[News] All Hail the Revolutionary King: Martin Luther King and the Black Revolutionary Tradition

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/21/all-hail-the-revolutionary-king-martin-luther-king-and-the-black-revolutionary-tradition/ 



  All Hail the Revolutionary King: Martin Luther King and the Black
  Revolutionary Tradition

by Eric Mann <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/drudra/> - January 21, 
2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The annual King Day celebrations provide a great opportunity to defend 
Dr. King’s revolutionary legacy against The System’s efforts to white 
wash and degrade his frontal challenge to its crimes. Dr. Martin Luther 
King Jr. was one of the great revolutionaries in U.S. and world history. 
He was a leader of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement, a 
fierce internationalist, anti-imperialist, and Pan Africanist, a Black 
militant, pro-communist socialist, and part of The Movement that was far 
to the left of and in opposition to the Democratic Party.

Since 1980, with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, The 
Two Party System, aka U.S. imperialism, has waged a Counter-revolution 
against the Great Victories of the Revolutionary Sixties.  In that the 
revolutionary left won so many of the ideological battles against U.S. 
hegemony, The System has understood that a counter-revolution must 
include a ferocious battle over the historical record.  In the past 40 
years, in particular, it has been profoundly painful to witness, and 
very difficult to combat, the lies and slanders against the historical, 
and political achievements of the Black and Third World led movements. 
This includes an epidemic of recantation literature written by depressed 
and disillusioned former radicals denigrating the great achievements of 
the U.S. Communist Party, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, 
Black Panther Party, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Nation of 
Islam, the New Communist groups such as the League of Revolutionary 
Struggle, and the great communist led revolutions in the Soviet Union, 
China, Cuba, and Vietnam. It has also included character assassinations, 
arrests, and murders of those with the most vivid and irrepressible 
revolutionary memories. As just one terrifying reflection of the impacts 
of this campaign, I have heard young Black and Latino organizers, with 
such militant intentions, repeat without grasping the sources “this is 
not your grandfather’s civil rights movement” caricaturing the heroic 
and historic work of visionary leaders like Malcolm X and Dr. Martin 
Luther King Jr.

In the case of Dr. King, the U.S. government, Democratic Party and Civil 
Rights Establishment distort King’s life by putting him forth as a 
“non-violent” accommodating, dreamer. They attempt to use him as a 
counterforce against Malcolm X, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Paul Robeson, 
W.E.B. Du Bois, Fidel Castro, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer, and 
the great Third World revolutionaries throughout history. In truth, Dr. 
King was one of their colleagues and comrades and in turn, they all had 
great appreciation of his unique and courageous role in History.

In that there is no such thing as History but only the struggle over 
historical interpretation, I, along with many others, want to reinforce 
the historical view of Dr. King as a great leader in the Black 
Revolutionary Tradition whose work should help shape our organizing today.

** Dr. King rejected the myths of U.S. society*. He rejected its Mad Men 
packaging itself as “the leader of the free world” to tell it like it 
is; that the United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the 
world.”

** Dr. King saw “the Negro revolution” as part of a Third World and 
world revolution*. “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…For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the 
existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little 
change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a 
radical reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

Dr. Clayborne Carson, Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research 
and Education Institute at Stanford University, in his King Papers, 
related the followingstory.

    Before leaving Ghana, King welcomed a visit from English clergyman
    and anti-colonial activist Michael Scott, during which the two men
    compared the freedom struggles in Africa and the United States. King
    reportedly expressed admiration for the bus boycott then taking
    place in Johannesburg, South Africa, and remarked that there was “no
    basic difference between colonialism and racial segregation … at
    bottom both segregation in American and colonialism in Africa were
    based on the same thing — white supremacy and contempt for life.”

** Dr King supported the Black Power movement and saw himself as a 
tendency within it*. He marched with Stokley Carmichael and Willie Ricks 
on the March against Fear in Mississippi June 1966. While initially 
taken back by their cries of Black Power, he soon elaborated his own 
views as part of the Black Power continuum. “Now there is a kind of 
concrete, real Black power that I believe in … certainly if Black power 
means the amassing of political and economic power in order to gain our 
just and legitimate goals, then we all believe in that.”

** Dr. King sided with the people of Vietnam including the Vietnamese 
Communists*against the U.S. invasion. In his /Beyond Vietnam/speech, 
written by and with his close comrade, Vincent Harding, his 
anti-colonial support for the legitimacy of the Vietnamese Communist 
cause was clear.

    The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945
    after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the
    Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even
    though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their
    own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we
    decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

    Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready”
    for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western
    arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so
    long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary
    government seeking self-determination, and a government that had
    been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great
    love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some
    Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land
    reform, one of the most important needs in their lives. For nine
    years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of
    independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in
    their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

** Dr. King was deeply appreciative of the Black communist traditions of 
W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. *He was well aware of theirony and 
significance that Dr. DuBois died, in Ghana, an exile from the United 
States and a Communist, on the very day of the March on Washington for 
Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.

Dr. King observed,

    We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing that he was a
    radical all of his life. Some people would like to mute the fact
    that he was a genius who became a Communist in his later years. It
    is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly recognized the support
    of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely.
    In contemporary life the English speaking world has no difficulty
    with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the
    twentieth century and a Communist or that Pablo Neruda is generally
    considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the
    Chilean Senate as a Communist…Our irrational, obsessive,
    anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as
    if it was a model of scientific thinking

King did not merely mention the great contributions of Communists from 
Du Bois, Casey, Neruda and d Ho Chi Minh; he situated himself in that 
tradition not as a member but clearly as a friend and admirer.

*Dr. King’s non-violence was aggressive and militant reflected in 
non-violent direct action. *

Of course Dr. King had his own unique views inside the civil rights 
movement and Black united front. His views on non-violence were real and 
deeply held. He also saw non-violence as a tactic to prevent a massive 
violent backlash from racist whites. King tried to position his 
demonstrations in ways to get the largest amount of white liberal and 
international support and to pressure the national Democratic Party that 
was tied at the hip to the racist Dixiecrats.  His belief in 
non-violence deeply held, but was also tied to the theory and practice 
of militant, aggressive, Non-Violent Direct Action.

When I worked with CORE and allied with SNCC In 1964-1965 they were 
known as the Black militants, and yet both organizations saw themselves, 
at the time, as non-violent. But that did not prevent and in fact 
encouraged Black people to march into the registrar of elections in 
Southern cities and refuse to leave, Black students to occupy lunch 
counters and refusing to leave, Black and white people marching at the 
Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma confronting an army of armed police and 
white racists, or Black people in the north marching into elected 
officials’ offices and occupying them, yelling, chanting, singing, and 
confronting. Everyone we challenged in “the white power structure” saw 
militant, non-violent direct action as a big threat and retaliated 
accordingly. No one at the time praised Dr. King for his “moderation.” 
They saw angry Black people and saw Dr. King as a threat, which he 
certainly was. and saw his non-violence and “urgency of now” as a 
political force to be crushed not co-opted.

*Dr. King fought the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and the Black 
Democratic Establishment. *When Dr. King brought his movement to Chicago 
the Democratic Party Black establishment refused to support him, sided 
with the racist Mayor Daley, and told him to “go down south where you 
belong.”  Many of them refused to join his mass and militant marches for 
open housing and an end to police brutality.  In response, Dr. King 
called out the Black political establishment.

    “The majority of Black political leaders do not ascend to prominence
    on the shoulders of mass support … most are still selected by white
    leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and
    inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of [Blacks] nurtures
    a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader.”

On this day honoring his birthday, let’s take a deeper look at his 
political thought and revolutionary legacy.

* Dr. King understood that the Civil Rights and Black Liberation 
Movement was from the outset a battle against the system itself.*

King understood the intersection of radical reforms and social 
revolution and was always working to understand the time, place, 
conditions and balance of forces that would shape his rhetoric and 
tactical plan. King was one of the greatest and most effective reformers 
of all and yet, in confronting the system’s intransigence his own 
revolutionary outlook kept evolving. King’s prominence began in 1955, in 
his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the same year as the 
murder of Emmett Till and the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned 
Nations–to begin what turned out to be “the Two Decades of the Sixties” 
that did not end until the defeat of the United States in Vietnam in 
1975. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn school 
segregation in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, 
Montgomery in 1955, the great Greensboro sit-ins of 1960, the exciting 
work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Congress of 
Racial Equality Freedom Rides of 1961 the conditions of Black people in 
the United States remained at criminal levels. By 1963 white Democratic 
Party terror in the South and Democratic Party racism and brutality in 
the ghettos of the North had generated a great deal of militancy, 
organizing, and consciousness but little change in the system. At the 
great March on Washington in August 1963 King’s Southern Christian 
Leadership Conference, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, Urban League, and A. Phillip 
Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters took place amid air of 
hope–but also great impatience and militancy. King’s “I Have a Dream” 
speech (a phrase that was not in its initial draft) was in fact a 
revolutionary indictment of U.S. society.

    “One hundred years later [after the formal abolition of slavery] the
    Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the
    Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the
    chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives
    on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of
    material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still
    languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself in
    exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a
    shameful condition

    “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s Capital to cash a check. When
    the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the
    Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing
    a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This
    note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white
    men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty,
    and the pursuit of happiness. 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 believe 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. We have also come to this hallowed spot
    to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to
    engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing
    drug of gradualism.”

King is imploring, cajoling, but what his words make clear, threatening 
U.S. society and trying to mobilize Black rebellion. When he says 
“crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of segregation” 
he is making it clear that slavery is in fact still in place. He 
describes the United States as a society that offers the Negro bad 
checks and broken promises, When he says, “We refuse to believe the bank 
of justice is bankrupt” this is code for “we know you are morally 
bankrupt but Black people are here to demand, as the Staple Singers 
demanded, “When will we be paid for the work we’ve done.”

King’s formulation of “the fierce urgency of now and the tranquilizing 
drug of gradualism” was a frontal assault on the President Kennedy and 
the Democrats cry for “patience” in face of injustice. King countered 
with the spirit of Freedom Now–the cry of Black militants in South 
Africa, South Carolina and the South Bronx–and supported by a growing 
number of white supporters of the civil rights movement. In fact, “Now” 
was one of the revolutionary slogans of its time. And President Kennedy 
and the whole world were listening.

One of King’s revolutionary observations– that is still painfully 
relevant today–was, “the Negro is still languishing in the corners of 
American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.”

In 1964 I was recruited by organizers of the Student Non-Violent 
Coordinating Committee to join “the civil rights revolution.” By the 
time I got to CORE in Harlem and the Northeast my mentors were staying 
up all night debating what exactly that revolution would look like. 
While the struggle focused on democratic rights and full equality many 
SNCC and CORE leaders were talking about some form of Black nation, 
Black Power, Black militancy, Black separatism–not as a way of “getting 
away” from the system but as part of a plan to challenge it–and for 
some, overthrow it. Clearly influenced by Malcolm X but also the African 
liberation movements people were talking about a challenge to U.S. 
capitalism and at least talking about some type of pro-socialist system. 
It was not all that clear or delineated but the concepts of full 
equality, full democratic rights, Black rights, self-determination, 
radical reform and revolution were far more interrelated than 
counterposed–and all of them involved Black people in the leadership of 
a multi-racial movement–either through integration or separation. In 
that context, I am arguing that Dr. King was a Black revolutionary 
nationalist, perhaps of a more moderate nature, but he was a student of 
world history and was impacted by the revolutionary ideas of the times. 
For Dr. King, as early as 1963, to tell the president of the United 
States that Black people in the U.S. are “exiles in their own land” was 
clearly a call for some form of both full equality and Black 
self-determination and far away from the “more perfect union” myth that 
the system was selling–with few buyers.

*King was a victim of capitalist state violence, surveillance, 
psychological, character, and actual assassination.*

The story of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to destroy ML King and force him 
into a nervous breakdown and suicide is not tangential but central to 
King’s revolutionary history–and the surveillance and police state we 
live under today. And yet, another element of the revolutionary history 
of Dr. King that is being whitewashed is his actual assassination was by 
the system itself. Part of this cover-up is to destroy the memory of the 
work of Coretta Scott King in exposing the actual assassination of Dr. King.

In his “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech the very night before he 
was murdered Dr. King was very aware of what he felt was his possible 
and imminent assassination.

    “Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its
    place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s
    will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked
    over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.
    But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to
    the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about
    anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of
    the coming of the Lord.^“

And while his words are brave, every time I hear that talk I hear a 
mortal man not fully at peace, nor should he have been, with his 
mortality–but trying to comfort and reassure Black people that “we as a 
people” will find liberation–rather than asking them to protect 
him–which he knew they could not.

On December 8, 1999, (21 years after his death) after the King family 
and allies presented 70 witnesses in a civil trial, twelve jurors in 
Memphis, Tennessee reached a unanimous verdict after about an hour of 
deliberations that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a 
result of a conspiracy.

In a press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta 
Scott King welcomed the verdict.

    There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the
    assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil
    court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly
    applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been
    well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great
    victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a
    great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this
    was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury
    deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive
    evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to
    Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal
    government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my
    husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that
    identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and
    that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. I want to make it clear
    that my family has no interest in retribution. Instead, our sole
    concern has been that the full truth of the assassination has been
    revealed and adjudicated in a court of law… My husband once said,
    “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward
    justice.” To-day, almost 32 years after my husband and the father of
    my four children was assassinated, I feel that the jury’s verdict
    clearly affirms this principle. With this faith, we can begin the
    21st century and the new millennium with a new spirit of hope and
    healing.

Sadly, the police/surveillance/counter-insurgency state is stronger than 
ever–but at least there is growing public challenge to its hegemony. 
Understanding the revolutionary story of Dr. King and the system’s 
decision to bring him down is essential if we want to understand and 
make history in the present.

*King was from the outset a Black militant and revolutionary who 
advocated non-violent direct action but saw “the Negro revolution” as 
the overriding objective.*

While Dr. King strongly argued for non-violence as both a tactical and 
ethical perspective he also supported the right of Black people to armed 
self-defense and allied with the advocates of armed self-defense and 
even armed struggle in the Black movement.

At a time of the most rampant and systematic police violence the 
system’s armed requirement that Black people are “non-violent” is 
intellectually and morally lethal. It flies in the face of the 
long-standing tradition of armed self-defense in the Black community and 
the urgency to defend that tradition today. Worse, to use Dr. King 
against that basic right is the height of cynicism and historical 
distortion.

Clay Carson’s /_In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674447271/counterpunchmaga>_/, 
helps shed light on this complex relationship. While many young 
organizers were critical of Dr. King SNCC’s Stokley Carmichael explained 
best their appreciation of his profound impact on the Black masses.

    “People loved King..I’ve seen people in the South climb over each
    other just to say, “I touched him, I touched him.” I’m even talking
    about the young…These were the people we were working with and I had
    to follow in his footsteps when I went in there. The people didn’t
    know what was SNCC. They just said, “You one of Dr. King’s men?”
    “Yes, Ma’am I am.”

Carson explains the pivotal role of “militant and self-reliant local 
black residents who owned weapons and were willing to defend themselves 
when attacked. Black rallies in the county were often protected by armed 
guards sometimes affiliated with the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense 
and Justice”

Many SNCC organizers, disagreeing with King’s focus on non-violence, 
explained, “We are not King or SCLC. They don’t do the work the kind of 
work that we do nor do they live in the areas we live in. They don’t 
drive the highways at night”…Carmichael recalled that the discussion 
ended when he asked those carrying weapons to place them on the table. 
Nearly all the black organizers working in the Deep South were armed.

But again the system wants to act like the battle between King and SNCC 
and the Black militants was a morality play or an ideological war. But 
it wasn’t. It was an intellectual, strategic, and yes, ethical struggle 
among equals and King was both open minded and introspective about the 
limits of his non-violent advocacy–and as such, people had respect for 
his own principles and rationale.

In 1965, James Farmer, the director of CORE, a truly dedicated pacifist, 
told a group of us at a mass meeting, “I am completely non-violent but I 
want to thank our brothers from the Deacons for Defense (who were both 
standing guard and yes, getting a standing ovation from the organizers) 
whose arms allow me to be non-violent.” My read of history is King felt 
similarly.

And even more importantly, King well understood that his “non-violence” 
could be used by the system as a justification for state violence and of 
course the system’s need to destroy the Black united front. In his 
speech, “Beyond Vietnam” on April 4, 1967 King addressed frontally his 
most principled conversations with the angry youth of the urban ghettos. 
He stated,

    /“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young
    men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not
    solve their problem. I have tried to offer my deepest compassion/
    while/maintaining my conviction that social change comes most
    meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and
    rightfully so, “What about Vietnam?”..Their questions hit home and I
    knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the
    oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the
    greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”/

Note that King does not try to raise a moral critique of those who would 
use Molotov cocktails and rifles in response to the economic and armed 
violence of the state. And by making clear he considered its advocates 
“the oppressed” he supported the morality, if not the tactics, of their 
cause. Instead, he simply argued that he did not feel it would “solve 
their problem” and even then qualified his own advocacy of non-violence 
to make the case that “social change comes /most meaningfully/” but not 
exclusively from non-violence. He admitted it was a legitimate debate.

Martin Luther King Jr., SNCC, CORE, and Malcolm X represented at the 
time the “left” of the Black united front and worked to find strategic 
and tactical unity with the NAACP and Urban League–which made the March 
on Washington, the Civil Rights Bill, and the Voting Rights Bill 
possible. While King had many contradictions with the young Black 
militants he understood them and they him as strategic allies against a 
system of white supremacist capitalism.

*SNCC, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and M.L. King were on the frontlines of 
the movement against the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam.*

While SNCC and Malcolm were among the first to speak out frontally 
against the war as early as 1965, by April 1967 both King and Muhammad 
Ali took enormous risks to frontally challenge the war on moral grounds 
and to argue that Black people in particular had no interest in 
supporting the war.

In his monumental /Beyond Vietnam /speech. Dr. King argued in support of 
Vietnamese self-determination and rejected the view that the U.S. had 
any legitimate interests in Vietnam.

Reading primary documents is essential for the revolutionary 
historian/strategist/tactician and organizer. In reading and re-reading 
/Beyond Vietnam/I still hang on its every word.

* /King called out U.S. war crimes against the Vietnamese/people making 
the analogy that the United States feared the most–comparisons with Nazi 
Germany. He asked, what do the Vietnamese people “think when we test our 
latest weapons on them just as the Germans tested out new medicine and 
new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.”

* /King praised the integrity and legitimacy of the National Liberation 
Front of Vietnam including the communists who he argued were the 
legitimate political leaders of the Vietnamese people’s struggle./

“They were led by Ho Chi Minh” and were creating “a revolutionary 
government seeking self-determination.” He describes Ho as saved only by 
“his sense of humor and irony… when he hears the most powerful nation in 
the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands bombs on a nation 
eight thousand miles from its shores.” (Communists with a sense of humor 
and irony–perhaps the most revolutionary insight of all.)

/*King focused on demand development. In the end movements are unified 
by ideas, people, organizations and demands.  He called on the U.S. 
government/

* End all bombing in North and South Vietnam

* Declare a unilateral cease fire

* Curtail the U.S. build up in Thailand and Laos

* Recognize the role of The National Liberation Front in any future 
Vietnam government

* Remove all foreign–that is, U.S. troops from Vietnam

* Make reparations for the damage

This was tantamount to calling for immediate U.S. withdrawal from 
Vietnam. It recognized the victory of the National Liberation Front and 
argued for what would later become a critical component of Black 
people’s demands against the U.S. government — “reparations.”

The story of the system’s attacks on Dr. King once he spoke out against 
the war in Vietnam and his courage in the face of this assault is 
another chapter of Dr. King’s revolutionary contribution to U.S. and 
world history. One important version of that story is Tavis Smiley’s 
documentary, /Death of a King: Dr. Martin Luther King’s Final Year/.

Dr. King brought a powerful and frontal indictment of the system of 
white supremacist, racist, capitalism. He appreciated the ideas of 
others and worked to build a Black and multi-racial united front against 
what he called “racism, poverty, and militarism.” He was willing to 
confront “the cowardice” inside his own bosom and modeled how all of us 
have to put our bodies, souls and lives on the line. He rejected 
gradualism and demanded “Freedom Now.” He advocated non-violence but 
defended the right of those who disagreed with him to armed 
self-defense.   He rejected U.S. chauvinism, called for a militant 
internationalism, and challenged the U.S. Empire at home and abroad. He 
was independent of and yes, willing to challenge and confront the 
Democratic Party. He was and is a great contributor to the endless 
struggle for human and planetary liberation.

It is time to celebrate the Revolutionary King on the anniversary of his 
birthday. We thank Stevie Wonder, who spoke for all of us, when he wrote,

    I just never understood
    How a man who died for good
    Could not have a day that would
    Be set aside for his recognition Because it should never be
    Just because some cannot see
    The dream as clear as he
    that they should make it become an illusion
    And we all know everything
    That he stood for time will bring
    For in peace our hearts will sing
    Thanks to Martin Luther King
    Happy birthday to you
    Happy birthday to you
    Happy birthday
    Happy birthday to you
    Happy birthday to you
    Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you!

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20190121/470170c3/attachment.htm>