How many people actually know this? How many rabid anti-union and viscerally rabid anti-public union people know this or care?
I am so sick of the ongoing attempt to make Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into some bipartisan, centrist or even Republican(!) secular saint.
This profound diary by HamdenRice from 2011 is required reading:
Dr. King “ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south” where “white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them.”
And not just lynchings — much more commonly, beatings from which blacks could not fight back, for fear of police and judicial terrorism.
He was a militant non-violent fighter for justice against the racists of the time. The King revisionists omit the “fighter” part to take the non-violent part and make him into a bland, saintly conciliator without political or militant attributes. They minimize the militancy, the pro-union, the anti-war, the recognition of virulent racism that were Dr. King’s essence, to shape some bland all-purpose, non-militant cipher:
Exhibit A: David Brooks on January 1, 2018:
Martin Luther King described segregation and injustice as forces tearing us apart. He appealed to universal principles and our common humanity as ways to heal prejudice and unite the nation. He appealed to common religious principles, the creed of our founding fathers and a common language of love to drive out prejudice. King “framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption,” Haidt observed.
Yes, David F. Brooks, Dr. King changed the minds of George Wallace, Bull Connor, Strom Thurmond and the rest by “appealing to their common humanity and religious principles.” He was a “healer,” not a fighter. Why he was nothing more than a flower child, an extra in Hair, calming the dogs and batons by “using a common language of love to drive out prejudice.” It was “the common language of love” that helped the mob on the Edmund Pettis Bridge calm down and yield to the forces of integration and voting rights. Right Brooks?
I just hate this crap.
Here’s a longer excerpt from HamdenRice’s diary, Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King did.
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.
And he didn’t stand for some universalist vague concept of “love” or against “tribalism.” He stood against everything Republicans today are about: useless war, blatant and subtle racism, anti-unionism, anti-poor people-ism; “small government” in the service of depriving people of basic needs and of course, voter suppression.
So spare me your sanctimony, Brooks et al. King would hate everything at the core of your beliefs.