured as a test of Political Correctness.”
Blacks had always been Republican and were in 1932, Blacks reversed their vote in the 1936 election when they suddenly and mysteriously switched with 71% for FDR, it has been Democrat since then.
bttt
I am getting an education today. :-)
Not too long ago, 85% of blacks were Republican. This is no hard to believe...the Democrats of the South were the slave-owners and blacks voted the party of Lincoln for almost 100 years.
It was only when the Democrats diabolically began to feed the blacks Federal money under FDR and LBJ that they switched sides.
Marquette Park was the only large park left on the south side at the time that wasn’t in a Black neighborhood, and King wanted to “integrate” it.I loved that park and area. I had an Aunt & Uncle that lived close to teh Park and the Park's Golf Course is one of the places I learned to play when I was a 'wee lad'.
Then in the 19070's me and my buds would hang out in the park, near the Park's Monument on the corner at 67th & California Ave. We'd just sit on a bench, chill and 'bs', while listening to one of the car's radios through an open door window. It was a beautiful place to just go and relax.
Not any longer. MLK got his dream - it's now an 'integrated' black & brown poop-hole of an area, and park.
As I recall Blacks were voting about 75%-25% against the GOP in the 1960’s.
My point was more along the line that a new and stunning level of undisguised Black anger and contempt for the GOP emerged around 1968.
Race was no longer the issue.
It was now an issue of deeply held political values.
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