Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Saint

Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Saint

by Peter Dreier

 

From this powerful article:

In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America's class system and its racial caste system.  He was a strong ally of the nation's labor union movement.  He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike.  He opposed U.S. militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.

In his critique of American society and his strategy for changing it,  King pushed the country toward more democracy and social justice...

While in Boston, he told his girlfriend (and future wife), Coretta Scott, that "a society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people's needs is wrong." ...

"There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression." ... "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." 

“You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."...

 "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."

 

King's growing critique of capitalism coincided with his views about American imperialism. By 1965 he had turned against the Vietnam War, viewing it as an economic as well as a moral tragedy... In April 1967, in a bold and prophetic speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, entitled "Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence," King called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against militarism. King argued that Vietnam was stealing precious resources from domestic programs and that the Vietnam War was "an enemy of the poor."

 

In early 1968, King told journalist David Halberstam, "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."...

 

The best way to honor his memory is to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers' rights, racial equality, peace, and social justice.

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For the entire article, please go here:

 http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/21-2