MLK

Dr. King: Beyond The Dreamer, A Personal Story

January 20, 2014 Gar Alperovitz, www.sojo.net Educate! Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr, MLK

IN THE LAST YEAR of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. struggled with what are best understood as existential challenges as he began to move toward an ever-more-profound and radical understanding of what would be required to deal with the nation’s domestic and international problems. The direction he was exploring, I believe, is far more relevant to the realities we now face than many have realized—or have wanted to realize. I first met King in 1964 at the Democratic Party’s national convention held that year in Atlantic City—the occasion of an historic challenge by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to the racially segregated and reactionary Mississippi Democratic Party. I was then a very young aide working for Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.

Peace Activists Honor Dr. King By Nuclear Weapons Action

January 20, 2014 Leonard Eiger, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Martin Luther King Jr, MLK, Nuclear Weapons, Wars and Militarism

On January 18, 2014 activists from a Puget Sound-based nuclear abolition group engaged in a nonviolent direct action at the US Navy's West Coast nuclear submarine and nuclear weapons base. Members of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action held a peaceful vigil and nonviolent direct action at the main gate to Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Silverdale, Washington. They protested the U.S. government’s continued deployment of the Trident nuclear weapons system, and increasing military presence in Asia due to its Asia-Pacific Pivot. Its continued reliance on nuclear weapons as an instrument of foreign policy by force projection is in contravention of both U.S. and international laws.

If MLK Were Alive Today (video)

January 20, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Criminal Justice and Prisons, Environment, Government, Martin Luther King Jr, MLK, MLK Speeches, Nonviolence, Oppression, Popular Resistance, Race, Racism, Wars and Militarism, Worker Rights and Jobs

No one can say what King would be doing or saying if government agencies at the local, state and federal level (including the FBI and CIA with an assist from a Mafia henchman) had not conspired to murder him.

Remembering The Officially Deleted Dr. King

January 20, 2014 Paul Street, www.counterpunch.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, MLK, Poverty, Worker Rights and Jobs

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Trumpet of Conscience does not jibe well with the conventional domesticated and whitewashed image of King that is purveyed across the nation ever year during and around the national holiday the bears his name. That image portrays King as a moderate reformer who wanted little more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a mostly benevolent American System – a loyal supplicant who was tearfully grateful to the nation’s leaders for finally making those adjustments. The official commemoration says nothing about the Dr. King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age and who said in his last years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism”. It deletes the King who wrote that the “real issue to be faced” beyond superficial matter was “the radical reconstruction society of society itself.” In his first talk (“Impasse in Race Relations”), King reflected on how little the black freedom struggle had actually attained beyond some fractional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of the limited forward progress” blacks and their allies had attained “by [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.”

Dr. King’s Nightmare

January 20, 2014 Bob Lord, www.otherwords.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, MLK, Worker Rights and Jobs

The net worth ofjust 400 billionaires, a group that could fit into a high school gym, is on par with the collective wealth of our more than 14 million African- American households. Both groups possess some $2 trillion, about three percentof our national net worth of $77 trillion. We chose to honor Dr. King by making his birthday a national holiday because of his tireless work for justice. And MLK stood not only for social justice, but for economic justice as well. Back in 1951, he told his future life partner, Coretta Scott, that a small elite should not “control all the wealth.” “A society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people’s needs, is wrong,” Dr. King explained.

My Homage to MLK

January 20, 2014 Michael N. Nagler, www.PopularResistance.org Strategize! MLK, Nonviolence

When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hatred cannot drive out hatred; only love can do that,” he is pointing out a simple, polar difference between the two forces that determine the quality and direction of our life. St. Augustine long before him had said repeatedly in his monumental City of God, “there are two loves’ (or basic drives), that lead respectively to two world orders.” There are times when we fail to see things because they’re too simple. It takes a kind of courage to peer into that stark, underlying simplicity, to grasp that those two forces, with their opposite character and opposite results, really make up the texture of the moral choices facing us every time we address the major issues of our lives, personal or political. It is the failure to see these two forces as the underlying criterion of our choices, almost without exception, that makes our decisions such a disastrous incompetence.

Disgusting: Anti-Immigrant Group Tries To Misuse MLK Message

January 18, 2014 Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org Educate! Immigrant Rights, MLK, Racism, Video

An anti-immigration group is trying to use the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to push their racially divisive message. The group, Californians for Population Stabilization, has put an advertisement on the air focused on trying to divide unemployed African Americans from the immigrant community. Their campaign plays on the high unemployment in African Americans, which has existed well beyond the surge in immigration and the economic collapse, in order to create divisions among people who should be united for a fair economy and respect for human dignity. Dr. King's approach would be quite the opposite. He preached on the basis of love and solidarity with the poor, he recognized the unfairness of the capitalist system and the wealth-divide it creates. He would have urged African Americans and Latinos to unite for fair immigration laws and living wages for all -- laws that respected their human rights and dignity. King would have urged a transformation of the economy to a full employment economy that treated all with respect.

Seattle’s Monthly Community Art & Imagery Build Party

January 14, 2014 Staff, www.backbonecampaign.org Create! Arts, MLK

This Sunday January 19th is Seattle's Monthly Community Art & Imagery Build Party at the Fremont Abbey! Join progressive artists and activists and friends from 350 Seattle, WAmend, the Salish Sea Sanctuary movement, and the MLK March. Make visible and vibrant the progressive values and vision we share. Lets create a future worthy of passing onto the next generation. Support and amplify the progressive grassroots movement for human rights, dignity, and ecological well-being while we create a stronger Seattle Community. No prior skills or experience necessary. We welcome you to share your gifts and passion however you enjoy expressing them. Newest Project for this month: Prop making: Exploding Oil Trains in Seattle! We'll be painting and cutting cardboard to create a very simple and effective one sided prop of oil cars on fire and leaking oil, with messaging printed on them to spread the word about these dangerous trains coming through now with 8x as many proposed (3.5/day).

MLK’s Daughter Calls for End of Economic Injustice Against First Nations

January 9, 2014 Camille Bains, www.ctvnews.ca Educate! Canada, First Nations, MLK

The daughter of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. says economic injustice must be addressed as part of the reconciliation process with Canada's First Nations. Bernice King said a history of pain and abuse can't be erased with an apology, and money for programs won't undo the suffering that can take generations to overcome. "We still suffer in America, as an African-American community," she told reporters on Saturday, referring to the lingering effects of slavery and oppression. King, 50, said her maternal great-grandmother was part Cherokee and there is Indian ancestry on her father's side as well.

The Future Needs Us

December 23, 2013 Rebecca Solnit, www.tomdispatch.com Educate! Gandhi, MLK, Slavery, Thoreau

I see the fabric of my country’s rights and justices fraying and I see climate change advancing. There are terrible things about this moment and it’s clear that the consequences of climate change will get worse (though how much worse still depends on us). I also see that we never actually know how things will play out in the end, that the most unlikely events often occur, that we are a very innovative and resilient species, and that far more of us are idealists than is good for business and the status quo to acknowledge. What I learned first in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was how calm, how resourceful, and how generous people could be in the worst times: the “Cajun Navy” that came in to rescue people by boat, the stranded themselves who formed communities of mutual aid, the hundreds of thousands of volunteers, from middle-aged Mennonites to young anarchists, who arrived afterward to help salvage a city that could have been left for dead. I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.

Martin Luther King: “My Dream is Not Obama”

August 19, 2013 Ajamu Baraka, www.PopularResistance.org Educate! Human Rights, MLK, Racism, Wars and Militarism

On August 28, the 50th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington, an event is being organized at the Lincoln Memorial by the King Center, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Council of Negro Women to commemorate that extraordinary and consequential demonstration. To highlight the occasion, these organizations apparently extended an invitation to the President of the United States to deliver the keynote address on the very same spot where Martin Luther King delivered his legendary “I have a dream” speech. The fact that Barack Obama will be standing in the shadow of Dr. King, his presence conveying the impression that he somehow represents the values and self-sacrificing lives of Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks and many of the thousands gathered that afternoon on the national mall, should be taken as an insult by everyone who has struggled and continues to struggle for human rights, peace and social justice.

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