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What Happened to the Real Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr?

Junious Ricardo Stanton

“If students analyze King’s speeches and life’s work more carefully, they’ll see that he promoted a more radical approach to justice—not one that asks citizens to be neutral on racism or one that merely offers comfort.” Teaching About King’s Radical Approach To Social Justice - Choshandra Dillard https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/teaching-about-kings-radical-approach-to-social-justice

The powers that be are attempting to whitewash the true legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Shortly after they had him cut down on a balcony in Memphis Tennessee in April of 1968, the plutocrats and oligarchs who own and run this country determined to destroy the movement he was building; a movement for social justice, equity, peace and prosperity for all Americans. The psychopaths who own and run this country decided to redefine King’s impact, redirect his righteous fervor for social justice and neuter his push for structural change and replace it with a one day of service thus nullifying persistent activism for a systemic metamorphosis of American society. Thus far it is working, our government is spending trillions for overseas wars while homelessness and despair escalate in this country yet not a peep of protest out of the masses!

The ruling elites weren’t able to dissuade or stop the campaign to make King’s natal day a national holiday so they cunningly recast his image into one of a “dreamer” rather than an ardent activist and champion for peace and social transformation. They always promote the “I have a dream” refrain from his August 28, 1963 March on Washington D.C. speech. They never mention the stirring words that preceded his famous refrain; “… It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

The campaign to tear down legal apartheid and racial cast in America was winning meanwhile the US ruling elites escalated their imperialist campaign to replace French Neo-Colonialism in Indochina with an American brand determined to snuff out the liberation movement in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson put the pedal to the metal and intensified the war effort exponentially.

Martin Luther King Jr was one of the few nationally prominent US clergy who stood up against the Military Industrial Complex and courageously denounced the war in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand). King disparaged the carnage and war profiteering at the expense of justice, morality and obliterating the grinding poverty experienced by Blacks, whites, indigenous peoples and people of color in this country. His efforts earned him the hatred and hostility of the power elites.

King’s national Poor People’s Campaign was an embarrassment to the US government because it exposed the lies and disingenuous propaganda that portrayed America as the land of the free, home of the brave and a place of unlimited opportunity for all of its citizens. His efforts to mobilize a diverse cross section of Americans to come to Washington and plead their case for social justice and systemic transformation including ending the war marked King as a man to be, to use a CIA term “neutralized”, meaning killed.

The FBI tried all kinds of tricks to make King give up even pushing him to commit suicide, https://allthatsinteresting.com/fbi-martin-luther-king-tapes to no avail. So on April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed while assisting Memphis Tennessee sanitation works in their struggle for recognition, decent wages and benefits.

The ruling class then had to decide how to deal with his legacy. Today little or no mention is made of King’s stance against the war nor his push for radical societal transformation. We never hear his speeches about the ravages of war both at home and far away places like Indochina. We are not exposed to King’s words at Riverside Church in New York one year to the day before his brutal murder in Memphis Tennessee where he said, “… Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with 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 schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor…” Beyond Vietnam – A Time To Break Silence.

The billionaires and warmongers who own the media are depriving us of King’s conviction, courage and vision. They deliberately suppress words like this, “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Ironically, King warned against superficial acts of kindness versus real change. “One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

In 2024 as we celebrate Martin Luther King’s natal day and his life mission, do not allow the warmongers, the corporations and soulless billionaires belittle King’s true legacy, misdirect and rechannel our energies and actions in ways that pose no threat to their power and maintain the status quo! As wars increasingly ravage our planet, do not allow the warmongers, war profiteers, their bought and paid politicians and controlled media trick us into being silent, passive and acquiescing to their evil! Be like Martin Luther King Jr., speak out, act out and live in ways that promote and spread peace.

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