Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. -25 Major Speeches- Inspirational & Profound

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King Day 2019

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - 25 Major Speeches


25 Major Speeches that you won't hear on the "corporate-media-of-mass-distraction".
They will play a 30 second clip of the 'I Have A Dream' speech
and lie to the clueless audience that that phrase summed up his life's work.
Listen to them all, they are inspirational! and profound!



MLKing_speeches_list.jpg


Download all 25 speeches

Code:
https://mega.nz/#!asUyAKqS!-jKTaNqGjsZ_Gt-ORw--Ox5oMmIwjYvVIgqNuk0KGMA


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QueEx

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After 22 views, you'd think that someone would have thanked the poster for this wonderful contribution. :hmm:

Thank you sir.
 

QueEx

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Super Moderator
Martin Luther King Jr.
on What America Owes Black People
The civil rights leader on America’s indebtedness to its black citizens.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. -25 Major Speeches



Code:
https://mega.nz/#!asUyAKqS!-jKTaNqGjsZ_Gt-ORw--Ox5oMmIwjYvVIgqNuk0KGMA



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Dr. King being physically assaulted by rabidly barbaric racist cac in Chicago




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muckraker10021

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King Day 2017


Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - 25 Major Speeches


25 Major Speeches that you won't hear on the "corporate-media-of-mass-distraction".
They will play a 30 second clip of the 'I Have A Dream' speech
and lie to the clueless audience that that phrase summed up his life's work.
Listen to them all, they are inspirational! and profound!



MLKing_speeches_list.jpg


Download all 25 speeches

Code:
https://mega.nz/#!asUyAKqS!-jKTaNqGjsZ_Gt-ORw--Ox5oMmIwjYvVIgqNuk0KGMA


Martin_Luther_King_Jr_NYWTS_4.jpg
 
Last edited:

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

The forgotten dream of Martin Luther King Jr.


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John Wiebenson, a local architect, and others build a structure to use during the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign on the Mall.
(Leah L. Jones/Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture)



In that fraught and unsettled spring of 1968, Kenneth Jadin had a problem.

The 25-year-old architecture professor at Howard University needed a chunk of land. A big, big chunk of land.

Jadin and others had been tasked with the difficult challenge of figuring out how and where to house thousands of activists who would be flooding into Washington for an antipoverty demonstration so grand in scale and so ambitious in scope that no one had ever seen anything like it.

Decades before Occupy Wall Street mainstreamed the notion of protest as semi-permanent encampment, Washington was about to become the scene of a demonstration so fixed in place that it would have its own Zip code: 20013.

The demonstration was to be the centerpiece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, which he envisioned as a bold call to action to pressure the government to do more to address poverty. Jadin had a meeting scheduled with King, a man he admired but had yet to see in person, to discuss the difficult logistics of his plan to occupy Washington. That meeting was set to take place the first week of April.


But first, King would travel to Memphis, where an assassin’s bullet took his life.

The shots fired by James Earl Ray did not, however, halt King’s vision for a nonviolent show of civil disobedience — featuring a diverse array of African Americans, as well as Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and Appalachian and rural whites — intended to rattle the capital and its powerful inhabitants. Jadin and other volunteers kept planning. They had been considering staging the demonstration site — which would take the name “Resurrection City” — at an abandoned airfield or on undeveloped land owned by a cemetery. But now they pressed for approval for their first choice.

“We’re going to get the National Mall,” Jadin, now a professor emeritus at Howard, remembers telling colleagues. “They can’t say no now.”

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Kenneth Jadin, 75, is one of the architects who designed and oversaw construction of Resurrection City. At the time,
he was teaching architecture and city planning at Howard University. (Andre Chung/for The Washington Post)

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Freelance photographer Robert Houston’s rarely seen images of the Poor People's Campaign are now on display at
the Smithsonian. (Robert Houston)

And he was right. In the weeks to come a city grew on the expanse of land between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. At its height, 3,000 people would take up residence there in tents that Jadin designed.

But in a sense what they did there has been lost to time, wedged as it was amid the anguish of two of the signal tragedies of 20th-century America: the assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot less than a month after Resurrection City was erected and three weeks before riot police forced the demonstrators out of their camp.

“It’s a forgotten part of our history,” Marc Steiner, a Baltimore radio host and longtime activist who lived at Resurrection City during its six-week run, said in an interview.

A protest in living color
The assassinations of King and Kennedy drew so much attention that dozens of images captured by a freelance photographer on assignment for Life Magazine, Robert Houston, were pushed aside for bigger news — and never published.

An enlarged version of one of Houston’s photos greets visitors to a new exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign in space dedicated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the National Museum of American History. Half a century on, Houston’s photographs have a special resonance: While many of the images of the civil rights era were taken in black-and-white, Houston often shot with color film.

His image of a striking yellow school bus ferrying demonstrators from Newark pulls visitors into the exhibit, serving as a kind of beacon of brightness in a space where the lighting and the mood are more subdued. Houston’s photos have seldom been seen in public, but they came to the attention of the Smithsonian after an exhibition of his work was held at Morgan State University, Houston said.

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Photographer Robert Houston captured this image of a school bus ferrying demonstrators from Newark to Resurrection
City. Houston shot his photos in color, which was rare in the civil rights era. (Robert Houston)
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A button shows the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, who helped to organize the
Poor People's Campaign. (Alex Jamison)

On a recent morning, Houston — now 82 and still active as a photographer in Baltimore — stood beneath the school bus photograph looking up at the faces: young black men wearing pins bearing the image of a slain civil rights leader, but with expressions that could only be read as optimism.

“You heard that four-letter word a lot: H-O-P-E,” said Houston, who lived in a tent throughout the demonstration. “Never before had I met a group of people who had absolutely nothing to lose. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

Jadin, the Howard University professor who was one of many sympathetic whites who joined the cause, drew up diagrams on how to assemble the plywood-and-plastic, A-frame tents where Houston and the rest of the demonstrators would live. The parts were assembled at a Catholic brotherhood facility north of the city, he said, and trucked in by volunteers. But once the young demonstrators got ahold of them, they let their creativity flow.

“I was amazed at the inventiveness of people,” Jadin recalled. “These high school kids . . . made two-story units. One of them told me he’d never held a hammer before!”

He thought to himself, “If they’re an example of the youth of today, we’re in good shape.”

Some painted peace signs on the plywood. A people’s university was erected, so demonstrators could attend classes, and a culture tent was set up. A Washington Post headline awkwardly declared a “City of Huts Started Near Mall; Leaders Vow a Long Camp-in.”

In May 1968, demonstrators began arriving in bus caravans and in mule carts. They were determined to make their presence known. Among those who had been vocally supportive was Kennedy, who was in the midst of his campaign for president and seemed to be on a path to the White House. Peter Edelman, a Georgetown law professor and the husband of civil rights leaders Marian Wright Edelman, recalled talking to Kennedy poolside one afternoon. Kennedy told him activists should go to the capital determined “to stay and to stay and keep on staying until people in Washington get sick of it and decide to do the right thing.”

[The March on Washington: 50 years later]

Tear gas and flying rocks
The goals of the Poor People’s Campaign included an “economic bill of rights” and more money for housing and jobs programs. Folk singer Pete Seeger spent time there, as did Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, who had recently starred on one of the biggest shows on television, “I Spy,” Steiner recalled.

But the means of achieving their goals weren’t universally agreed upon. Steiner, the longtime radio host who lived at Resurrection City for weeks, and many of the demonstrators advocated a boisterous, disruptive approach that was sometimes in conflict with the movement’s leaders, he said.

One day, Steiner said he and others stormed into a hotel where the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, who had assumed a more prominent leadership role after King’s assassination, was staying with other leading lights of the movement. Steiner, who had been slogging through mud brought on by heavy rains that swamped Resurrection City, didn’t like the optics of some of the movement’s leaders staying in more comfortable digs.

“There was clearly a split between those of us in the camps and the leadership,” Steiner said.

But others saw the movement’s leaders as galvanizing forces. Jadin marveled at the daily speech the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson delivered while breakfast was distributed.

“I hadn’t ever heard such preaching” Jadin said.


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The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and singer James Brown were among the many famous visitors to the tent city. (Laura
Jones)

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Residents of Resurrection City gather around a campfire. (Robert Houston)

Three weeks into the demonstration, the nation was rocked by the assassination of Kennedy during a campaign event in Los Angeles. His funeral procession stopped at Resurrection City and the crowd broke into song.

“It was one of the most emotional moments you’ve ever experienced with that number of people,” Steiner recalled. “Black, white, Latinos, spontaneously breaking into the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ His death in many ways was as profound as the death of Martin Luther King. He was someone who identified with poor people and wanted to do something about poverty.”

As the days dragged on, the resolve of the demonstrators waned and the population living in the more than 500 tents plummeted. By late June, the city’s tolerance for the demonstration was also gone. The demonstration permit was expiring, and protesters and police were trading accusations. Law-enforcement officials were accusing demonstrators of throwing rocks at officers, and Poor People’s Campaign leaders were arguing about alleged police brutality and saying riot forces were provoking camp residents by lobbing tear gas canisters.

On June 24, teams of riot police descended on Resurrection City firing tear gas. Houston, the freelance photographer, can remember leaping into the Reflecting Pool to wash the chemicals from his skin. More than 340 demonstrators, including Abernathy, were arrested. It was a demoralizing moment, as the demonstration came to an end without having achieved major tangible results.

“At the time I thought they’d crushed us. It was just dispersing all the energy of people who were coming in the beginning,” Steiner said. “That’s why people thought it was a failure.”

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Demonstrators march on Washington during the Poor People’s Campaign Solidarity Day on June 19, 1968. (Charles
Tasnadi/AP)

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An aerial view of the Poor People’s Campaign on Solidarity Day. (AP)

But, looking back, Steiner has begun to reassess. Yes, poverty persists as a huge problem — there were 35 million people, or about 17 percent of the total population, living in poverty in 1968, according to the Census Bureau, and there were 40.6 million, or about 12 percent, in the same condition in 2016.

Steiner noted how many of the activists returned to their communities and organized programs that helped countless people, a spirit that he believes lives on.

“The success is now — that 50 years later people are saying, ‘What? What happened?’ ” he said.

He was talking recently with a young activist who crowed that the protest movements of today are different.

“This is not your grandmother’s revolution,” the activist told him. “I said, ‘You’re part of a continuum.’ ”

City of Hope, the National Museum of African American History and Culture exhibition at the National Museum of American History, will be on display through December 2018. nmaahc.si.edu.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...b18ce41436a_story.html?utm_term=.51fe5f11fe76


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How JFK Saved MLK’s Life
And So Won The Presidency

Monday, January 15, 2018 | http://www.gregpalast.com/jfk-saved-mlks-life-won-presidency/#more-14889
By Greg Palast

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Greg Palast at King's Atlanta Church on assignment for Al Jazeera

It was a Republican, Martin Luther King Sr., who made John Kennedy president of the United States — for JFK’s saving Daddy King’s son, Martin Jr., from lynching.

This harrowing and little known drama of terror and courage, confirmed for me by Martin Luther King III, changed American politics — and America — forever.

On October 19, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Georgia for driving with an Alabama driver's license and sentenced to six months hard labor. No one expected King to survive the sentence — he’d be lynched at the outset.

His father, Martin King Sr., had one desperate chance to save his son. Daddy King had endorsed Richard Nixon, a family friend, for the presidency. Nixon could count on King, a Republican like many African-Americans, who chose the party of Lincoln over the racist Democratic party of Jim Crow segregation.

A desperate King called Vice-President Nixon — who refused to answer. But MLK’s wife, Coretta, had a single hope. She called a friend, pacifist activist Harris (later Senator) Wofford who called Bobby Kennedy.

RFK didn’t hesitate, calling from a pay phone on Long Island to his brother, demanding John save MLK Jr.

It was just three weeks before the presidential election, a race too close to call. This was a crisis. Three Southern governors warned the Kennedys that any help for Dr. King and JFK would lose three Deep South states.

John Kennedy, who’d just won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, knew this was his test. He gave Bobby the go-ahead to save King.

Bobby called Atlanta and told the judge he’d post King’s bond — though the judge had never offered bond. But this Democratic judge knew that with his party, the Kennedys could employ and destroy.

Meanwhile, according to Martin King III, his father was pulled from his Atlanta jail at 2am and told he would be transferred to Reidsville Prison hours from the city. King was certain he would not live to see the dawn.

But the judge had let it be known that King now was now under the protective gaze of the Kennedys. And MLK, said his son, was “the first prisoner ever to be thrilled and thankful to enter the gates of Reidsville Prison.”

But the warning came true. Word of Kennedy saving King cost JFK the electoral votes of Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia. But then there was the miracle. Daddy King had written a pamphlet beginning, in block letters:

“No Comment” Nixon
versus
A Candidate with a Heart,
Senator Kennedy
*
THE CASE OF
MARTIN LUTHER KING


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The pamphlet, on blue paper, was carried to the churches of half a million African-Americans.

Daddy King said, “I have a suitcase full of votes for the Senator that I’m carrying to Chicago.”

The mass outpouring of sermon-inspired African-Americans won Kennedy razor-close victories in Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey.

Even historian Ted White cites the King family’s powerful campaign of gratitude, and the pamphlet now known as “The Blue Bomb,” as the deciding factor in John F. Kennedy’s victory over Nixon.

The Democrats' once-solid hold on the South was no longer solid — but a new voting block, would hold hard as a hammer for the Democratic Party for the next half century to today.

It was this profile in courage — the Kings and the Kennedys — that truly made America great and morally mighty.

Those mighty Kings and Kennedys are gone.

So it's left to us to stand up to the gelatinous orange pustule of bloviating bigotry that has, against the democratic will, seized this White House and Congress.

Today, we honor a man whose courage must now be ours; and then we can make America truly great again.


* * * *
 

QueEx

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Revisiting King's Final and Most Haunting Sermon

Delivered two months before he died, “The Drum Major Instinct” saw the preacher give his own eulogy.


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One of the last pictures to be taken of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking to a mass rally April 3, 1968, in MemphisBettmann / Getty


The Atlantic
April 1, 2018
By DAGMAWI WOUBSHET


The Drum Major Instinct” is one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s finest sermons and perhaps his most haunting.

He delivered it exactly two months before his assassination, on February 4, 1968, at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he served as co-pastor with his father. In both substance and style, the sermon is vintage late King: He fiercely articulates the imperatives of faith and citizenship with the voice of a preacher who had mastered his art.


Still, what distinguishes “The Drum Major Instinct” is that King concludes this homily by rehearsing his death, effectively spelling out the kind of eulogy he wanted delivered at his funeral. It’s spellbinding to listen to, especially when King reaches the climax and begins to reckon with his imminent mortality, his voice heightened with the kind of emotion rarely heard in his other recorded speeches.

The sermon wasn’t one of King’s iconic addresses, nor was it delivered on a grand stage; rather, it was part of a Sabbath service given in his home church. In the sermon, King is a minister teaching and communing with his flock. Listening to the recording of “The Drum Major Instinct,” in fact, we can hear a key feature of the black church: the call and response between preacher and congregation, with the latter’s cries of Amen,” “Yes,” “Preach it,” and “Make it plain” adding resonance to King’s words.


Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, his legacy is still being written.
Read more

That Sunday, King preached on the virtues of service and the false ideals of greatness, adapting his sermon from a 1949 homily, “Drum Major Instincts,” by James Wallace Hamilton, a prominent white liberal Methodist minister. Like Hamilton, King draws his text from a passage in the Gospel of Mark detailing an exchange between Jesus and the apostles John and James. The two brothers ask to sit next to Jesus in heaven; Jesus tells them the favor isn’t his to grant, but theirs to earn by committing their lives to serving others. The apostles’ request is motivated by a need to stand out, to be the exception. It’s this basic human impulse for recognition that Hamilton and King refer to as a drum-major instinct. Both caution that this drive can be abused for self-serving purposes and pernicious ends. But, if nurtured, it can be a powerful resource for good and for achieving greatness.

* * *

While the central idea is borrowed, King’s sermon is ultimately his own. “The Drum Major Instinct” is a work that must be heard, and not simply read, for clearly audible is King’s power to align the sound and substance of his words. At the outset, when King is introducing the lesson, his voice is measured, his cadence controlled. But soon come the flashes of exclamation, as King stresses a word or a phrase with a quiver, a shout, or a roar. His cries come in shorter intervals as he goes on, becoming more pronounced with each social peril he warns against. And for much of the sermon, King shifts between a composed voice (laced with a tart irony) and a variation of whooping (brimming with righteous discontent). This seesaw of tones and emotions continues until the minister, eventually, reaches his self-eulogy.




Thematically, “The Drum Major Instinct” features King’s signature blend of radical faith and politics. For the first two-thirds of the 40-minute homily, King illustrates his religious lesson with social messages that are as urgent today as they were in 1968. He counsels his congregation not to be “taken by advertisers” who insist material goods can lead to self-worth. He warns against the “snobbish exclusivism” that can lead churches to care more about their social standing than their mission to be a sanctuary for all.

America’s “tragic race prejudice,” King adds, is another example of the “perverted use of the drum-major instinct,” leading white people to falsely believe in their own supremacy, and blinding the white poor from seeing that their fate is directly linked to that of black Americans. King is even more scathing when he describes the American quest for global supremacy as another perversion of greatness. “God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam,” he says. “We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it.”

In short, greatness cannot be won by might, nor by virtue of belonging to a privileged group. But, King preaches, if his audience can harness the drum-major instinct and put it to use in the service of justice, they can strive toward the kind of greatness Jesus embodied. And to serve, King exhorts, requires no entitlements or credentials but “a heart full of grace” and “a soul generated by love.” This path to distinction and recognition, he suggests, is available to all.

The conclusion of “The Drum Major Instinct” is masterfully wrought, as King captures the urgency of his moral-political message by anticipating his own end. “Every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral,” he says. “And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. And every now and then I ask myself, ‘What is it that I would want said?’” Speaking in a posthumous voice, as if calling out from the dominion of the dead, he instructs his congregation to keep the funeral short. He asks that whoever eulogizes him be brief, skipping over his resume of countless awards and degrees and instead focusing on how he died pursuing justice. With unfettered emotion, King says:

I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. (Yes) I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. (Amen) I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. (Yes) And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. (Yes) I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. (Lord) I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. (Yes)

Charged with passion and pathos, these lines are perhaps the sermon’s most stirring. A first-rate orator, King uses repetition not only to itemize the things he had done to earn his death (and to embody the very lesson he’d preached), but also to stress key phrases like “I did try” and “say that day.” King takes the sermon to its emotional peak and ultimately concludes with a grief-driven recapitulation of the homily’s ideas:

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. (Amen) Say that I was a drum major for peace. (Yes) I was a drum major for righteousness ... Yes, Jesus, I want to be on your right or your left side, (Yes) not for any selfish reason. I want to be on your right or your left side, not in terms of some political kingdom or ambition. But I just want to be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world.

On April 9, 1968, the day of King’s funeral, Coretta Scott King, his widow and comrade, requested that the elegiac ending of “The Drum Major Instinct” be played as part of the memorial service. This, too, is spellbinding to watch. How uncanny that only two months after King stood to deliver this sermon on the same dais he would be lying in a coffin; and that the same words would be spoken again in the same church to eulogize him. Yet, King’s murder wasn’t unexpected, as “The Drum Major Instinct” attests. During the short interval of his public life, from 1954 to 1968, death had become King’s close companion—his house had been bombed, he had been stabbed, and he had faced a legion of white vigilantes and sheriffs.

In the last year of his life, King had turned to his ministry to voice what it felt like to live under the pall of death. In a sermon he gave in Chicago in August 1967, for instance, King confided, “Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged sometimes.” And, as it’s well-known, the night before his assassination in Memphis he ended his last sermon, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” with a fairly elaborate discussion of mortality.

King’s late sermons also express the feelings of a larger black collective contending with similar forces of loss, and connect with a long tradition of African American elegizing. Given the systematic killing of black people across U.S. history, mourners have had to invent ways of grieving not only the dead but also the living, for whom the possibility of sudden and arbitrary death is all too real. The prospect of dying is such a persistent theme in African American culture—from spirituals to hip-hop music, slave narratives to contemporary literature—that it reveals how much loss animates both black life and art.

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If we take black music alone, songs like “Feel Like My Time Ain’t Long,” “I’m Traveling to the Grave,” and “When I’m Dead” are among a cluster of spirituals that conjure up imminent death and what Frederick Douglass called “the death-dealing character of slavery.” Robert Johnson’s blues classic “Hellhound on My Trail” is a song also about the threat of lynching. Songs that foresee death abound in hip hop—“Only Fear of Death” and “Death Around the Corner” being two powerful examples just from Tupac Shakur’s repertoire. Indeed, it’s easy to glean from the canon of black culture, to borrow from the poet Claudia Rankine’s essay, “the condition of black life is one of mourning”—mourning born out of both a death-riddled past and a precarious future.

Though King’s influence is readily visible throughout American culture 50 years after his assassination, it’s still all too common to see his words divorced from his life and what he stood for. Those who watched the Super Bowl this year may recall a Ram Trucks TV spot, which featured an excerpt of “The Drum Major Instinct,” and which ran exactly five decades after he gave the homily. There was an immediate backlash, and rightly so: No King sermon is fit for a commercial, but especially not this homily, which explicitly confronts the dangers of capitalism and calls out advertisers by name. The spot was little more than a crass ploy to use a work of mourning, and a militant call for radically transforming America, to sell automobiles.

The 50th anniversary of King’s death offers an occasion for a deeper consideration of his words, indeed as one way to stymie such vacuous appropriations of his ideas. If anything, “The Drum Major Instinct” reminds Americans of, and emboldens them to change, the fact that they live in a country and a world still rife with the “three evils” of classism, racism, and militarism. Today, King’s sermon is a pitch-perfect counterpoint to the ugly cacophony of the present political culture. Exquisite and fierce, “The Drum Major Instinct” should move all of us who encounter it—and move not only our senses, but also our resolve to achieve a more just world.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  • DAGMAWI WOUBSHET is the Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS.

https://www.theatlantic.com/enterta...-luther-king-jrs-most-haunting-sermon/556277/


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50 years ago, one deranged man ended the promising life of MLK. One of his last pursuits was the poor people's campaign seeking economic justice. Today, I wanted to create a thread to bring much greater intellectual might behind his ideas, sort of a 2018 Poor People's campaign.

1. As a result of my extensive research into the financial crisis for another project, I began to gain a greater understanding of the banking system. One of the concepts that is critical to the banking system is credit risk. The bank charges you additional money to insure they earn a certain amount for lending money to borrowers. Similar to car insurance, if you default, the bank wants to charge an additional amount to pay for the damages.

One of the ways wealth can be transferred is through the government. However, the private sector through lending to borrowers that default, transfer many billions of dollars, possibly trillions. This minor fact represents a huge wealth transfer from people that retain stable employment to those with unstable income sources that default. A basic income in effect would mitigate this wealth transfer that occurs, and reduce credit risk for all borrowers of mortgages, car loans, student loans, or credit cards. If implement correctly, a car loan that is given to a black borrower with some sort of basic income could see their interest rate drop from 20% to 5%. Your mortgage interest rate would drop substantially, while your housing value remains stable.

You will pay whether through taxes or interest charges from loans.

2. Basic Income could reduce, eliminate or streamline many of the government bureaucracies that exist today. The income received could be spent in the private sector. The amount of money lost to fraud waste and abuse would be reduced substantially. This is amount of wealth that is transferred through our taxes to those that are poor through many government programs such as food stamps, disability, bailouts, jobs program, or the secondary mortgage market....

3. Guaranteed Income, could be formula based tied to your employment. Instead of this binary income system that if you work than you are paid. It could be based on many other factors. Most of the systems being proposed will give a set amount to everybody with no incentive to work. However, the a work component could be tied to the amount a person received. It is no different than a pension, that a person receives after 30 years that was based on your work history. Social Security lifted millions of people out of poverty.

4. It could also be used to reduce the incentive for crime. If a person commits a felony their basic income could be reduced or eliminated as punishment. This could substantial reduce the prison population saving billions of dollars.



How could this be implement?

There are many ways to implement this system without using taxes and other measures.
 

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"Orders to Kill" Dr. Martin Luther King:
The Government that Honors MLK with a National Holiday Killed Him

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MLK DAY 2019. In commemoration of Martin Luther King’s assassination, we bring to you this article by Edward Curtin first published on Global Research in January 2017.

**

Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For almost fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government deception to hide the truth.

And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the absurd official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of the one man capable of leading a mass movement for revolutionary change in the United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial.

In order to comprehend the significance of this extraordinary book, it is first necessary to dispel a widely accepted falsehood about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. William Pepper does that on the first page.

To understand his death, it is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.

In other words, Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on violence, racism, and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man.

Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Forty-eight years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression , and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects. And King’s message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and urging Americans to make it “a day of service.” Needless to say, such service does not include non-violent war resistance or protesting a decadent system of economic injustice.

Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth,” he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that later – once he was long and safely dead – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.

But William Pepper resurrects the revolutionary MLK, and in doing so shows in striking detail why elements within the U.S. government executed him. After reading this book, no fair-minded reader can reach any other conclusion. The Plot to Kill King, the culminating volume of a trilogy that Pepper has written on the assassination, consists of slightly less text than supporting documentation in its appendices, which include numerous depositions and interviews that buttress Pepper’s thesis on the why and how of this horrible murder. It demands a close reading that should put to rest any pseudo-debates about the essentials of the case.

Pepper, an attorney who represented the King family in the 1999 trial that found U.S. officials of the federal (in particular, the FBI and Army Intelligence), state, and local governments responsible for King’s assassination, has worked on the King case since 1977. He met MLK in 1967, after King had read his Ramparts’ magazine article, “The Children of Vietnam,” that exposed the hideous effects of U.S. napalm and white phosphorous bombing on young and old Vietnamese innocents. The text and photos of that article reduced King to tears and were instrumental in his increased opposition to the war against Vietnam as articulated in his dramatic Riverside Church speech (“Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”) on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his execution in Memphis. That speech, in which King so powerfully and publicly linked the war with racism and economic exploitation, foretold his death at the hands of the perpetrators of those abominations.

Devastated by King’s death, and assuming the alleged assassin James Earl Ray was responsible, Pepper retreated from the fray until a 1977 conversation with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s associate, who raised the specter of Ray’s innocence. After a five hour interrogation of the imprisoned Ray in 1978, Pepper was convinced that Ray did not shoot King and set out on a forty year quest to uncover the truth.

Before examining the essentials of Pepper’s discovery, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. M. L. King, Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917. All were considered communist sympathizers and dangerous to the reigning hegemony because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. When MLK, Jr. forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, and announced his Poor People’s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in the bowels of government spies and their masters. Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate “justification.” As Stokely Carmichael, co-chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said to King in a conversation secretly recorded by Army Intelligence, “The man don’t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers, you got trouble.”

It is against this “trouble” that Pepper’s investigation must be set, as that “trouble” is also the background for the linked assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, and RFK. Understanding the forces behind the military, the spies, and the gunmen who, while operating in the shadows, are actually the second layer of the onion skin, is essential. The government and mainstream corporate media form the outer layer with their collusion in disinformation, lying, and truth suppression, but Pepper correctly identifies the core as follows.

Bombastic, chauvinistic, corporate propaganda aside, where the slaughter of innocents is, and always was, justified in the name of patriotism and national security, it has always and ever been about money. Corporate and financial leaders trusted with the keys to the Republic’s treasure moved from boardrooms to senior government positions and back again. Construction, oil and gas, defense industry, and pharmaceutical corporations, their bankers, brokers, and executives thrive in a war economy. Fortunes are made and dynasties created and perpetuated and a cooperating elite permeates an entire society and ultimately contaminates the world in its drive for national resources wherever they are ….Vietnam was his [King’s] Rubicon …. Here, as never before, would he seriously challenge the interests of the power elite.

MLK was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right side of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade. The U.S. government claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967. Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim’s Grill across the street. Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings, including the rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door onto the adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have jumped into his white Mustang and driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car. From there he fled to Canada and then to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968 and extradited to the U.S. The state claims that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and for all his travel was secured through various robberies and a bank heist. Ray’s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.

When Ray, under extraordinary pressure, coercion, and a payoff from his lawyer to take a plea, pleaded guilty (only a few days later to request a trial that was denied) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the case seemed to be closed, and was dismissed from public consciousness. Another hate-filled lone assassin, shades of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.

In the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government’s case – Harold Weisberg in 1971 and Mark Lane and Dick Gregory in 1977. The rest of the country put themselves and the case to sleep. They are still sleeping, but Pepper is trying with this last book to wake them up. Meanwhile, the disinformation specialists continue with their lies.

While a review is not the place to go into every detail of Pepper’s rebuttal of the government’s shabby claims, let me say at the outset that he emphatically does so, and adds in the process some tentative claims of which he is not certain but which, if true, are stunning.

As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of patsies to take the blame for government executions. Ray, Oswald, and Sirhan all bear striking resemblances in the ways they were chosen and moved as pawns over long periods of time into positions where their only reactions could be stunned surprise when they were accused of the murders.

It took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and Abernathy interviewed Ray in prison in 1978. The first giveaway that something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report on the King assassination. Led by Robert Blakey, suspect in his conduct of the other assassination inquiries, who had replaced Richard Sprague, who was deemed to be too independent, “this multi-million dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent,” and that government forces might be involved. Pepper lists over twenty such omissions that rival the absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report became the template “for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case” for the past thirty-seven years.

Pepper’s decades-long investigation, not only refutes the government’s case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. He is right to assert that “we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.” This makes the silence around this case even more shocking. This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty day trial and over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and William Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried once again by a media in cahoots with the government.

The civil trial was the King family’s last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence (shades of Sirhan Sirhan who still languishes in prison). During all those years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim’s Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination. The government has always denied that Raul existed.

Blocked at every turn by the authorities and unable to get Ray a trial, Pepper arranged an unscripted, mock TV trial that aired on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. Jurors were selected from a pool of U.S. citizens, a former U.S. Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney. He presented extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security for King; that the state’s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the alleged bathroom sniper’s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that three eyewitnesses, including the NY Times Earl Caldwell, said that the shot came from the bushes behind the rooming house; and that two eyewitnesses saw Ray drive away in his white Mustang before the shooting, etc. The prosecution’s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.

As with all Pepper’s work on the case (including book reviews), the mainstream media responded with silence. And though this was only a TV trial, increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was deeply involved in the assassination. Pepper dug deeper, and on December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live that aired nationwide. Pepper writes, “Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot MLK but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $1,000,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man names Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized …. The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast there was no coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC …. Here was a confession, on prime time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.”

In the twenty-three years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the government’s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing cover-up. The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in The Plot to Kill King, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government. Much of his evidence was presented at the 1999 trial, while other was subsequently discovered. Since the names and details involved make clear that, as with the murders of JFK and RFK, the conspiracy was very sophisticated with many moving parts organized at the highest level, I will just highlight a few of his findings in what follows. A reader should read the book to understand the full scope of the plot, its execution, and the cover-up.

Pepper refutes the government and proves, through multiple witnesses, telephonic, and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that his full name is Raul Coelho; and that he was James Earl Ray’s intelligence handler, who provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the assassination. It was Raul who instructed Ray to return to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board. The parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan are startling.

He presents the case of Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent working out of the Atlanta office in 1968, who went with a senior colleague to check out an abandoned white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray’s car, to which Raul had a set of keys) and opened the passenger door to find that an envelope and some papers fell out onto the ground. Thinking he may have disturbed a crime scene, the nervous Wilson pocketed them. Later, when he read them, their explosive content intuitively told him that if he gave them to his superiors they would be destroyed. One piece was a torn out page from a 1963 Dallas telephone directory with the name Raul written at the top, and the letter “J” with a Dallas telephone number for a club run by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. The page was for the letter H and had numerous phone numbers for H. L. Hunt, Dallas oil billionaire and a friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Both men hated MLK. The second sheet contained Raul’s name and a list of names and sums and dates for payment. On the third sheet was written the telephone number and extension for the Atlanta FBI office. (Read Jim Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)
Pepper interviewed four other witnesses who confirmed that they had seen Raul with Jack Ruby in Dallas in 1963 and that they were associated.
Pepper shows that the alias Ray was given and used from July 1967 until April 4, 1968 – Eric Galt – was the name of a Toronto operative of U.S. Army Intelligence, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who worked for Union Carbide with Top Secret clearance. The warehouse at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto that Galt supervised “housed a top secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command …. In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group (MIG) Colonel John Downie.” Downie selected four members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit that was sent to Memphis to back up the primary assassin of MLK. Meanwhile, Ray, set up as the patsy, was able to move about freely since he was protected by the pseudonymous NSA clearance for Eric Galt.

To refute the government’s claim that Ray and his brother robbed the Alton, Illinois Bank to finance his travels and car purchase (therefore no Raul existed), Pepper “called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to do with the robbery. No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their opinion.” CNN later reiterated the media falsehood that became part of the official false story.

Pepper proves that the fatal shot came from the bushes behind Jim’s Grill and the rooming house, not from the bathroom window. He presents overwhelming evidence for this, showing that the government’s claim, based on the testimony on a severely drunk Charlie Stephens, was absurd. His evidence includes the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and that of Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he took the rifle from the shooter in the bushes and brought it into the bar where he hid it. Thus, Ray was not the assassin.
He presents conclusive evidence that the bushes were cut down the morning after the assassination in an attempt to corrupt the crime scene. The order to do so came from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans to Maynard Stiles, a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works.

He shows how King’s room was moved from a safe interior room, 201, to balcony room, 306, on the upper floor; how King was conveniently positioned alone on the balcony by members of his own entourage for the easy mortal head shot from the bushes across the street. (Many people only remember the iconic photograph taken after-the-fact with Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, et al., standing over the fallen King and pointing across the street.) Pepper implicates that Reverends Billy Kyles, Jesse Jackson, and, to a lesser extent, Ralph Abernathy were involved in these machinations. He uncovers of the role of black military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111th MIG, within the entourage. McCollough can be seen kneeling over the fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead.
Pepper confirms that all of this, including the assassin in the bushes, was dutifully photographed by Army Intelligence agents situated on the nearby Fire House roof.
He presents evidence that all security for Dr. King was withdrawn from the area by the Memphis Police Department, including a special security unit of black officers, and four tactical police units. A black detective at the nearby fire station, Ed Redditt, was withdrawn from his post on the afternoon of April 4th, allegedly because of a death threat against him. And the only two black firemen at Fire Station No.2 were transferred to another station.

He names and confirms the presence of Alpha 184 snipers at locations high above the Lorraine Motel balcony.
He explains the use of two white mustangs in the operation to frame Ray.
He proves that Ray had driven off before the shooting; that Loyd Jowers took the rifle from the shooter who was in the bushes; that the Memphis police were working in close collaboration with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the “Dixie Mafia,” particularly local produce dealer Frank Liberto and his New Orleans associate Carlos Marcello; and that every aspect of the government’s case was filled with holes that any person familiar with the details and possessing elementary logical abilities could refute.
So importantly, Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X assassinations that are of a piece with this one.

But since this is a book review and not a book, I will stop listing Pepper’s very detailed and convincing findings. While he may not have answered every aspects of the case, and may be mistaken in some small details, he has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the basic fact that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King, but that this great and dangerous leader was killed by a conspiracy organized at the highest levels of government.

The Plot to Kill King will mesmerize any reader seeking the truth about MLK’s assassination. Even when Pepper, towards the end of the book, offers circumstantial and non-corroborated testimony from witnesses Ronnie Lee Adkins and Johnton Shelby, the reader can’t help but be intrigued and to consider their stories highly plausible given all that Pepper has proven. Adkins claims that his father, a friend of Clyde Tolson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy, and then he himself, were part of the plot to kill King. This involved politicians, the FBI, MPD, and mafia, including the aforementioned produce dealer Frank Liberto and others, making payoffs with FBI money to various people, including Jesse Jackson (whom Adkins, Jr. claims was a paid FBI informer) and working closely on the details of the assassination. Johton Shelby’s story as recounted in his deposition (2014) to Pepper (reproduced, together with Adkins’ (2009), as appendices in the book), is that his mother, who was working as an emergency room aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital when King was brought there, inadvertently witnessed men spitting on Dr. King as he lay in the emergency room and a doctor putting a pillow over his head and suffocating him to death. Pepper tends to accept these accounts, but says he isn’t completely convinced of all aspects of them. The reader is offered plenty of food for thought concerning these claims.

Besides clearly proving the government’s part in killing Martin Luther King, this book is very important for the way Pepper links the case to those of JFK and RFK, who was murdered two months after King. At the center of all these murders is a trinity of men who were devoted to the ending the Vietnam War and all wars, restoring economic justice for all Americans, and eliminating racial inequality. That their goals were the same provides a motive for their murders by forces opposed to these lofty objectives. That their murders clearly involved highly sophisticated operations and cover-ups that could never have been pulled off by “crazed lone assassins” points to powerful forces with those means at their disposal. And when it comes to opportunity, when did the shadowy forces of the deep state ever lack for that?

The ramifications of the MLK assassination profoundly inform our current condition. For anyone who truly cares about peace, love, and justice, The Plot to Kill King is essential reading. William Pepper should be saluted. He has carried on Martin King’s noble legacy.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/order...lk-with-a-national-holiday-killed-him/5559300
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
1.What we need is a sign for all businesses that are public accommodations to display on the front. This is to remind them that they are providing a service for the public good to facilitate travel or other function. Nobody has time to go to 50 motels after driving all day to figure out which one will take them.

2.The Civil Rights Act should have included provisions to require the government to create minority ownership of businesses through loans or other mechanisms for companies that are systemically discriminatory towards minorities. This is to ensure that employment opportunities and services are available that are free of discrimination.

3. We need a political system that is separate to elect black leadership that can counsel our government on legislation that we need. This leadership will not require the financial support or votes of whites to be elected.

Was MLK killed by the government? He was aware of the need for high security, to go to a motel was reckless which which became public information. He was well aware of the threats to his life. I believe the newspapers may have conspired to disclose his location publicly for this assassination attempt.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
The Crisis in America’s Cities
Martin Luther King Jr. on what sparked the violent urban riots of the “long hot summer” of 1967
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Three Lions / Getty

Editor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s special coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.
Image above: The riots in Detroit brought fires and looting.

Three weeks after 43 people were killed in race riots in Detroit—the worst of the more than 150 urban riots during the “long hot summer” of 1967—King addressed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. He delineated the causes of the violence, notably “the white backlash,” black unemployment, racial discrimination, and the war in Vietnam.

Amillion words will be written and spoken to dissect the ghetto outbreaks, but for a perceptive and vivid expression of culpability I would submit two sentences written a century ago by Victor Hugo:
If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
The policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they created discrimination; they created slums; they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison.
Let us say it boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.

After establishing the general cause of outbursts, it is possible to identify five immediate causes:
  1. The white backlash.
  2. Unemployment.
  3. General discriminatory practices.
  4. War.
  5. Features peculiar to big cities: crime, family problems, and intensive migration.
I place the white backlash first because the outbursts have an emotional content that is a reaction to the insults and depravity of the white backlash. Many people point out that there have been years of some progress, and this is true. Yet equally true is the fact of an animalistic reaction by a significant section of the white population. In the midst of progress Negroes were being murdered in the South and cynical white jurors automatically freed the accused. In Chicago last year thousands of vicious white hoodlums with murder in their hearts bombarded Negroes with rocks and bottles because they dared to ask to be neighbors. The white backlash told Negroes that there were limits to their progress; that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor. The white backlash said Negroes should not confuse improvements with equality. True equality, it said, will be resisted to the death. The so-called riots in a distorted and hysterical form were a Negro response that said inequality will now be resisted to the death.
The second major cause is unemployment because it furnishes the bulk of the shock troops. Government figures reveal that the rate of unemployment for Negroes runs as high as 15% in some cities—and for youth up to 30–40%! It is not accidental that the major actors in all the outbreaks were the youth. With most of their lives yet to live, the slamming of doors in their faces could be expected to induce rage and rebellion. This is especially true when a boastful nation, while neglecting them, gloats over its wealth, power and world pre-eminence. Yet almost 40% of Negro youth waste their barren lives standing on street corners.

I proposed that a national agency be established to immediately give employment to everyone needing it. Training should be done on the job, not separated from it and often without any guarantee of employment in which to use the training. Nothing is more socially inexcusable than unemployment in this age. In the thirties when the nation was bankrupt, it instituted such an agency, the W.P.A. In the present conditions of a nation glutted with resources it is barbarous to condemn people willing to work to soul-sapping inactivity and poverty.
The National Guard was called in to keep the peace in Detroit. (Lee Balterman / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty)

I am convinced that one massive act of concern will do more than the most massive deployment of troops to quell riots and still hatreds. I am not convinced that the statesmanship exists in Washington to do it. Hugo could have been thinking of 20th century America when he said, “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher classes.”

The third cause is discrimination, which pervades all experiences of Negro life. It pushes the Negro off the economic ladder after he has ascended a few rungs. It stultifies his initiative and insults his being. Even the few Negroes who realize economic security do not attain respect and dignity, because on upper levels discrimination closes different doors to them.

Discrimination is a hell hound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.
The fourth cause is the war in Vietnam. Negroes are not only conscripted in double measure for combat, but they are told the billions needed for remaking their lives are necessary for foreign intervention. Democracy at home is starved to seek a spurious democracy abroad. Dictators, oligarchies, are given our resources to perpetuate their rule at the rate of $80,000,000 per day, but we cannot afford to spend 10% of this on anti-poverty programs …
To war against your own people, while warring against another nation, is the ultimate in political and social bankruptcy.

Finally, a complex of causes is found in the conditions of urban life. Crime is well organized in the cities and produces an underclass of great numbers. Rackets are the big business of the ghetto, with masses of employees. In any period of unrest they utilize conditions for advantage. Organized crime has a protected sanctuary in the slums, with police tolerance, if not connivance. It becomes a normal feature of life, poisoning the young and confounding the adult …

Cities are also victims of the anarchic migrations of Negroes. Although everyone knew in the past decade that millions of Negroes would have to leave the land without schooling, no national planning was done to provide remedies. White immigrants in the 19th century were given free credit and land by the government. In the early 20th century a plethora of social agencies helped them to adjust to city life. The economy readily absorbed white workers into factories and trained them to skills. There were obstacles and privations for white immigrants but every step was upward; care and concern could be found.

When the Negro migrated he was substantially ignored or grossly exploited within a context of searing discrimination. He was left jobless and ignorant, despised and scorned as no other American minority has been …

“There is probably no way … for Negroes to obtain their rights without upsetting the equanimity of white folks.”

To list the causes is to structure the remedial program. A program is not, however, our problem. Our real problem is that there is no disposition by the [Johnson] Administration nor Congress to seek fundamental remedies beyond police measures. The tragic truth is that Congress, more than the American people, is now running amok with racism. We must devise the tactics, not to beg Congress for favors, but to create a situation in which they deem it wise and prudent to act with responsibility and decency.

Some people assert riots are just such a method. Perhaps it would be well to examine the nature of the outbreaks. They reveal in the first place that the time we have is shorter than many of us believed. Patience is running out and the intransigence and hostility of government—national, state and municipal—is aggravating grievances to explosive levels.

The riots are not simply a reign of terror or a splurge of crime, though both elements are partially present. They are also a wildly emotional protest and a desperate attempt to display the utter desperation that has engulfed many Negroes. The vast majority who actively participated were remarkably discriminating in avoiding harm to persons, venting their anger by appropriating or destroying property. There is an ironic purpose in this choice; to attack a society that appears to cherish property above people, the worst wounds to inflict on it are those to property.

The outbursts cannot be considered an insurrection, because insurrections are organized and can sustain themselves for more than a few days. The riots are powered by spontaneous bitter emotions and therefore die out rapidly.
Rolls Press / Popperfoto / Getty

We have not devised the tactics for urban slum reform. We spent ten years in the South using new tactics of nonviolence that were successful. But in the Northern cities, with time running out, we failed to achieve creative methods of work. As a result, a desperate, essentially leaderless mass of people acted with violence and without a program …

There is probably no way, even eliminating violence, for Negroes to obtain their rights without upsetting the equanimity of white folks. All too many of them demand tranquility when they mean inequality …
RELATED STORIES

Nonviolent action in the South was effective because any form of social movement by Negroes upset the status quo. When Negroes merely marched in Southern streets it was close to rebellion. In the urban communities marches are less disquieting because they are not considered rebellions and secondly, because the normal turbulence of cities absorbs them as merely transitory drama which is ordinary in city life.
To raise protest to an appropriate level for cities and to invest it with aggressive but nonviolent qualities, it is necessary to adopt civil disobedience. To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the society but not wantonly destructive. Moreover, it is more difficult for government to quell it by superior force. Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be.
This excerpt appears in the special MLK issue print edition with its original title, “The Crisis in America’s Cities.” © 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., © renewed 1995 Coretta Scott King. All works by Martin Luther King Jr. have been reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., care of Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, New York.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. was a Baptist minister and a leader of the American civil-rights movement. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for employing nonviolent civil disobedience to advance racial equality.


 

sahusahir

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Let us listen to Rev. Dr. William Barber deliver the factual history lesson and benediction about where we are today in 2018. Listen to him his speech is inspirational & Powerful!!


powerful, informative, motivating. caught it 4 years late. but I am 100% down. speech is part historical lesson, part analysis, part directive. dry bones drylongso in the valley indeed.
 
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