Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

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<span style="font-weight: 700; font-size: 14px"><i>Make It a Day ON, Not a Day Off!</i></span></font>

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to forge the common
ground on which people from all walks of life could join
together to address important community issues. On
January 21st, 2008, millions of Americans across the
country will once again honor his legacy by
<a href="/about/how/index.asp">taking part in a wide range of service projects</a>—conducting food drives,
painting schools and community centers, recruiting
mentors for needy youth, and bringing meals to homebound
neighbors, to name but a few.


In recognition of the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s
assassination, the Corporation for National and
Community Service in 2008 is also pleased to join with
other organizations in supporting a new initiative, “40
Days of Nonviolence: Building the Beloved Community.”
Under this initiative, the King Day of Service will kick
off 40 days during which families, schools, faith
communities, and other organizations will plan service
projects and educational activities promoting Dr. King’s
message of nonviolence and social justice.
<a href="/about/beloved_community/index.asp">Click here</a> for more information.</p>


http://www.mlkday.gov/
 
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<font size="5"><center>Doing justice to the memory
of MLK's faith and vision</font size></center>


2002735915.gif


By William H. Chafe
Special to The Times

IN the decades since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, politicians and commentators have honored his birthday by celebrating his "mainstream" values — his commitment to the American Dream, his belief in equal opportunity and, above all, his hope that, one day, white and black children might be judged by "the content of their character ... [and not] by the color of their skin."

Yet, these celebrations fail to do justice to King's commitment to social justice, the complexity of his political convictions and the profound religious faith that enabled him to endure racism, as well as persecution by the FBI. Only when we understand the full scope of King's vision of equality can we appreciate his true legacy.

That legacy begins with the power of King's faith, which became searingly personal when, soon after agreeing to become the spokesman for the Montgomery bus boycott, he began receiving nightly phone calls from people threatening to kill his family.

Unable to sleep and tormented by visions of his little girl suffering, King broke down one night in his kitchen. As David Garrow writes in his biography of King, at that moment King heard an inner voice saying, "Stand up for justice, stand up for truth ... [It was] the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone." From that moment forward, the voice in the kitchen was King's personal anchor.

The second point to recognize is the tension King insisted upon between his embrace of the New Testament's gospel of unconditional love and the Old Testament's prophetic insistence on righteous justice. Latter-day King celebrants focus on his support for reconciliation without acknowledging his prophetic anger.

"It is not enough for us to talk about love," he told his followers. "There is another side called justice ... Standing beside love is always justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion — we've got to use the tools of coercion."

It was this co-existence of love and justice that led King to write his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in 1963. To moderate white clergymen who pleaded for patience and a reduction in tension, King wrote: "[N]onviolent direct action seeks to create ... a crisis and foster such tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue."

King then drove home the point. "The Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom," he wrote, "is not the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers the negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

The third and final point is King's insistence that racial justice was inextricably linked to economic justice and international peace. "We are engaged in a social revolution," he proclaimed. "The evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together, and you can't really get rid of one without getting rid of the others." That was why he condemned America's war in Vietnam, demanded "basic structural changes in the architecture of American society," and insisted that his dream of a just society required "a radical redistribution of economic and political power."

All these themes came together in the last months of King's life. Hounded by the FBI, which sent him tapes documenting his sexual infidelities and a letter suggesting he commit suicide, King became profoundly depressed. In the words of his wife Coretta, "[H]e didn't expect to live a long life."

But then there was that voice from the kitchen — a voice that gave him the courage to continue standing up for justice and love, and that sent him to Memphis to advance the cause of striking sanitation workers there as part of the Poor People's Campaign to which he was now devoted.

"It doesn't really matter with me now," he declared the night before his assassination, "because I've been to the mountaintop ... 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."

So as we remember the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., let us recognize the full depth of his faith and vision — not just the antiseptic version that has now become part of our official culture.

pi]William H. Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University, and author of the recently published "Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern America" (Harvard University Press). [/i]

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company




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<font size="5"><center>King’s Son, Others Warn on His Birthday:
Don’t Be Mystified By Historic Candidacies</font size></center>



Black Press USA
by Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Editor-in-Chief

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – As millions commemorate the 79th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jan. 21, orators and community leaders across the nation will point to the historic presidential campaigns of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as a sign that Dr. King’s dream is becoming real.

But, his oldest son and others who marched with Dr. King this week cautioned observers against becoming so fixated on the candidates that they forget about the issues that would still cause Dr. King pain.

“This is a pivotal year for our nation because our nation is saying, 'We are willing to potentially elect an African-American or a woman as our number one person as our nominee',” says Martin Luther King III.

“In a sense, the ground was tilled for all of that many years ago by my father and many others so that we could get to this point as it relates to this one issue. I say ‘this one issue' because while Barack Obama is doing incredibly well around our nation, the masses of people of color are still being inflicted at certain levels of pain on issues around race.”

He continues, “It’s wonderful on the one hand because it says that America is perhaps a different nation. But, it still does not excuse the fact that there are many issues in relationship to civil and human rights that still must be addressed.”

People who do not normally watch politics are suddenly following Democratic primaries like a sport as news of inequities and injustices such as the Jena Six case, noose intimidations, police misconduct, brutality, and police shootings around the nation still flourish.

Simultaneously, key progresses are occurring such as record numbers of Black elected officials, African-Americans leading Fortune 500 Companies, Black Caucus members leading committees of Congress, and African-Americans breaking historic barriers of all kinds around the nation.

“Who would have thought that a Black would one day be the head of American Express, or that a Black would be the head of Time-Warner or Merrill Lynch?” King III quizzes. “That is very positive, just as if Barack Obama is able to garner the nomination and then become president. That would be phenomenal, but it does not mean the work is complete. That’s the main point.”

Others who marched with Dr. King echoed these sentiments in interviews with the NNPA News Service this week as they discussed current events in America that would cause the slain civil rights leader to applaud and other issues that he would lament.

“He would be the saddest to know that we’re at war,” says Dr. Dorothy Height, president emeritus of the National Council of Negro Women and a peer of Dr. King and the Big Six civil rights leaders. “In his last speech from Riverside church in New York at the time of the Vietnam War, he said, ‘Stop the bombing,’ Height recalls. “But, I think that he would be equally sad to see that we have so many people in poverty.”

The U. S. Census Bureau reports that the number of Americans living in poverty is around 36 million, with African-Americans remaining nearly twice the national rate at around 25 percent.

The Rev. Dr. Willie T. Barrow, 82, a long-time board member of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and a behind-the-scenes organizer for King, says she thinks the health care crisis – often a result of poverty - would be foremost on his mind.

“He would be sad to see that [47 million] people don’t have health care.” At the same time, she said, he would be pleased to see that so many Black youth are actively involved in civil rights, such as the Jena Six marches, as well as involved in the Democratic campaigns for the presidency.

“I think the Obama campaign is really showing that,” she says.

Despite the excitement surrounding the candidacies, economic issues are foremost, says the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., who marched alongside King and is considered one of his lieutenants.

“I preached at Ebenezer today at his church here in Atlanta and I spent most of his last birthday with him at his church. His own last birthday was spent organizing the Poor People’s campaign and preparing the march to Washington to engage in national civil disobedience,” says Jackson in a Sunday evening interview.

“Forty years later, we’ve seen the most wholesale shift of resources ever with losses, taking our land, taking our houses through these mortgages foreclosures and the sub-prime scam.”

Jackson, who has announced a Jan. 22 march on the Department of Housing and Urban Development at noon, says he is certain that Dr. King would be crying out on behalf of the victims of defaulted sub-prime loans.

“He would be fighting therefore to save people’s homes, to restructure loans and to repossess homes. I’m sure he would. And he’d be fighting to not only end the war in Iraq, but to redirect the resources from the war in Iraq to build America’s cities, bridges collapsing in Minnesota and levies collapsing in New Orleans, obviously the infrastructure is crumbling while we keep giving tax cuts to the rich and getting in deeper in debt with China.”

Jackson said that on the other hand, King would be genuinely pleased with South Carolina, where the race between Obama and Clinton will next be spot-lighted.

“I think he’d be proud of just the real competition. Forty years ago when he died, we’d just gotten the right to vote for two years. And now in South Carolina, that vote could very well determine the launching pad for the next president. So, the empowerment of the masses of us, just the real talent would impress him.”

Still, King's hopes would be that the candidates would do something for the poor, says Height: “His last effort on earth was to march on Washington to force the government to respond to poor people.”

http://www.blackpressusa.com/News/Article.asp?SID=3&Title=Hot+Stories&NewsID=15059
 

Makkonnen

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<span style="font-weight: 700; font-size: 14px"><i>Make It a Day ON, Not a Day Off!</i></span></font>

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to forge the common
ground on which people from all walks of life could join
together to address important community issues. On
January 21st, 2008, millions of Americans across the
country will once again honor his legacy by
<a href="/about/how/index.asp">taking part in a wide range of service projects</a>—conducting food drives,
painting schools and community centers, recruiting
mentors for needy youth, and bringing meals to homebound
neighbors, to name but a few.


In recognition of the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s
assassination, the Corporation for National and
Community Service in 2008 is also pleased to join with
other organizations in supporting a new initiative, “40
Days of Nonviolence: Building the Beloved Community.”
Under this initiative, the King Day of Service will kick
off 40 days during which families, schools, faith
communities, and other organizations will plan service
projects and educational activities promoting Dr. King’s
message of nonviolence and social justice.
<a href="/about/beloved_community/index.asp">Click here</a> for more information.</p>


http://www.mlkday.gov/
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<font size="5">
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial:
First-Hand Look</font size>
<font size="4">

Russ Mitchell Gets Up-Close and Personal
Tour of $120M Honor on National Mall in
Washington, Opening This Summer</font size>


(CBS) WASHINGTON -- It has been more than 42 years since the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

The Martin Luther King Memorial is slated to open this August on the National
Mall in Washington, D.C.

The $120 million dollar project, more than 20 years in the making, will feature
a 28 foot statue of the slain civil rights leader, as well as granite stones with
15 of his most famous quotes.

The memorial will be between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.

NO non-president has been so honored on the mall.

CBS News correspondent Russ Mitchell was given unprecedented access to
the memorial, which is almost three-quarters complete.

Harry Johnson, president and CEO of the MLK Memorial Foundation, showed
Mitchell around:



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image7254614g.jpg

Towering 28-foot statue of Dr.Martin
Luther King Jr. in memorial to slain civil
rights leader scheduled to open this
summer on the National Mall in Wash-
ington (Getty Images/Mark Wilson).



http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/17/earlyshow/main7254615.shtml
 

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<font size="5"><center>
Pastor believes he was on
balcony with King for a reason</font size></center>



0117_mlk_metro.ART_G07177MU7.1+MLK_Kyles_3.standalone.prod_affiliate.58.jpg

The Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles was the keynote speaker at the
"Share the Dream" banquet at UTA. Kyles was the only person
standing on the motel balcony with Martin Luther King Jr. when
a gunshot struck down the civil rights leader.



0117_mlk_metro.ART_G07177MU7.1+lorraine_motel.standalone.prod_affiliate.58.jpg

Kyles was with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was slain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on
April 4, 1968. Star-Telegram/Ben Noey Jr.



Star-Telegram
By Robert Cadwallader
rcadwallader@star-telegram.com
Sunday, Jan. 16, 2011


ARLINGTON -- The Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles' life has been a fight for those without power, but his legacy is defined by a bloody moment outside a Memphis motel room on April 4, 1968.

Kyles was the only person standing on the motel balcony with Martin Luther King Jr. when a gunshot struck down the civil rights leader.

"I had just turned around and walked about five feet, and that's when the shot rang out -- Ka-PAH-yah! -- and people started ducking and screaming and hollering, and it was unbelievable," Kyles said during a visit for Arlington's "Sharing the Dream" Celebration 2011, a four-day event that ends today.

It begins the story he has recited hundreds, maybe thousands of times to anyone who yearns for a living, breathing connection with King.

"People are so curious about it," he said. "No matter what [program] they put together, they will ask, 'Will you say something about the last hour?' And it's been 40 years. So no matter where I go, I close out by telling that story."

Kyles' civil rights work didn't begin with King. Born in the South, Kyles grew up in Chicago. He moved his family to the segregated city of Memphis, where he has served as pastor of Monumental Baptist Church. He also worked with the NAACP and in 1968 helped persuade King to visit Memphis to bolster support for black city sanitation workers, who were on strike.


<font size="3">Kyles has struggled to understand his purpose in being on the balcony that day. </font size>

"It was too powerful to be happenstance," he said, resting near the stage at the Bluebonnet Ballroom at the University of Texas at Arlington late Friday. He had just spoken to 480 people at a King celebration banquet and then posed for photos with dozens of them. "There had to be some reason."

He came to believe his calling is to serve as an ambassador of history. Last year, he logged 17,000 miles telling his story.​

<font size="3">Does it get tiring? </font size>

"No, it really doesn't. Just seeing the reaction of people, I know this is what I'm supposed to do. People came up to me tonight, some even in tears. They wanted to let it out and touch history. I said, 'You can do that. You can do that.'"​

<font size="3">What was your early inspiration in civil rights? </font sie>

"When those students did the sit-ins [at the segregated Woolworth's store lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.], I was amazed that they let them pour coffee on them and put out cigarettes on them, and they didn't fight back. I said this is going to be something great, and I want to be a part of it."​

<font size="3">When you were on the balcony and you heard the shot, what was your first reaction? </font size>

"I thought it was a car backfire, because you can park right up to the door. When I saw people ducking, I knew it was a shot."​


<font size="3">What happened next? </font size>


"I went in the room to call an ambulance. The operator was the motel owner's wife, and she heard the shot and left the switchboard, so I couldn't get anybody to use the phone. She had a heart attack. She died a few days later."

There's been a lot of progress in civil rights since then, but what would you say is the most immediate issue now?

"Every survey you take, you see that African-Americans are at the bottom. Education. Medically, we don't get the same treatment. We've got to tackle that. I said in my presentation, we need to keep holding fast, and we'll work it out. We have done a tremendous job. From slavery to the president of the United States. My God! In less than 150 years? It's mind-boggling to me."​

Robert Cadwallader, 817-390-7641



http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/16/2773135/pastor-believes-he-was-on-balcony.html
 

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COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
"Whenever the government provides opportunities and privileges for white people and rich people they call it ‘subsidies.’ When they do it for Negro and poor people they call it ‘welfare.’ The fact is that everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of ninety percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem."

--Martin Luther King Jr.
Miami, FL

I saw this quote on TV, it has some truth to it...
 

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MLK Decried the Psychological Enslavement of Blacks​

<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">It is well past time for black people to heed Martin Luther
King Jr.’s call to build a movement for emotional emancipation.</span>​



mlk.jpg.CROP.rtstory-large.jpg





There is a sad irony in the fact that we are celebrating what would have been the 85th birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., just a month after the New York Times focused national attention on the gap in breast-cancer survival rates between black and white women. This news came on top of the disclosure that the income and wealth gaps between blacks and whites continue to grow, and the gap in standardized-test scores has scarcely budged.

The King holiday has been with us now for nearly 30 years. Every year we celebrate him as the Dreamer and the Drum Major. But the data on the disruptions within the black community continue to add up, and they are likely to keep getting worse until we pay attention to a forgotten yet crucial part of King’s legacy: <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">his call for psychological liberation</span>.

In August 1967, in his final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King drew a powerful link between racism and the psychological health of black people. In answer to the question “Where do we go from here?” he said, “First we must massively assert our dignity and worth.” He talked about the “false sense of inferiority” that plagues the black community and pointed to the need for us to regain our “psychological freedom.” “Any movement for the Negro’s freedom,” he said, “that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried.”

On this, as with so many other issues, King was prophetic. There is a growing body of evidence that the black community is in emotional distress brought about by the historical and continuing trauma of racism and its dehumanizing consequences. Among the signs of distress are 1) the fact that homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men, 2) a consistent decline in both the number and longevity of black marriages and 3) the disproportionate number of African Americans who are incarcerated.

A comprehensive study by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found that higher levels of chronic physical health problems, such as hypertension, heart disease and obesity, and of depression and lower life satisfaction are related to the chronic stress of racism. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s 2006 resolution against racism, “Racism and racial discrimination adversely affect mental health by diminishing the victim’s self-image, confidence, and optimal mental functioning.” And a recent study in the journal Psychological Science found that experiencing discrimination increases anger and risk-taking behavior.

We believe that close to the root of many of the problems plaguing our community is the lie of black inferiority. That lie was introduced centuries ago to justify the dehumanization and enslavement of black people, and it is still with us today—undermining our psychological, physical, family and community well-being. It is also undermining our ability to address our challenges. A community in emotional distress cannot deal effectively with the problems confronting it.

Community Healing Network and the Association of Black Psychologists are working in collaboration to build a movement for the emotional emancipation, healing, wellness and empowerment of black people. A key element of our collaboration is the development of the concept of Emotional Emancipation Circles—culturally grounded, evidence-based support groups through which we as a people can work together to develop essential emotional-wellness skills and compassionately examine our community, family and personal histories to decide which of our attitudes and behaviors are worth taking with us—and which must be left behind—as we move forward to build a future in which we can thrive, not just survive.

A team from ABPsi has developed an Emotional Emancipation Circles Guide, which has been piloted in Tuskegee, Ala. (pdf), and New Haven, Conn. At its 45th annual convention in New Orleans in July 2013, ABPsi trained teams of psychologists who have launched EE Circles in more than 20 cities across the African Diaspora. CHN and ABPsi will continue to work together to provide webinar training to local leaders to launch additional EE Circles starting in February 2014 through an initiative called “Celebrating Our History, Transforming Our Present, and Taking Control of Our Destiny.”

Our goal is to engage a critical mass of black people in the United States in the movement for emotional emancipation by the year 2019, the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans at Jamestown Colony. As a people, we know a great deal about King, the dreamer. But we need to know even more about King, the psychological freedom fighter. As he said, “The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation.”

The Root aims to foster and advance conversations about issues relevant to the black Diaspora by presenting a variety of opinions from all perspectives, whether or not those opinions are shared by our editorial staff.



SOURCE



 

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member
Dkos diary...good read. The picture that originally accompanied this on their facebook page was of several men being forced to undress. I guess they changed the picture. I had never heard of that sort of treatment, tho I shouldn't be surprised. The picture on the current diary is Dr. King addressing a crowd. I'm just posting the text. He said it was a short diary, but it really wasn't. Bolded parts are author's emphasis, not mine.


~~~~~~~​

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/...-no-idea-what-Martin-Luther-King-actually-did


This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective.

The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished.

What most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That's why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind.

Head below the fold to read about what Martin Luther King, Jr. actually did.



~~~~~~~​



I remember that many years ago, when I was a smartass home from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, probably for the second time.

A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we were talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call, "peasant" origin, although he had risen solidly into the working-middle class. He was from rural Virginia and his parents had been tobacco farmers. I spent two weeks or so every summer on the farm of my grandmother and step-grandfather. They had no running water, no gas, a wood burning stove, no bathtubs or toilets but an outhouse, potbelly stoves for heat in the winter, a giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung, chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no tractor or car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse drawn implements, and electricity only after I was about 8 years old. The area did not have high schools for blacks and my father went as far as the seventh grade in a one room schoolhouse. All four of his grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had been born slaves. It was mainly because of World War II and urbanization that my father left that life.

They lived in a valley or hollow or "holler" in which all the landowners and tenants were black. In the morning if you wanted to talk to cousin Taft, you would walk down to behind the outhouse and yell across the valley, "Heeeyyyy Taaaaft," and you could see him far, far in the distance, come out of his cabin and yell back.

On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they lived in isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did have to leave the valley to go to town where all the rigid rules of Jim Crow applied. By the time I was little, my people had been in this country for six generations (going back, according to oral rendering of our genealogy, to Africa Jones and Mama Suki), much more under slavery than under freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism, which had inculcated many humiliating behavior patterns.

Anyway, that's background. I think we were kind of typical as African Americans in the pre-civil rights era went.

So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X's message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn't that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn't accomplished anything as Dr. King had.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his "I have a dream speech."

Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, "he marched." I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."

Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.

But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I'm guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the midwest and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.

White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of "assault," which could be anything from rape to not taking off one's hat, to "reckless eyeballing."

This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father's memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady.

This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.

I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents' vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.

This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.

If you didn't get taught such things, let alone experience them, I caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans.

The question is, how did Dr. King do this—and of course, he didn't do it alone.

(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of nonviolent resistance, and taught the practices of nonviolent resistance.)

So what did they do?

They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.

Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.

If we do it all together, we'll be okay.

They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn't that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.

And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn't that bad.

Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?

These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.

That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era.

Please let this sink in. It wasn't marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.

So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war-like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears. So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.

That is what Dr. King did—not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives.

Once the beating was over, we were free.

It wasn't the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid. So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I admire you, you were wrong on this one. Our people freed ourselves and those Acts, as important as they were, were only white people officially recognizing what we had done.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Martin Luther King Jr.
on Revolution and Justice
The civil rights activist and Nobel laureate on the
inevitability of social activism in the presence of injustice.​


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