Quote:I have a fair grasp on reality.

Quote:These are words that the noted Black North Carolina minister, NAACP board member and Democratic Party apologist William Barber III might want to review. He used the Charlotte uprising to shamefully claim in a New York Times Op Ed two days ago that “we made significant efforts to address inequality through the War on Poverty. We didn’t lose that war because we lacked resources or met insurmountable obstacles. We lost it because Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ played on white fears about black power by promising to restore order without addressing the causes of unrest.” [“Why We Protest,” NYT, 9/24/2016]. Please. Nixon’s racial politics were terrible but Barber seems to have no sense that the “war on poverty” never rose beyond a “skirmish” [King] and was strangled in its cradle by an imperialist campaign launched by Democratic Partypresidents – Kennedy and Johnson. That’s the modus operandi of the liberal and Black political class: blame Republicans and provide cover for Democrats who are joined at the hip with the dastardly G.O.P. in betraying the causes of peace and social justice, including racial justice).

The masters of the “Vietnam War” sent poor Blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. They also advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even a solution to social and political problems. Black Americans and others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit,” King said in his second CBC lecture, adding that he “could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor” (Trumpet, 23).

Racial hypocrisy aside, King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better have said “military empire”] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom” (p.33). (Those are haunting words nearly five decades after his assassination (or execution), in a time when the hyper-bloated U.S. Pentagon System accounts for nearly half the world’s military spending and maintains more than a 1000 military installations across more than 100 “sovereign” nations as a part of a seemingly permanent war of geopolitical provocation.)

Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’ transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,” who “created discrimination…created slums. [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty…[T]he white man,” King elaborated, “does not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.” (p.8).

Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said, but noted that their aggression was “to a startling degree…focused against property rather than against people.” He observed that “property represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [understandably] attacking and trying to destroy” (pp. 56-57). Against those who held property “sacred,” King argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being”

What to do? King advanced significant policy changes that went against the grain of the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New Left Radicals that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations” (p.40). King advocated an emergency national program providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income “at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called tor “demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that lives in them” (p. 14).

His proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the Negro revolt” had come to challenge what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism). It had “evolve[ed] into more than a quest for desegregation and equality” by becoming “a challenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology to create justice.”

“If humanism is locked outside the system,” King said, “Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far greater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war….” (pp. 16-17, emphasis added). There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to “the system” and its “inner core of despotism.”

No careful listener to King’s reflections in 1967 could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said in his fourth lecture. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added (p. 59). Such a revolution would require “more than a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society…The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…”

Quote:By and before the time of his death, King was a democratic socialist mass-disobedience world revolution advocate. The guardians of national memory don’t want you know about when they honor the official, doctrinally imposed memory of King – and they dress him up as a fan of law and order in service to race and class hierarchy and the police state.

Quote:King was a democratic socialist mass-disobedience world revolution advocate.