The enduring legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Fight against racism, poverty and war continues
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/mlk_0121/
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Published Jan 13, 2010
Jan. 15 marks the 81st birthday of civil rights and anti-war martyr
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A federal holiday in his honor is held
every year on the third Monday of January, when federal offices,
state and local municipal agencies are closed. Some private
businesses also give their workers the day off.
This recognition of Dr. King, an African-American clergyperson who
was born in Atlanta on the eve of the Great Depression, grew out of a
struggle that lasted for nearly two decades. Numerous civil rights
organizations, artists like Stevie Wonder and African-American
politicians such as Detroit Rep. John Conyers led the fight for the
adoption of the holiday.
In 1986, after the King holiday bill was passed by Congress, it was
reluctantly signed into law by perhaps one of the most ideologically
right-wing presidents, Ronald Reagan. Every year the government,
transnational corporations and their media counterparts present a
view of Dr. King that strips his legacy of the broad social movements
in the civil rights and anti-war struggles between the mid- 1950s and
late 1960s.
The corporate media reduce his contributions to the struggle to a few
sound bites from his classic "I Have a Dream" speech a speech that
was delivered to hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C.,
and millions more over national television and radio on Aug. 28, 1963.
Those who participated in those struggles or studied that history
understand that although Dr. King was a tremendous orator and
charismatic figure, his efforts were a reflection of the mass
consciousness and political commitment of millions within the U.S.
and around the world.
This understanding of the historical and social context that produced
Dr. King and countless other leaders, who sacrificed their well-being
and lives to fight institutional racism, poverty and war, is
fundamental to the ongoing efforts to complete the revolutionary
movements that made such a monumental impact during the 1950s and 1960s.
The election and inauguration of the first African-American
president, as significant as it was, by no means resolves the social
contradictions that have characterized the U.S. since its inception.
In fact, the election of President Barack Obama has created new and
more complex challenges that activists are grappling with.
Why King's legacy remains relevant today
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee realized that the
African-American struggle would need to shift focus toward addressing
the fundamental institutional racism and class oppression that were
still prevalent in the U.S. With the passage of civil rights
legislation and the mass mobilizations surrounding the movement
against segregation, a new wave of repression by the ruling class was
launched in the South.
The eventual failure of the Johnson administration's "War on
Poverty," due to lack of funding and disempowerment of the poor,
coupled with the escalation of military involvement in Vietnam during
the mid-1960s, created a political crisis in the U.S. that remains
unresolved. During the 1960s the ruling class stifled the mass
movement towards genuine equality and self-determination by both
channeling the aspirations of African Americans into the electoral
strategy of the Democratic Party and by intensifying the repressive
apparatus of the state and the corporations.
This reaction to the gains of the civil rights struggle was
illustrated in an article cited in Samuel Yette's "The Choice: The
Issue of Black Survival in America." In the Jan. 31, 1967, issue of
the New York World Journal Tribune, Marianne Means reported that "the
practical economics of wage increase (to 84 cents per hour) hardly
warrant the sudden eviction of huge numbers of impoverished Negro
families ... but political realities are something else again."
Yette quotes a letter written by Dr. King to President Lyndon Johnson
on Aug. 10, 1966, where he addressed the mass removal of African
Americans from the land they had farmed for decades as a result of
wage and political demands put forward by the movement.
Dr. King said: "Last January, numerous poor, homeless Mississippi
Delta Negroes went to the empty Greenville Air Base seeking shelter
from the winter cold. They were forcibly driven off by Federal troops.
"Some fled to Northern ghettos. Some burdened already overcrowded
Mississippi kinfolk. Others are trying desperately to survive today
on 400 acres of land in Washington County without adequate permanent
housing, jobs, education, on the verge of starvation, and with little
hope. Another group of poor, evicted Mississippi Negroes at Tribbett,
Washington County, Mississippi, struggled through the long winter in
tents because of the Federal Government's failure to respond to their
pleas for housing. They have no jobs and almost no food."
Yette places the mid-1960s expulsion of African Americans from
Southern agricultural areas within broader trends in the labor
market. He quotes a June 15, 1964, press release issued by
then-Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz: "We are piling up a human
scrap heap of between 250,000 and 500,000 people a year, many of whom
never appear in the unemployment statistics.
"They are often not counted among the unemployed because they have
given up looking for work and thus count themselves out of the labor
market. The rate of nonparticipation in the labor force by men in
their prime years increased from 4.7 percent in 1953 to 5.2 percent
in 1962. The increase has been the sharpest among nonwhites,
increasing from 5.3 percent to 8.2 percent in that period."
It is obvious that things have now worsened tremendously. The actual
unemployment rate among African Americans and the working class in
general is far higher than the 10 percent the federal government
acknowledges in its monthly job loss report. Rates of joblessness
among youth and the oppressed are much higher, with African Americans
and teenagers suffering the highest levels of unemployment.
It was estimated that 85,000 people were thrown out of work in
December. This figure is not reflective of the broader trends towards
declining social wages for the class as a whole.
There have been three stimulus or recovery packages enacted by
Congress and two presidential administrations over the last three
years. During this same time period 8 million workers were laid off,
according to official government statistics. Millions of working
people have lost their homes and apartments.
The federal government and the corporations have no effective plans
to put the estimated 34 million people back to work at decent wages
with benefits.
The principal objectives of the U.S. ruling class are the widening of
the so-called "war on terror" and the maximization of profits for the
bankers, industrialists and insurance companies. By promoting fear of
"terrorism" among all segments of the working class, the ruling class
is seeking to build public support for its aggressive wars of
domination in Central Asia, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and
Latin America.
Working class and oppressed must advance their own program
With the escalation of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama
administration, at the behest of the Pentagon, is dashing the hopes
that millions of working people and nationally oppressed embodied in
their mass support of the 2008 Obama campaign. Just as the prospects
for improvement of African-American social conditions in the 1960s
and 1970s were eviscerated through the "war on poverty" and the
occupation of Vietnam, today the rising militarism of the U.S. around
the world has trumped the material needs of the masses.
When Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in late 2009, he
claimed that U.S. imperialism had underwritten world security for the
last six decades. However, what he did not say is that during the
post World War II period the U.S. has utilized its military might,
funded by profits accrued from the exploitation of labor, to fight
against every progressive and revolutionary movement that has
developed to challenge world capitalism and racism.
It has been the United States ruling class that waged wars against
the peoples of Korea, China, Vietnam and Southeast Asia, Angola,
Namibia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Cuba and other geopolitical regions
throughout the world. The U.S. ruling class has waged war against the
people of this country by stifling the civil rights, Black power,
anti-war, women's and working-class movements.
Organizers must raise issues that address the needs of the workers
and the oppressed. What the majority of people in the U.S. and the
world need today are jobs, income, health care, quality education,
housing and a life free of intimidation and harassment by the armed
agents of the capitalist and imperialist states. This is the only way
that the true legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. can be realized.
On March 4 students around the U.S. will protest the drastic cutbacks
in education funding, which has been taken away from the people to
fund the Pentagon and Wall Street bankers. Youth must militantly ask:
How can the ruling class and its state talk about national security,
when tens of millions inside the country are without jobs, decent
incomes, utility services, health care and quality education?
The peoples of the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Latin America
and other areas of the world have not taken anything away from the
working class and oppressed inside the U.S. The true enemy of the
people of the U.S. is the bourgeoisie, who have not only taken
trillions of dollars in wealth away from the people but have also
sent youth into battle to carry out the bidding of the bankers and militarists.
A major jobs initiative being planned for April 10 must politically
challenge the false notion of a "jobless recovery." Increasing
profits for the corporations do not translate into better conditions
for the workers and nationally oppressed. Taxpayer bailouts of the
banks and insurance companies have resulted in depression-like
conditions for greater numbers of working people.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
