Martin Luther King

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      MLK is revered today but the real King would make white people uncomfortable | Michael Harriot

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      MLK is revered today but the real King would make white people uncomfortable Michael HarriotMartin Luther King Jr was a walking, talking example of everything this country despises about the quest for Black liberation Every year, on the third Monday in January, America hosts a Sadie Hawkins-style role-reversal where the entire country pretends to celebrate a man whose achievements and values they spent the previous 364 days ignoring, demonizing and trying to dismantle. Today, your favorite vote suppressors will take a brief respite from disenfranchising Black voters, denying history and increasing inequality to celebrate a real American hero.That’s right, it’s MLK Day!You might think it’s a little disrespectful to refer to a great American hero by his initials but, in this specific case, it’s perfectly fine. The actual Martin Luther King Jr who lived and breathed is not the man most people will be honoring today because that Martin Luther King is dead and gone. No, the man upon whom they will heap their performative praise with social media virtue-signaling is MLK, a caricature of a man whose likeness has been made palatable for white consumption. Like BLM, CRT and USA, the people who King fought against have now managed to flatten a three-dimensional symbol to a three-letter, chant-worthy phrase worthy of demonization or deification.I am not condemning this all-American tradition of gaslighting. I had an imaginary friend growing up and he was not nearly as eloquent as this history – refurbished MLK they have invented. I, more than anyone, can appreciate the effort this country has put into manufacturing a version of King that is based on a true story. Whitewashing an entire human being is not as easy as you think. Plus, I understand why they do it:The real Martin Luther King would make white people uncomfortable.Anyone who knows the unwhitened story of Martin Luther King Jr understands why whitesplaining “what MLK would have wanted” is a favorite pastime of politicians and performative sympathetic social media “allies”. The average American might get the heebie-jeebies if they knew they were celebrating a radical who challenged systemic racism, supported reparations and advocated for a universal basic income.Although, in death, he became one of the most revered figures in US history, for the entirety of the 39 years that King lived and breathed, there wasn’t a single day when the majority of white Americans approved of him. In 1966, Gallup measured his approval rating at 32% positive and 63% negative. That same year, a December Harris poll found that 50% of whites felt King was “hurting the negro cause of civil rights” while only 36% felt he was helping. By the time he died in 1968, three out of four white Americans disapproved of him. In the wake of his assassination, 31% of the country felt that he “brought it on himself”.One does not have to reach back into the historical archives to explain why King was so despised. The sentiments that made him a villain are still prevalent in America today. When he was alive, King was a walking, talking example of everything this country despises about the quest for Black liberation. He railed against police brutality. He reminded the country of its racist past. He scolded the powers that be for income inequality and systemic racism. Not only did he condemn the openly racist opponents of equality, he reminded the legions of whites who were willing to sit idly by while their fellow countrymen were oppressed that they were also oppressors. “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” King said. “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”To be fair, King readily admitted that it was his goal to make white people uncomfortable. Just before he condemned white moderates in A Letter from Birmingham Jail, he revealed that his goal was to “create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism”. He went on to explain that nonviolent direct action – King’s primary strategy to affect progress – was an attempt to induce the white community to a point where marginalized people’s desperate cries could no longer be ignored.Yet, this new, more compassionate America is just as intolerant when Black Lives Matter demonstrators flood into the streets to protest police brutality. Of course, if teaching Black history wasn’t criminalized as critical race theory, more people might know that the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers’ original intent was to confront their governor about police brutality – namely the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper. The people who believe the NFL should have kicked Colin Kaepernick out of football for his “un-American” protests would have really loathed Roberto Clemente, who convinced his teammates to protest King’s death by refusing to play on Major League Baseball’s opening day in 1968. They were furious when Clemente told his local paper: “If you have to ask Negro players, then we do not have a great country.”I wonder how Tim Scott and Mitch McConnell would’ve felt about that. After all, they both invoked King’s name while claiming that America is not a racist country. But I’m sure MLK would never go as far as painting his place of birth as a racist country.“The first thing I would like to mention is that there must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country,” said King days before a white supremacist put a bullet in his face. “Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is.”See how many times someone mentions that quote today.Oh, wait … King made that speech at Grosse Pointe High School, where Michigan’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives recently passed an anti-CRT bill making it illegal to teach that the “United States is a fundamentally racist country”.Never mind.That’s why, despite what people who cherry-pick quotes from the I Have a Dream speech would have you believe, King has never suggested that white people should be judged “by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin”. In fact, he regularly judged white people to explain the insanity of white supremacy.“In their relations with Negroes, white people discovered that they had rejected the very center of their own ethical professions,” King wrote in 1956. “They could not face the triumph of their lesser instincts and simultaneously have peace within. And so, to gain it, they rationalized – insisting that the unfortunate Negro, being less than human, deserved and even enjoyed second class status… White men soon came to forget that the Southern social culture and all its institutions had been organized to perpetuate this rationalization. They observed a caste system and quickly were conditioned to believe that its social results, which they had created, actually reflected the Negro’s innate and true nature.”Even as a 17-year-old, King used Georgia’s largest newspaper to make the entire state uncomfortable when he reminded the Atlanta Constitution’s readers: “It is fair to remember that almost the total of race mixture in America has come, not at Negro initiative, but by the acts of those very white men who talk loudest of race purity.”To white America, that Martin Luther King Jr was an America-hating, anti-white commie, just like today’s outspoken Black people who are criticized for “playing” all the things that white America hates: the “race card”, the “victim”, and – my favorite – “identity politics”.But, now that King is dead and gone, leaders like Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis will sing hosannas for MLK while demonizing Black Lives Matter and critical race theory as Marxist, un-American race-baiting that poses American values. It is no coincidence that Alabama’s governor George Wallace described King as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today. Long before “race-baiting” became a popular term, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond said King “must always have an agitation objective lest he end up in the street one day without a drum to beat or a headline to make”. One of Thurmond’s first acts after leaving the Democratic party to become a Republican was to implore the FBI to investigate King’s activities as a communist. (Years later, Thurmond voted for the MLK holiday.) Even after his death, conservative leaders sought to sully King’s legacy by erasing the prospect of a holiday honoring him. “Rev. King’s motives are misrepresented,” wrote then Ohio senator John Ashbrook. “He sought not to work through the law but around it.”And they won.They only agreed to honor King’s legacy after enough time had passed to sufficiently whitewash the radical who unapologetically fought for liberty and justice for all. This might be why they contend that he “gave his life” for civil rights – as if he agreed to take a projectile from a high-powered rifle to his temple in exchange for a statue, a church fan with his face on it, and a three-day weekend in the future.But, let not your heart be troubled when you hear them shower the memory of Martin Luther King Jr with bouquets of reverence. The people who continue to protect broken systems of criminal justice, education and democracy might not necessarily hate King but they do not love him or anything he stood for.That’s not even an opinion. The polling data proves it. Historical facts prove it. The bits of blood and bone that stained the balcony outside of a Memphis hotel proves it. More importantly, the fact that Black Americans are still fighting the same battles against voter suppression, inequality and the right to have a dream almost 54 years after his death is the most accurate measuring rod of what this nation thinks about Martin Luther King.Perhaps that is the most uncomfortable fact of all.
      Michael Harriot is a writer and author of the upcoming book Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America
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      ‘It’s time to take action’: faith leaders urge Biden to pass voting rights legislation

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      ‘It’s time to take action’: faith leaders urge Biden to pass voting rights legislationA letter organized by Martin Luther King III and his wife comes after Republicans successfully filibustered bills four times this year More than 800 faith leaders have called on the Biden administration and Senate Democrats to pass voting rights legislation next year.“We cannot be clearer, you must act now to protect every American’s freedom to vote without interference and with confidence that their ballot will be counted and honored. Passing comprehensive voting rights legislation must be the number-one priority of the administration and Congress,” faith leaders said in a letter addressed to the president and Senate members on Wednesday.The letter, organized by Martin Luther King III and his wife, Arndrea Waters King, was signed by various faith organizations, including the African American Christian Clergy Coalition, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action and Faith in Public Life.Signatories include those who come from Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities, including Reverend Canon Leonard L Hamlin Sr of the Washington National Cathedral and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg of National Council of Jewish Women.“The communities we represent will continue to sound the alarm until these bills are passed. While we come from different faiths, we are united by our commitment to act in solidarity with the most vulnerable among us,” the letter added.The letter comes after Republicans successfully filibustered voting rights bills on four different occasions this year. Most recently, on 3 November, Republicans in the Senate blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts – one of two major pieces of voting rights legislation that Democrats have championed in Congress in attempts to prevent Republicans from eroding easy access to the vote.Republicans blocking the key voting rights bill in November was a move seen by many as a breaking point in the push to eliminate the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation.Despite numerous Democrats calling for the elimination of the filibuster, they lack the votes to end the rule due to not only a slim majority but also opposition within their own party. Two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are strongly opposed, arguing that the rule forges bipartisan compromise.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, described the filibuster on 3 November as a “low, low point in the history of this body”.In Wednesday’s letter, faith leaders said, “Nothing – including the filibuster – should stand in the way of passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which have already passed the House and await Senate action and leadership.”According to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice, nineteen states have enacted nearly three dozen laws between January and the end of September that make it more difficult to vote.Wednesday’s letter is a reflection of the growing pressure on Democrats to pass voting rights legislation that aims to outlaw excessive partisan gerrymandering and would require early voting, no-excuse mail-in voting, in addition to automatic and same-day registration.“It’s time to stop lamenting the state of our democracy and take action to address it,” the letter said.TopicsUS voting rightsBiden administrationMartin Luther KingRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Washington voting rights march marks Martin Luther King anniversary

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      US voting rightsWashington voting rights march marks Martin Luther King anniversaryNearly 60 years after the I Have a Dream speech, crowds came to the capital again to protest attacks on minority rights Ankita Rao in WashingtonSat 28 Aug 2021 16.25 EDTLast modified on Sat 28 Aug 2021 16.31 EDTTheodore Dean marched in Washington DC in 1963, somewhere in the crowd behind Martin Luther King Jr. Exactly 58 years later, he decided to drive 16 hours from Alabama to do it again.Will America’s latest redistricting cycle be even worse than the last? Read more“I’m here because I’ve got grandchildren and children,” the 84-year-old told the Guardian as he and his son made their way past the White House.Dean joined thousands for March On for Voting Rights, an event organized by a coalition of civil rights groups and nonprofits. Speakers included Rev Al Sharpton and Cori Bush, a Democratic congresswoman from Missouri.The US Senate will soon vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure passed by the House which would restore protections from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 at a time when minority voters are the target of concerted Republican efforts to restrict access and participation. Furthermore, lawmakers across the US are set to redraw electoral districts, a process open to partisan abuse.In Washington on Saturday, however, it was clear that voting rights was not the only issue on people’s minds. While some marchers carried posters supporting the end of the filibuster and gerrymandering, weapons wielded to great effect by Republicans in state and federal government, others chanted about police violence toward Black people, worker’s rights, the Afghanistan withdrawal and minimum wage.In many ways, the spectrum of issues reflected Dr King’s agenda 58 years ago, when on 28 August 1963 he told a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial: “I have a dream.”“The original march on Washington was not just about Black people and voting rights – it was for jobs and justice,” said Rev William Barber II, a prominent activist and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, after his own speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, at a “Make Good Trouble Rally”.“It was about brutality, poverty, voting rights. There was unfinished business.”Barber said the US was facing issues that had little to do with Donald Trump, the Republican president beaten by Joe Biden but still an active force in national politics from the far right.“In some ways Trump not being president is forcing the movement to have to understand this was never about a person,” Barber said. “All Americans should be worried, concerned, mad and dissatisfied. We may be a civil oligarchy and not a democracy, and the next step is autocracy.”Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign have held marches and rallies across the US, particularly in states like Texas, where lawmakers passed a sweeping elections bill this week that would curb access to voting, and West Virginia, where both cities and rural areas are seeing high rates of poverty and joblessness.West Virginia is home to Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat who along with Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has refused to end the filibuster, a procedural rule Republicans have used to block key voting rights legislation.“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said Rev Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, adding that a summer of action had given her hope. While the coronavirus pandemic further exposed deep economic disparities, she said, it also gave rise to temporary legislative solutions, such as an eviction moratorium and stimulus checks.“We can take our experience here and make it work for everybody,” she said.On Saturday, thousands braving 93F (34C) heat were holding on to optimism too.“Our ancestors did these walks and talk so this is something I’m supposed to do,” said Najee Farwell, a student at Bowie State University in Maryland who rode a bus to the march with fellow students.“I feel as though if I don’t stand up, who else is going to?”TopicsUS voting rightsUS politicsCivil rights movementMartin Luther KingRaceUS CongressProtestnewsReuse this content More

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      Death penalty kills belief that people can change | Letters

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      Austin Sarat writes powerfully about the Trump administration’s rush to execute federal prisoners (Trump is spending the last days of his presidency on a literal killing spree, 15 December). In the past weeks, it was Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois. Next in line are Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs.
      Joe Biden proposes to introduce legislation to abolish the federal death penalty. This will take time and its success is not guaranteed. But there is something he could do as soon as he takes office. This is to use his clemency power to spare the lives of the 50 or so individuals who will remain on federal death row. I estimate that it would take him four minutes to sign the required notices of commutation. This would ensure that the trail of bodies Sarat describes could not grow any longer.
      Is it too much to hope that Biden will set aside the time to do this during his first 100 days? It would be a magnificent gesture. Prof Ian O’Donnell School of Law, University College Dublin
      • When my friend, Brandon Bernard, was executed this month, he was a different man from the 18-year-old accessory to a double-murder (Trump administration puts Brandon Bernard to death amid rushed series of executions, 11 December). Spending two decades in solitary confinement changed him. Brandon never had a single infraction on death row. He did church youth outreach to help teens make better choices in life.
      He taught me many life lessons. To be open-hearted yet level-headed. To remain calm and patient. To be respectful and thoughtful and an attentive listener. To be kind. To live with a sense of optimism like one I’ve never witnessed. I want to hate the sin, but forgive the sinner after a horrible mistake and two decades of regret and reform. Martin Luther King Jr said “violence begets violence” and that holds true when the violence is committed by the government. Brandon became a beautiful person. When we killed Brandon, we killed the belief that one can change. Jen Wasserstein Washington DC, US
      • It has long been my view that any country that condones judicial murder in the name of justice cannot be deemed civilised. Suellen Pedley Stanford in the Vale, Oxfordshire More

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      To John Lewis, with love | Kevin Powell

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      Opinion

      Civil rights movement

      To John Lewis, with love

      Kevin Powell

      From the March on Washington to Selma, from the halls of Congress to Black Lives Matter Plaza, you gave yourself to us

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      John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report

      Dear Mr Lewis,
      I gasped when I learned of your death, after your courageous battle against cancer. I think of your December statement, when you said: “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
      I shed tears then and I shed tears now, at what your passing represents to America and to the world. You do not know this, but the very first time I heard of you, in 1986, I was a Rutgers University student, asked by the Commission for Racial Justice to be part of a group of young people recreating the Freedom Rides you led during the civil rights movement.
      We stopped in Atlanta, where you were running for Congress. You encouraged us, you gave us an on-the-spot civil rights history, you told us not to be afraid. You seemed to know that some of us, including me, were absolutely terrified.
      Our bus went on to Alabama, to help African Americans protect their voting rights, just as you had done a generation before. When we heard troubling rumors of white supremacists “coming to get us” for repeating and continuing your work, I held tightly to your words in Atlanta, urging us to never give up – never.
      That was 34 long years ago. I watched you become a congressman, an elder statesman, the humble and unassuming moral voice of America. I sat on panels with you at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference. I saw you publicly saddened by attacks on the civil rights for which leaders like you were savagely beaten. That is why you were forever committed to making “Good Trouble” on behalf of democracy.
      I myself have walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, many times. But my memories there are of you: of the bloodthirsty hatred of the police cracking your skull, how you could have died there on that ground, in your white trench coat, in 1965, just because you believed that Black people, all people, had the right to vote. I vote, Mr Lewis, because of you, because of people like you. I exist because of you, because of people like you.
      And I have wondered, as you witnessed president after president, one racial murder after another, from your childhood until your death, how you could still possess such a massive capacity to love people, every kind of people, in spite of what you experienced in your 80 years on this planet, in this country. You did not merely preach love, you embodied it, and were clear that love was forever the answer.
      Is that who you were, Mr Lewis, when you were a boy practicing your sermons to your chickens in your hometown of Troy, Alabama?
      Is that who you were in 2017, when you led 1,000 people through Comic-Con, a march to celebrate the trilogy of comic books you had written, based on your life?
      What a life it was, Mr Lewis. To be able to say you spoke at the same majestic March On Washington in 1963, where Dr King gave his “I Have A Dream” address, and to be the last living speaker from that sweltering August day. To be able to say you were there in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the day Bobby Kennedy announced to a mostly Black crowd that Martin Luther King Jr had been killed, Kennedy’s words rivaling King’s as one of the greatest speeches ever. To also say you were there, just two months later in Los Angeles, when Bobby himself was assassinated.
      To be able to say that your cracked skull and many arrests in the 1960s led to Barack Obama becoming our first Black president, and to also be able to say you lived long enough to witness #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and protests unlike anything we have had since you yourself led nonviolent demonstrations those many years ago.
      You never stopped protesting, Mr Lewis. In the final months of your life, there you were in Selma, honoring the 55th anniversary of that march. There you were in a virtual town hall meeting with Barack Obama. And there you were, in June, a mere month before your death, admiring the Black Lives Matter mural on the street leading to the White House.
      You never gave up, Mr Lewis, and neither will I, and neither will we who believe in freedom, justice and equality for everyone. You, sir, were a living, breathing history book of America, a living, breathing example of the best of the human race.
      The greatest thing you gave us, besides your entire life, was your entire love. The greatest salute to you we can give, is to love ourselves and each other as fiercely as you did us, to the very end.
      Kevin Powell is a poet, journalist, civil and human rights activist, public speaker, and the author of 14 books, including his newest title, When We Free The World, a collection of essays about the present and future of America available exclusively on Apple Books.

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      Civil rights movement

      Opinion

      Race

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      Barack Obama

      Martin Luther King

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      Barack Obama pays tribute to Joseph Lowery, civil rights leader dead at 98

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      Reverend helped start the influential Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr Civil rights leader the Rev Joseph E Lowery speaks at an event in Atlanta in 2013. Photograph: David Goldman/AP Barack Obama has paid tribute to the civil rights leader Joseph Lowery, calling the charismatic preacher “a giant who changed the face […] More