Too Early to Bury Martin Luther King Jr.

[McCamy Taylor]

“It always seems like Martin Luther King day is the first one they are willing to give up,” said Dot Scott.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/us/15mlk.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=mlk%20holiday&st=cse


Blacks and Hispanics are three times more likely than white Americans to be uninsured. African-American males are incarcerated at a rate six times higher than European-American men. States rush to pass “voter ID laws” that unfairly target the poor, the elderly---and minorities. If a white couple is stripped from the voting rolls, it’s national news, but if the Florida governor hires a company to deny tens of thousands of Blacks their right to vote that’s just politics as usual, nothing to see here, move along.

Deadly force is the new standard in free speech. If a bunch of Republicans are bused across state lines to stage a violent demonstration in order to obstruct the lawful counting of votes, they won’t go to jail. They’re just making their voices heard. Don’t call the feds unless your brains are actually splattered on the pavement.

When I was a child, policemen turned dogs and fire hoses on schoolchildren. When I was a child, northern “agitators” had a tendency to turn up dead. Justice in some of these cases has been a long time coming. In others, it has yet to come. Funny, there is no statute of limitation on murder, but apparently there is an expiration date on social justice. Get over it. Be glad for the gains you have made. Get to the back of the bus----

Somewhere in the desert southwest, an American armed with a gun is “defending” his right to pick grapes and mow lawns. Somewhere in Afghanistan, a family has been snuffed out like an inconvenient brush fire. Somewhere in the United States, another gay youth is wondering if suicide would be better than the bullying----

Will someone please tell me why Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision is now considered "optional"?

“Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning.” MLK Jr

http://www.usconstitution.net/dream.html

[Axrendale]

1. Well, a bust of him is sitting in the Oval Office next to one of Abraham Lincoln

So we can take some comfort in knowing that there is someone who still considers him to have been and continue to be a powerful positive influence.

[bertman]

2. Thanks for posting this, McCamy. Rec. nt

[Scruffy1]

3. Years of historic revisionism.

They would have us believe that once the vote is secured everything is ok. While I can honestly say that some things are better we still have a long way to go. I returned to Mississippi for the first time in forty years and can see a huge difference from the sixties, but the northern liberal city I live in has one of the highest disparities between black and white unemployment rates and nationwide the wealth gap is frightening. It seems getting the vote didn't make the capitalistic system work all that well for minorities, rather it laid the foundation for victim blaming. The black man is still the whipping boy for the fascists (I refuse to dignify these
people with the term conservative).
The truth that Martin Luther King became aware of is that the whole economic system is corrupt and unjust and that without economic power freedom is a meaningless word. As the only white member of a black church, I have helped bury over twenty young black men killed by gun violence in the last three years. Violence is perpetuated in the black community as the only power that is available. I came to the conclusion long ago that capitalism requires a permanent under class in order to function and that skin color is always the easiest way to pick and choose, but if it was no blacks, it would be some other group. When there's not enough chairs at the table someone is going to get left out and blackness is the easiest since it is so obvious and easy to seperate.
What bothers me most about the history of the civil rights movement is the ignoring of the work done on civil rights by the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party USA, the Democratic Socialist. The IWW, and many more groups with a Marxist ideology. It's like super McCarthyism for blacks. Whether I agreed with Communist Party on all things or not is irrelevant. They were at the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement because they saw racism as wrong and even evil and were willing to take great personal risks to fight it. The few rights we got weren't given to us but were demanded and paid for in blood. Now they would have us believe it was all peaceful. Well, I still got scars and left some behind, too.