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<h1 class="reader-title">All Hail the Revolutionary King: Martin
Luther King and the Black Revolutionary Tradition</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/drudra/"
rel="nofollow" moz-do-not-send="true">Eric Mann</a> -
January 21, 2019</span></div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>* Dr. King rejected the myths of U.S. society</strong>.
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.”</p>
<p><strong>* Dr. King saw “the Negro revolution” as part
of a Third World and world revolution</strong>. “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.”</p>
<p>Dr. Clayborne Carson, Director of the Martin Luther
King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford
University, in his King Papers, related the
followingstory.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>* Dr King supported the Black Power movement
and saw himself as a tendency within it</strong>. 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.”</p>
<p><strong>* Dr. King sided with the people of Vietnam
including the Vietnamese Communists</strong>against
the U.S. invasion. In his <em>Beyond Vietnam</em>speech,
written by and with his close comrade, Vincent Harding,
his anti-colonial support for the legitimacy of the
Vietnamese Communist cause was clear.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>* Dr. King was deeply appreciative of the Black
communist traditions of W.E.B. DuBois and Paul
Robeson. </strong>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.</p>
<p>Dr. King observed,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. King’s non-violence was aggressive and
militant reflected in non-violent direct action. </strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. King fought the Democratic Party of Lyndon
Johnson and the Black Democratic Establishment. </strong>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On this day honoring his birthday, let’s take a deeper
look at his political thought and revolutionary legacy.</p>
<p><strong> Dr. King understood that the Civil Rights and
Black Liberation Movement was from the outset a battle
against the system itself.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>King was a victim of capitalist state violence,
surveillance, psychological, character, and actual
assassination.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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.<sup>“</sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In a press statement held the following day in Atlanta,
Mrs. Coretta Scott King welcomed the verdict.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Clay Carson’s <em><u><a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674447271/counterpunchmaga"
moz-do-not-send="true">In Struggle: SNCC and the
Black Awakening of the 1960s</a></u></em>, 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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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,</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“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</em>
while<em> 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.”</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <em>most
meaningfully</em>” but not exclusively from
non-violence. He admitted it was a legitimate debate.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In his monumental <em>Beyond Vietnam </em>speech. Dr.
King argued in support of Vietnamese self-determination
and rejected the view that the U.S. had any legitimate
interests in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Reading primary documents is essential for the
revolutionary historian/strategist/tactician and
organizer. In reading and re-reading <em>Beyond Vietnam</em>I
still hang on its every word.</p>
<p>* <em>King called out U.S. war crimes against the
Vietnamese</em>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.”</p>
<p>* <em>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.</em></p>
<p>“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.)</p>
<p><em>*King focused on demand development. In the end
movements are unified by ideas, people, organizations
and demands. He called on the U.S. government</em></p>
<p>* End all bombing in North and South Vietnam</p>
<p>* Declare a unilateral cease fire</p>
<p>* Curtail the U.S. build up in Thailand and Laos</p>
<p>* Recognize the role of The National Liberation Front
in any future Vietnam government</p>
<p>* Remove all foreign–that is, U.S. troops from Vietnam</p>
<p>* Make reparations for the damage</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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, <em>Death of a King: Dr. Martin
Luther King’s Final Year</em>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I just never understood<br>
How a man who died for good<br>
Could not have a day that would<br>
Be set aside for his recognition Because it should
never be<br>
Just because some cannot see<br>
The dream as clear as he<br>
that they should make it become an illusion<br>
And we all know everything<br>
That he stood for time will bring<br>
For in peace our hearts will sing<br>
Thanks to Martin Luther King<br>
Happy birthday to you<br>
Happy birthday to you<br>
Happy birthday<br>
Happy birthday to you<br>
Happy birthday to you<br>
Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you!</p>
</blockquote>
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