{"id":1617,"date":"2014-01-21T13:04:18","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T18:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/napervilledemocrats.org\/ntdo\/?p=1617"},"modified":"2014-01-21T13:04:18","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T18:04:18","slug":"why-king-still-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/napervilledemocrats.org\/ntdo\/why-king-still-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why King Still Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

A timely reminder from Ed Kilgore yesterday \"King_Jr_Martin_Luther_093.jpg\"<\/a>about why we still need to hear the message of Martin Luther King Junior: “because so many Americans still want to deny the existence of injustice and inequality, and make the poor and the powerless offenders against the pride and self-satisfaction of the privileged.”<\/p>\n

Why King Still Matters<\/a><\/h2>\n

I don\u2019t have anything terribly original to offer this King Day about my hero\u2019s historical significance. He held up a mirror to America and asked us all to live up to our own professed civic and religious values. For that he was feared and despised in the most \u201cpatriotic\u201d and \u201cChristian\u201d part of the country\u2014or at least among a majority of the white citizens of his home region\u2014and was probably the most inevitable martyr of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

King matters today because so many Americans still want to deny the existence of injustice and inequality, and make the poor and the powerless offenders against the pride and self-satisfaction of the privileged. That these same people sometimes perversely pretend to be King\u2019s disciples, suggesting he would today be in a rapture of color-blindness that would keep him from seeing anything other than a blessed land of opportunity, is all the more reason we need a day set aside each year to remembering what he actually represented. And it wasn\u2019t some abstract, negative idea of \u201cfreedom\u201d or \u201cequality\u201d that accepted mass unemployment or low wages as the product of a divinely instituted marketplace. Here\u2019s an excerpt from a\u00a01965 sermon<\/a>\u00a0that represented a transition point in King\u2019s ministry that would eventually produce the Poor People\u2019s Campaign:<\/p>\n

About two years ago now, I stood with many of you who stood there in person and all of you who were there in spirit before the Lincoln Monument in Washington. As I came to the end of my speech there, I tried to tell the nation about a dream I had. I must confess to you this morning that since that sweltering August afternoon in 1963, my dream has often turned into a nightmare; I\u2019ve seen it shattered. I saw it shattered one night on Highway 80 in Alabama when Mrs. Viola Liuzzo was shot down. I had a nightmare and saw my dream shattered one night in Marion, Alabama, when Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot down. I saw my dream shattered one night in Selma when Reverend Reeb was clubbed to the ground by a vicious racist and later died. And oh, I continue to see it shattered as I walk through the Harlems of our nation and see sometimes ten and fifteen Negroes trying to live in one or two rooms. I\u2019ve been down to the Delta of Mississippi since then, and I\u2019ve seen my dream shattered as I met hundreds of people who didn\u2019t earn more than six or seven hundred dollars a [year]. I\u2019ve seen my dream shattered as I\u2019ve walked the streets of Chicago and seen Negroes, young men and women, with a sense of utter hopelessness because they can\u2019t find any jobs. And they see life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. And not only Negroes at this point. I\u2019ve seen my dream shattered because I\u2019ve been through Appalachia, and I\u2019ve seen my white brothers along with Negroes living in poverty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Martin Luther King not only held up a mirror to America to acknowledge its deeds did not match its stated ideals; he also made Americans see the consequences of that hypocrisy in unjustly blighted lives, and feel shame in the presence of the unquenchable dignity of the hard-working poor.<\/p>\n

We need more of that today.<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong>:\u00a0ThinkProgress<\/em>\u2019 Igor Volsky has a\u00a0good summary<\/a>\u00a0of Dr. King\u2019s less-known radical words and actions that are often obscured in the effort to keep his legacy safely noncontroversial.<\/p>\n