#BlackLivesMatter - #MartinLutherKing was not a founding father as Time Magazine crowned him in 2013 in an attempt to contain and sanitize his legacy, but a revolutionary intent on injecting a genuine justice for ALL into the white substance of the American dream. He was a militant pacifist, a man who challenged the popular grain of even the civil rights movement itself by linking the Viet Nam war, its fiscal cost and its innocent victims, to the injustice of black and poor people at home. I deep heart the soaring eloquence of Kings oratory, but this interview on the Mike Douglas show from 1967 (see all three parts) is inspiring in a very different though equally crucial way. It shows how ruthlessly principled, radical, patient and determined he was in the face of criticism from all sides. https://youtube/watch?v=9SfH2uMayks Ive also included a quote that Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow, circulated today. There should be little doubt where King would stand on current structural injustice in the form of police brutality, mass incarceration, torture, a decade plus of wars and drone strikes, our demonization of Islam, our abandonment of public education, our radical divide in wealth, our obsequiousness toward Wall St and our growing incapacity to love each other in public, which is Dr. Cornel Wests King derived definition of justice. He would encourage us not only to dream, but to act with a prophetic fire of love. May it be so. The dispossessed of this nation - the poor, both white and Negro -- live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:10:17 +0000