Forty years after Martin Luther King's assasination, the injustices he fought against are more prevalent than ever today

http://www.faireconomy.org/state_of_the_dream_200

 

Martin Luther King Jr. vs The New World Order

Junious Ricardo Stanton

 

 

As we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr, it is supremely ironic to realize forty years after his government sanctioned murder rooted in the very sicknesses King single handedly forced AmeriKKKa to face; are still alive and well. These pathologies: imperialism, militarism, racial superiority complexes and corporatist fascism like a massive cancer have metastasized over the past forty years to the point AmeriKKKa is rotted at its core. The stench is so foul now it can no longer be disguised or hidden. The same arrogance, greed and racism that prompted the US to take the baton from France in an attempt to maintain a European death grip of colonialism in Vietnam (under the guise of stopping global communism), drives the US imperial machine to occupy, choke, bomb, plunder and murder Haitians, Iraqis and  Afghans. Only now they do it in the name of their bogus Global War on Terrorism. Human beings are creatures of habit. We tend to do the same things over and over. So it is no surprise forty years later, the same out of control military industrial international bankers cabal is shedding US blood, dissipating the US treasury and expanding the powers of the police state at home.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered for daring to challenge the status quo, for forcing Joe and Jane Sixpack to look at how the US system was responsible for much of the world’s suffering. He became persona non grata for demanding a systemic restructuring and redistribution of wealth in AmeriKKKa. While the US elites said King was a communist, he was not. King knew communism was a bankrupt ideology and plainly said so, “I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn't come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn't come from Engels; my inspiration didn't come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn't come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn't follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called ‘dialectical materialism.’ I have to reject that.

 

What I'm saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.” "Where Do We Go From Here?" Annual Report Delivered at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference 16 August 1967 Atlanta, Georgia King eloquently called for a radical restructuring of AmeriKKKan  society and a re-examination about notions of wealth, justice and brotherhood.

 

He put his action behind his words often finding himself alone, misunderstood and under relentless attack from whites and handkerchief head Negroes as he opposed the Vietnam War, widening socio-economic disparities at home, and challenged the spiritual and psychological cancers rife in AmeriKKKa. For this he was murdered.But, wait, the real irony is the ruling elites were also planning and executing a radical restructuring of AmeriKKKan society and a definite redistribution of wealth. Only their plans call for the wealth to flow from us to them. The culmination of their plan is what is happening now through: globalization, the bogus War on Terror and the current economic meltdown. As Joe and Jane Sixpack lose their homes, their savings and their constitutional rights in 2008, the same forces that profited from the Vietnam War and AmeriKKKan apartheid in 1968, are getting over like fat rats manufacturing ordnance that will bomb babies around the world, incarcerate millions in AmeriKKKa, and terrorize AmeriKKKans in the name of a War on Terror.

 

The military industrial complex working with their FBI and CIA sycophants chose to “neutralize” (their term for murder) King because they viewed him as a potential “Black Messiah” . The Martin Luther King  Jr who was murdered on April 4, 1968 was not the “I Have A Dream” King the mind control apparatus keeps pumping out despite the fact the beginning of his I Have A Dream speech was a scathing indictment of AmeriKKKa’s failure to live up to her promises and creed. King was way ahead of his time. He was not the Milquetoast sell out some have erroneously painted him. King like Malcolm was keenly aware of the nexus between European racism, imperialism, and global exploitation. King too  opposed the New World Order of Western neocolonialism. He wisely eschewed violence because he knew we were out gunned and lacked the requisite organization, arms or support. His plan was to bring AmeriKKKa to heel via exposure, economic boycotts and civil disobedience. His Poor People’s Campaign would have further embarrassed, humbled and disrupted business as usual. The ruling elites could not tolerate that. So they ordered him killed.

 

Brotha Pruitt
Reparations Leader and Chairman
Committee for African American Reparations (CAAR)

 

Greetings,

In celebrating memory of Dr. King and Black History Month, African-Americans are in the most crucial times of their existence here in America , since congressional hearings began on H.R. 40 on 12-18-07! H.R. 40 is a bill in which congress is asked to study the institution of slavery and the impact it has on Black people today. Harmful and lasting effects of slavery are real and tangible within society and the psyche of Black people. Thanks to Dr. Joy Leary a technical term has been applied equating Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS). African-Americans have gone through bad and worse periods of time during their past 500 years of living in this United States territory. Many of them think their history began with slavery. They do not know the truth because it has been intentionally withheld. Now they have the opportunity to learn the truth about their ancestors, culture and heritage and seek restoration, restitution, rehabilitation and compensation. I would like to thank all of the individuals and groups who have made this possible by their constant action in the reparations arena.

 

BET recently aired a program called 25 events that Mis-Shaped Black America. I did not see the entire program but I do recall the top 3 events. They were Slavery, AIDS and Drugs. The question is should Blacks receive reparations for all the damage that these 3 events have caused. The answer is an undeniable and unequivocal yes and under no conditional circumstances! The basic function of reparations is to repair the damage done to a people. Evaluating these top 3 events we will find overwhelming damage done to the Black Family. The terrible part of this scenario is that there are many more events and periods of time in which African-Americans sustained severe damage.

 

They range from Willie Lynch Indoctrination, to the Illuminati, to negative images and stereo types, to Lynching, to lies and deceitful intentions of reconstruction, to The Freedmen’s Bureau thefts, to The Red Summer attacks, to segregation, bussing and integration, to The White Citizens Council, to Cointel-Pro, to Police Brutality, to the John Birch Society, to Ron Brown and the delegation of black business class people who were shot down in a plane with their economic strategy for Africa, to the conditions that are afflicting Africa and her native population today, to the Black Matrix, to the last two presidential elections, to Housing and Gentrification, to victims of Hurricane Katrina, to the education and justice system and to promising black high school students who were victims of unsolved murders all across America, in an effort to stop the rise of the black messiah.

 

We should also mention the 2 most alarming events that Mis-Shaped Black America which are the spiritual and cultural disconnection. African-Americans have been displaced, forbidden to practice traditional customs, unable to assimilate because of their complexion and lacking in opportunities for employment, peace and progress. These are the greatest contributing factors responsible for destroying the Black Family and causing black on black crime.

 

African-Americans need a process that will enable them to identify all of their problems that came as a result of enduring such traumatic experiences, with the intent of developing solutions. H.R. 40 is a good beginning for testimony but there has to be an in-depth course of action that will lead to African-American liberation and independence, which will come by producing an African-American Reparations Package similar to the Marshal Plan. We recommend the Five Phase Plan to achieve these goals, which I can forward to you upon your request.

 

 

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i19/19b00701.htm

The Prophet Reconsidered

 

40 years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., new studies emphasize his economic and social philosophy

 

By CHRISTOPHER PHELPS

January 18, 2008

 

We forget so much. We forget that he was hanging by a thread in 1968 at the time of his death, whose 40th anniversary we will mark in April. We forget that his moral authority had frayed, leaving his fund raising in free fall. We forget that in his final years, he faced not only a rising "white backlash" — the media term for white obduracy in the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods, North as well as South — but resentment from establishment liberals who thought he had executed too radical a turn by opposing a Democratic president and the Vietnam War. We forget that although blacks still looked to him more than any other leader, he was increasingly viewed with cynicism by young militants who derided him as "De Lawd" and thought his nonviolence too tepid for the times.

 

We forget that police agencies from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to military intelligence viewed him as a dangerous subversive, listened in on his conversations, and spread both true and false rumors about him in a concerted campaign to discredit him. We forget that between major addresses he was prone to depression, afflicted by insomnia so severe that he slept only a few hours each night, even when popping sleeping pills. We forget that his close associates were concerned by his anxiety and fatigue, and taken aback by his fixation on his own mortality. We forget the critics who accused him of harboring a "Messiah complex."

 

By all rights, though, we ought to remember. We are surrounded by constant reminders of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Statues, monuments, and postage stamps bear his likeness, highways and boulevards his name. He has become a national icon. Television ads sample his voice. Presidential candidates invoke the "fierce urgency of now." Ubiquity has come, however, at a price. The nonviolent revolutionary who upended conventional society and sought to induce tension has become an anodyne symbol of progress. The disappointed prophet who spoke toward the end of his life of America as a nightmare is remembered only for his 1963 dream. Once widely reviled, King has become an almost obligatory object of reverence.

 

Even conservatives genuflect before his memory. While dismantling affirmative action, a policy King advocated, they cite King's aspiration that Americans be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. King is a totem: safe, universal, unobjectionable. He is as remote and mythical to schoolchildren as any other figure in the national pantheon stretching back to the founding fathers. His inner turmoil, his public failures, his vocal critics, left and right, have all faded from view, replaced by a fable in which a nation awakens gently to his self-evident dream.

 

This pattern is not wholly lamentable. It may even be necessary. Had the long campaign waged by Coretta Scott King after his murder not succeeded, had she and her husband's closest associates not surmounted strong resistance and achieved a national day named for him, there might be no annual federal commemoration of the life of any African-American. There might be no occasion for the nation to reflect upon the merit of the dismantling of overt racism in law, public accommodations, and education, as well as the securing of voting rights for all citizens, regardless of race. These accomplishments — understood by King himself as gigantic steps forward — merit our commemoration.

 

But the ceremonial gloss now overlaid upon Martin Luther King Jr. causes problems. By rendering him immaculate and incontrovertible, sanctification has, paradoxically, left him vulnerable. Cynicism is too easily the reaction when revelations occur about, say, King's sexual escapades or collegiate plagiarism. But King's heroism and place in history never depended on a halo of saintly purity. Brilliant, flawed, controversial, talented, King — as he was first to observe — was always a sinner.

 

To view Martin Luther King Jr. as the Man Who Brought About Civil Rights is to conflate movement with man, and biography is no substitute for history. King's stature ought not obscure the vast and variegated activity from below, in countless cities and rural districts, that made up the civil-rights revolution. Too often King's story is framed within a self-contented story of national progress that idealizes the extent to which the country has transcended race and minimizes the disruptive tactics necessary to bring about an end to Jim Crow. Commemoration further confines King's life to the box of "civil-rights leader," making it seem that his sole aim was to eliminate de jure discrimination — the explicit racist barriers to opportunity. In actuality, King, like the black freedom movement as a whole, pursued an expansive moral mission dedicated to ending inequality, racism, war, and poverty.

 

"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day," King told the congregation of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, two months before his assassination, "I don't want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize — that isn't important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards — that's not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked."

 

Our scholarship on the civil-rights movement — truly stunning in its quality — is not to blame for our oversimplified iconography of Martin Luther King Jr. King is the subject of many fine biographies, among them David Levering Lewis's King (Penguin, 1970), Stephen B. Oates's Let the Trumpet Sound (Harper & Row, 1982), David J. Garrow's Bearing the Cross (William Morrow, 1986), and Taylor Branch's magisterial trilogy, beginning with Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Simon and Schuster, 1988). Excellent biographies now exist of Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Rosa Parks, King's colleagues. Testimonies of the black freedom struggle are collected in oral histories and memoirs. Narratives have appeared of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, and Freedom Summer, as well as struggles in local communities, from Birmingham to Greensboro. Writers have shed new light on Brown v. Board of Education (1954), organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the press's "race beat," and segregationists' "massive resistance." The freedom movement has even occasioned the best historical documentary ever produced on any subject, Eyes on the Prize.

 

These investigations have transformed historical understanding in ways the nation's culture has yet to fully register, let alone absorb. Scholars now emphasize the global context of cold war (as a lever) and decolonization (as inspiration) for the American civil-rights movement. Many of them speak of a "long civil-rights movement" stretching back at least to the 1940s, when A. Philip Randolph led fights to desegregate industry and the military — if not even further back, to Ida B. Wells's antilynching crusade of the 1890s or the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by W.E.B. Du Bois and others in 1909. Recent scholarship heralds women's networks, rooted primarily in the black church, as critical to movement success in the 1950s and 1960s, giving Septima Clark, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others their due. Historians have shown conclusively that armed self-defense was a significant factor in a cause once taken to have been purely nonviolent. They have depicted numerous mobilizations against Jim Crow in the North, as well as the South. They have begun to explore with sophistication the complex relationship between black radicalism and militant liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

Those insights, which mark off civil-rights scholarship as one of the most imaginative fields of modern American historiography, pose profound challenges to those who would consecrate King as the personification of the movement. In I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (University of California Press, 1995), a brilliant local study, Charles M. Payne blasts "top down" civil-rights histories for obscuring the "collective, multi-faceted nature" of the movement's leadership. "King-centric" studies, he writes, promote a "normative history" by assuming that "national institutions work more or less as advertised." They tend to overestimate the national consensus about the movement's goals and frame radicalism as irrational. In "popular discourse about the movement," Payne finds, King fits the normative bill as "the apostle of nonviolence, advocate of interracial brotherhood and Christian patience."

 

As if in conscious response, a new scholarly synthesis seems emergent four decades after the death of King, one that draws upon decidedly bottom-up conceptions of the civil-rights movement to reconsider King's life and thought. Far from a comforting, "normative" figure, King emerges in these studies, as Thomas F. Jackson puts it in his very fine intellectual portrait From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, as "much more radical, earlier and more consistently, than he is credited for being." One hallmark of these recent works — which concentrate above all on King's economic and social philosophy — is their attentiveness, again in Jackson's words, to the way in which King's voice echoed "the values and languages of specific audiences" while "challenging them with antithetical truths, stretching their terms of understanding and prodding them to think and act in new directions."

 

Nowhere is this more evident than in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., the ongoing work of the King Papers Project headed by Clayborne Carson at Stanford University. A labor of love, the King Papers Project is a money-losing venture both for its host institution, which quarters it in a temporary modular building, and its publisher, the University of California Press. Subject to the ebb and flow of whatever financial support it manages to cobble together, the King Papers Project has somehow succeeded in assembling an extraordinary, state-of-the-art digital database and issuing six handsomely bound volumes of King's papers to date.

 

An hour spent with a volume in this series is virtually equivalent to a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. Each volume is a trove of letters, memoranda, transcriptions, photographs, speeches, minutes, and fragmentary notes, some in facsimile of the handwritten original. All are reproduced verbatim, complete with King's wretched spelling ("diciple," "fudal"). The staff editors — as historians trained in social history and, in several cases, veterans of social movements — are ambivalent about Great Man theories of King. Aided by squadrons of Stanford students they oversee, they acquire King documents from the world over, make selections from mountains of potential items, and write the contextualizing footnotes and introductions.

 

The most recent volume comprises King's sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King's immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled "Will Capitalism Survive?" King held that "capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world." He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide "whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe." He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta's gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy's utopian socialist novel Looking Backward ("There is still hope for the future ... ," she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, "I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry."

 

The volume's assiduous editorial annotation permits us to locate King in lived dialogue. We discover, for example, that his 1952 sermon on "Communism's Challenge to Christianity," delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, prompted a letter of retort from Melvin H. Watson, a Morehouse College professor and Ebenezer congregant, who attempted to set King straight on the virtues of Stalin. Watson, a holdover from the Communist-led Popular Front, helps us place King's democratic radicalism in bold relief while providing a concrete illustration of how black communities retained a strong left-wing presence even after the 1940s.

 

Reviews of the first volume of King Papers in 1992 were mixed, but read today those initial objections look stingy. Regrettably, no volume issued since has received much attention, even though the third, on the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, is nonpareil as a sourcebook on that critical struggle. With six volumes now in print, it is time we hail the King Papers Project as a triumph of national scholarship, one that would have been impossible without grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and other federal agencies.It may be too much to hope that the steady accumulation of scholarship drawing attention to King's radicalism and situating him within a complex movement will alter popular conceptions of King, but if a breakthrough does come, it would seem most likely to take place in a year, like this 40th anniversary, that draws our attention to his activity in 1968.

Never was King's full agenda more visible than after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his last years, King struggled to devise tactics suitable to challenging economic injustice, a target more amorphous than Jim Crow. In 1966 he launched an ill-fated challenge to Chicago's slums and residential segregation. In 1967, in a speech against "racism, materialism, and militarism," he described the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," placed America "on the wrong side of a world revolution," and blamed the "need to maintain social stability for our investments."

 

In 1968, King visited a bare-bones elementary school in rural Mississippi. As he watched, the teacher provided each child with a few crackers and a quarter of an apple for lunch. "That's all they get," his friend Ralph Abernathy whispered. King nodded, his eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. That night, King conceived the notion of a Poor People's Campaign. To open the eyes of the nation to poverty, he would lead a Washington encampment of poor people whose civil disobedience would compel a shift of funds from war to social priorities such as full employment and a guaranteed annual income. Opposition instantly greeted the Poor People's Campaign. King's advisers privately doubted its wisdom. Former allies criticized it publicly. As King soldiered on undaunted, he was called to Memphis, where garbage workers requested his presence. Their strike, sparked by the deaths of two workers crushed in a faulty trash compactor, had unified the black community in opposition to Memphis's intransigent segregationist mayor, Henry Loeb.

 

Never before has there been so complete a rendering of that episode as in Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign. Situating the Memphis strike within the sweep of history, Michael K. Honey shows that the poverty wages of sanitation workers were emblematic of the black working poor. One might take issue with some aspects of Honey's retelling, such as his rendering of King as opposed to obsessive anticommunism but never to communism. Honey also misses that King, by invoking the Jericho parable, did not merely mean to call us to service like the Good Samaritan; he actually proposed, through social transformation, to alter the road itself to eliminate the need for charity. ("We're going to change the whole Jericho road!" he shouted in Chicago.) Honey's intricately researched reconstruction, however, leaves far more to commend than fault. His portraits of key players, from union leaders to Black Power youth, are highly informative. He effectively recreates King's powerful oratory — including his startling call for a Memphis general strike. Going Down Jericho Road is a majestic work of black history as labor history, and social history as American history.

 

When King died after being shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at age 39, he was beleaguered. Some people say he was a dreamer, but — to quote another martyr — he was not the only one. Malcolm and Medgar, Allende and Lumumba: The casualties dotted that age. King's mellifluent baritone voice and charismatic leadership in 1968 were directed beyond attitudinal racism and legal segregation, toward overturning the tables of the money-changers. He meant to bring an end to war, slums, underfunded schools, destitution, and unemployment. Down riot-torn streets, he continued his quest for audacious social transformation by means of creative tension, compassion, love, inclusion, and humility. His death reminds us of American violence. The aspirations he left unfulfilled — especially for social equality and economic justice — may yet supply the legacy for a renewed American hope.

 

Christopher Phelps teaches 20th-century American history at Ohio State University at Mansfield.

 

How African-Americans stand 40 years after the death of Martin Luther King

A statistical snapshot of black progress in areas from education to home ownership.

By Ross Atkin | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

At age 6, Martin Luther King Jr. was jarred when a parent of a white friend said the boys could no longer play together because he was black. Another time, King's father, a minister, was driving a car when a white policeman pulled him over for no obvious reason. "Listen, boy," he began, only to be cut off when the Rev. King pointed to his son in the passenger seat. "That is a boy. I am a man."

At age 14, King experienced a similar incident. While returning from a school debating competition, the driver threatened to call the police if he didn't move to the back of the bus.

King felt the pangs of racial bigotry growing up in Atlanta – and they stoked a fire within him. The son and grandson of pastors in Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, King pursued theological studies, culminating in a doctorate from Boston University in 1955. Late that year, he led a nonviolent bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., to protest Rosa Parks's arrest for refusing to move from whites-only seats at the front of a city bus. The boycott lasted 382 days.

In 1957 King was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he continued his civil rights activism, eventually leading a mass protest in Birmingham, Ala., over unfair hiring practices and customer discrimination. In 1963, he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of 250,000. It predated passage of the seminal 1964 Civil Rights Act by a year.

King was unbowed by arrests, assaults, and a bombing of his home meant to thwart his cause. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Four years later, while preparing to lead a march of striking garbage collectors in Memphis, Tenn., he was assassinated on a motel balcony.

History of MLK Day

1968: Days after King's assassination, Rep. John Conyers (D) of Michigan files a bill in Congress to commemorate his life. It lanquishes, despite repeated efforts to revive it.

1973: Illinois is the first state to adopt the holiday.

1983: The initiative receives a lift from major civil rights marches in Washington in 1982 and 1983, when the bill finally passes. But the holiday is moved from Jan. 15 (King's birthday) to the third Monday in January to avoid other observances.

1986: Federal holiday observance begins.

1992: Arizona, whose governor rescinded the holiday in 1987, adopts it in the face of economic boycotts.

1993: Some version of the holiday is held in all 50 states for first time.

1999: New Hampshire becomes the last state to grant paid-holiday status.

2000: Utah becomes the last state to adopt the name, MLK Day, dropping its Human Rights Day designation.

2008: Work will begin in the spring on a MLK Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, scheduled to open in 2009.

Is the civil rights movement still important to blacks?

Yes: 60 percent (up from 57 percent in 1993)

No: 35 percent

How often blacks say they face frequent discrimination in:

Applying for jobs: 67 percent

Renting an apartment or buying a house: 65 percent

Dining out or shopping: 50 percent

Applying to college: 43 percent

How well blacks say they get along with whites:

Very well: 20 percent

Pretty well: 49 percent

Not too well: 20 percent

Not at all well: 4 percent

Percentage of blacks who'd like to see:

More neighborhood integration: 62 percent (versus 44 percent of whites)

More school integration: 56 percent (versus 23 percent of whites)

African-American firsts in post-King era:

1968 – Conductor of a major US symphony: Henry Lewis with the New Jersey Symphony

1969 – Mayor of Southern city: Howard Lee of Chapel Hill, N.C.

1970 – President of a major university: Clifton Reginald Wharton Jr. of Michigan State University

1975 – Baseball manager: Frank Robinson of the Cleveland Indians

1977 – US United Nations representative: Andrew Young (1977-79)

1983 – Astronaut in space: Guion Bluford

1989 – Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Colin Powell (1989-93)

1989 – Governor: Douglas Wilder of Virginia

1993 – Nobel Prize for Literature: Toni Morrison

2000 – Billionaire: Robert Johnson, owner of Black Entertainment Television

2001 – Oscar, best actress: Halle Berry, "Monster's Ball"

2001 – President of an Ivy League school: Ruth Simmons of Brown University

Newsmakers whom blacks rate as a good influence:

Oprah Winfrey: 87 percent

Bill Cosby: 85 percent

Barack Obama: 76 percent

Bishop T.D. Jakes, pastor of a Dallas megachurch: 76 percent

Colin Powell: 70 percent

Tyra Banks: 68 percent

Jesse Jackson: 68 percent

Tiger Woods: 67 percent

Russell Simmons, hip hop entrepreneur: 67 percent

Al Sharpton: 65 percent

Others of note – Condoleezza Rice: 50 percent, Clarence Thomas: 31 percent

Sources: US Census; US Department of Justice; Pew Research Center; www.infopleasecom; "The Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Jr.," by James Haskins; "Martin Luther King, Jr.," by Diane Patrick

 Historians fear MLK'slegacy being lost

by Deepti Hajela
Mon Jan 21,2008 

Nearly  40 years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., some say his legacy is being frozen in a moment in time that ignores the full complexity of the man and his message."Everyone knows — even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King — can say his most famous moment was that 'I have a dream' speech," said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo. "No one can go further than one sentence. All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don't know what that dream was."

 

King was working on anti-poverty and anti-war issues at the time of his death. He had spoken out against the Vietnam War and was in Memphis when he was killed in April 1968 in support of striking sanitation workers. King had come a long way from the crowds who cheered him at the 1963 March on Washington, when he was introduced as "the moral leader of our nation" — and when he pronounced "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.By taking on issues outside segregation, he had lost the support of many newspapers and magazines, and his relationship with the White House had suffered, said Harvard Sitkoff, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire who has written a recently published book on King.

 

"He was considered by many to be a pariah," Sitkoff said.But he took on issues of poverty and militarism because he considered them vital "to make equality something real and not just racial brotherhood but equality in fact," Sitkoff said. Scholarly study of King hasn't translated into the popular perception of him and the civil rights movement, said Richard Greenwald, professor of history at Drew University. "We're living increasingly in a culture of top 10 lists, of celebrity biopics which simplify the past as entertainment or mythology," he said. "We lose a view on what real leadership is by compressing him down to one window." That does a disservice to both King and society, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University.

 

By freezing him at that point, by putting him on a pedestal of perfection that doesn't acknowledge his complex views, "it makes it impossible both for us to find new leaders and for us to aspire to leadership," Harris-Lacewell said. he believes it's important for Americans in 2008 to remember how disliked King was before his death in April 1968. "If we forget that, then it seems like the only people we can get behind must be popular," Harris-Lacewell said. "Following King meant following the unpopular road, not the popular one."

 

In becoming an icon, King's legacy has been used by people all over the political spectrum, said Glenn McNair, associate professor of history at Kenyon College.He's been part of the 2008 presidential race, in which Barack Obama could be the country's first black president. Obama has invoked King, and Sen. John Kerry endorsed Obama by saying "Martin Luther King said that the time is always right to do what is right."Not all the references have been received well. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton came under fire when she was quoted as saying King's dream of racial equality was realized only when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

King has "slipped into the realm of symbol that people use and manipulate for their own purposes," McNair said.

Harris-Lacewell said that is something people need to push back against. "It's not OK to slip into flat memory of who Dr. King was, it does no justice to us and makes him to easy to appropriate," she said. "Every time he gets appropriated, we have to come out and say that's not OK. We do have the ability to speak back."