{"id":4099,"date":"2008-01-21T00:37:10","date_gmt":"2008-01-21T07:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/01\/21\/how-martin-luther-king-jr-wished-to-be-remembered\/"},"modified":"2008-01-21T00:37:10","modified_gmt":"2008-01-21T07:56:58","slug":"how-martin-luther-king-jr-wished-to-be-remembered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4099","title":{"rendered":"How Martin Luther King, Jr. Wished To Be Remembered"},"content":{"rendered":"

From an article about MLK Jr in The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day,” King told the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, two months before his assassination, “I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize \u2014 that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards \u2014 that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article gives a brief overview of some of the scholarly books about Dr. King, and emphasizes how his radically left views — not just on racial justice, but also on economic justice (two subjects that I doubt MLK saw as separable) — have been obscured by the safe, saintly image of MLK that predominates. Obscured also is the fact that MLK was part of a mass movement that long preceded him, not a sole Great Man creating change out of whole clothe.<\/p>\n

There are too many interesting bits to quote, but here’s another sample:<\/p>\n

Never was King’s full agenda more visible than after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his last years, King struggled to devise tactics suitable to challenging economic injustice, a target more amorphous than Jim Crow. In 1966 he launched an ill-fated challenge to Chicago’s slums and residential segregation. In 1967, in a speech against “racism, materialism, and militarism,” he described the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” placed America “on the wrong side of a world revolution,” and blamed the “need to maintain social stability for our investments.”<\/p>\n

In 1968, King visited a bare-bones elementary school in rural Mississippi. As he watched, the teacher provided each child with a few crackers and a quarter of an apple for lunch. “That’s all they get,” his friend Ralph Abernathy whispered. King nodded, his eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. That night, King conceived the notion of a Poor People’s Campaign. To open the eyes of the nation to poverty, he would lead a Washington encampment of poor people whose civil disobedience would compel a shift of funds from war to social priorities such as full employment and a guaranteed annual income.<\/p>\n

Opposition instantly greeted the Poor People’s Campaign. King’s advisers privately doubted its wisdom. Former allies criticized it publicly. As King soldiered on undaunted, he was called to Memphis, where garbage workers requested his presence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Curtsy: Crooked Timber<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From an article about MLK Jr in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “If any of you are around when I have to meet my day,” King told the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, two months … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-poverty-labor-related-issues","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}