Appearing on the Tom Joyner radio show yesterday, President Obama commented on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial and the memory of Dr. King:
“It’s always important to remember that when Dr. King gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, that was a march for jobs and justice, not just justice,” Obama said during the interview on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. “And the last part of his life, when he went down to Memphis, that was all about sanitation workers saying, ‘I am a man,’ and then looking for economic justice and dealing with poverty.
“It’s not enough for us to just remember the sanitized version of what Dr. King stood for,” the president added.
WaPo
I'm glad to hear him express that understanding.
I have published a diary the last few years on or about Dr. King's birthday about the unsanitized version of his struggles for justice in the years after the "I have a dream" speech, and I will add a few excerpts here. The links are in the diary. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. You Don't See on TV
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped.
But they're not shown today on TV.
Why?
It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
As the freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s confronted poverty and economic reprisals, King championed trade union rights, equal job opportunities, metropolitan integration, and full employment. When the civil rights and antipoverty policies of the Johnson administration failed to deliver on the movement's goals of economic freedom for all, King demanded that the federal government guarantee jobs, income, and local power for poor people. When the Vietnam war stalled domestic liberalism, King called on the nation to abandon imperialism and become a global force for multiracial democracy and economic justice.
By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic.
In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
[Charity and compassion alone are not enough. Justice demands changing an unjust system]
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
[The Poor People's Campaign]:
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign.
He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights.
Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."
King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" — appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."
"There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life..."
-- The Trumpet of Conscience, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, 1967.
[On his plans for the Poor People's Campaign in 1968, a campaign he did not live to see]
[Question:] You had resistance in Birmingham and also in Selma. Do you expect resistance in Washington and if so, what type?
[King:] Well I’m sure with the various methods that they are now using to break up demonstrations that we’ll face some of that, I imagine. We don’t know what will happen. They may try to run us out, they did it with the bonus marches you remember years ago. The army may try to run us out. We are prepared for any of this kind of resistance. We don’t go in with the feeling that there won’t be an attempt to block it because we will be engaging in civil disobedience, there’s no doubt about that.
President Obama is right:
“It’s always important to remember that when Dr. King gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, that was a march for jobs and justice, not just justice,” Obama said during the interview on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. “And the last part of his life, when he went down to Memphis, that was all about sanitation workers saying, ‘I am a man,’ and then looking for economic justice and dealing with poverty.
“It’s not enough for us to just remember the sanitized version of what Dr. King stood for,” the president added.
We memorialize Dr. King's life and his principles by struggling for justice today.