Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day

A different view of MLK. Excerpts from The King we've lost -- On Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, and what we've lost as his historical memory fades on Working for Change:

"King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power."

"What little history TV will give us in the next week is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering, as much about self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American as self-examination that American racism made him necessary and that our government, at every level, sought to destroy him. We hear "I have a dream"; we don't hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don't see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the generations of beatings and busts before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We don't hear about the mainstream American contempt at the time for King, even after that Peace Prize, nor his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe."

"If the King of 1955 or 1965 were alive today, he would be accused of treason for his pacifism, as he was reviled for "Communism" then; instead of the FBI trying to bring him down, he, and most of his associates, would be prosecutable under new anti-terrorism statutes. And the moral outrage of Americans that made his work so effective? We don't do that any more. We can torture thousands of mostly innocent Iraqis and Afghans, in plain sight, and nobody is held accountable. It'd take a whole lot more than police dogs to make the news today."

"Instead, for white America, King's soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacism. (See? We're not so bad. We honor him now. Why don't those black people just get over it, anyway? We did.)"

Click for the MLK Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, which contains text and audio of many of King's important statements, as well as a wealth of information about the Reverend King's life, words and deeds. There's a whole lot more than the "I Have a Dream Speech."

Here are direct links to the audio and text of and "A Time to Break the Silence", MLK speaks about Viet Nam. Listen to an excerpt of King speaking about voting rights in Selma, Alabama and it will give you chills, even after all these years. Think about the voting "problems" in Ohio when you do so. King was murdered at age 39. He would have been 76 years old today.