Honor King, ignore his vision?

 


 “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate.”

— Riverside Church speech, April 4, 1967

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr., birthday. This blog honors King as a racial equality hero. Even at his life’s untimely end, King held to his vision of Americans working together, helping the less favored of all races.

Clayborne Carson is founding director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford. He states King’s most significant contribution to the civil rights struggle was linking black aspirations to more universal democratic and Christian ideals. King inspired civil rights activists to believe in egalitarian values appealing to all Americans. Emphasizing nonviolence and interracial cooperation, he effectively overcame the South’s legalized racial segregation.

Later, King was less successful at helping end poverty and de facto segregated housing on a national scale. Whereas King stood for approaching social change with care, wrote Carson, “the sharp-tongued, blue jean-clad young urban radicals stood for confrontation and immediate change.” They sided with the revolutionary Malcolm X, who called King’s tactics “criminal.”

In November 1967, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided to launch a Poor People’s Campaign to help the poor of any race. The Campaign would address economic inequalities with nonviolent direct action. It would end with a Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C.

The protestors—poor blacks, whites, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans from both urban and rural areas—would come together on the Washington Mall and demonstrate daily in May-June 1968, while Congress was in session. The massive protest would persuade Congress and the White House to act on jobs and incomes. But in April, King was assassinated.

Affirmative action should benefit all poor, not exist to boost privileged "people of color."


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