January 18, 2010
In case you missed it
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.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also 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.”
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
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now all those people vote Republican.
And have greater faith in Walmart than our president this year.
It puts it in perspective doesn’t it? The young, moderate black man in the White House is regularly typified as racist, radical and marxist; meanwhile, in the same breath, the self-described communist who protested Vietnam, outspokenly criticized US foreign policy and catalyzed the most progressive social reforms of the last half century gets canonized and honored.
I’m sure Glenn Beck had a wonderful retrospective on what a stand-up guy that MLK used to be. The dissonance is unreal.
Yes, but he died prematurely, Josh. That makes all the difference.