------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Feb. 14, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
BLACK HISTORY MONTH: LEAGCIES OF DR. KING & MALCOLM X [Monica Moorehead of Workers World Party gave an interview on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to The Comment, the Bridgewater State College newspaper, for a Black History Month special dated Feb. 1. The interviewer, Seth Price, asked how people today can best pay tribute to King's legacy.] Become active in the struggle against this terrible, imperialist war that the U.S. government, big business and the military profiteers are promoting. They are exploiting the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the pain and confusion of the people to whip up a racist, anti- immigrant war hysteria. The fault for the attacks clearly lies at the doorstep of U.S. foreign policy. This country has for decades carried out a systematic campaign of brutal, unrelenting destabilization against the economies of the developing countries, not to mention workers' states, all for the sake of making tremendous profits for big business interests. I grew up in the segregated South. My family lived in Montgomery, Ala., during the period of the historic Montgomery bus boycott. So my political consciousness was first formed by the civil rights movement. One vivid memory I have is watching Dr. King make his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. I was 11 years old, living in the racist city of Houston at the time. That memory has never left me. He was a person who had such strong convictions. He struck me as someone who never put his ego and charisma before the needs of the people. He always worried about pushing the mass movement forward in the most effective, unifying way. That type of attitude and orientation is very much needed now. Until the day he died, Dr. King understood that social conditions could not be changed for the better unless there was organized, mass dissent. The ideologies or philosophies of Dr. King and Malcolm X were as different as night and day. They were both concerned about the liberation of African Americans and other poor people from the scourge of racist repression. They both understood these problems in a profound way. They used different oratorical styles to explain them based on their diverse views of the world. Where they disagreed were the methods by which to achieve this goal. Dr. King sought to win basic democratic rights for Black people, [of the kind] that whites had generally won hundreds of years earlier, within the existing capitalist system. He was basically for reforming the system, using nonviolent methods based on the Christian religious teachings of Gandhi. Malcolm X was moving in the direction of not only fighting against racism but understanding the root causes of many forms of injustice endemic within the capitalist system. Before he was assassinated, Malcolm X founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He had a plan to bring the plight of African Americans to the attention of the United Nations when that body was more progressive in character than today. Malcolm wanted the movement to understand that the racism Black people faced in this country could not be separated from the anti-colonial movements. Malcolm X was inspired by the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and wanted African Americans to relate more closely to these movements, politically and organizationally. He was moving more and more towards an anti-imperialist view of the world as he traveled extensively in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world. Malcolm X was not a pacifist. He believed in the right to self-defense that inspired the Black Panthers, Young Lords and other young activists during the 1960s. Despite the fact that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King represented two distinct currents of the African American struggle, they did everything they could to show unity because they both understood that the U.S. government and its mouthpiece, the media, worked overtime to divide and conquer the legitimate movements of oppressed peoples. Workers World Party had a very close political affinity to Malcolm's view because he was a militant fighter who had no love for imperialist domination. In the final days of his life, Dr. King was definitely moving towards a more working class approach that linked the struggle for political rights with economic rights. His support for the striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., before his assassination is a reflection of his political growth. King also began to speak about the plight of other oppressed peoples, like Mexican Americans, that reflected the changing character of the workers in the U.S. as a whole. One of King's lesser-known speeches was made on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church. It was called "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." He was trying to appeal to the U.S. government to become more humane and open to different kinds of political and economic systems--something it is incapable of doing, no matter who is president. However, talking about the questions that Black men had raised to him on the violence of war and the violence they faced in the inner city, Dr. King said: "Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government." This was the first time a major civil rights leader had come out so strongly against the war. He actually raised the idea of the U.S. making reparations to the Vietnamese people for all the destruction to their economy and homeland. This was quite a revolutionary demand for this particular time. I think that if he had lived, he would have impacted upon the anti-war movement in the most powerful way. One of the great weaknesses of the anti-war movement during this period was the ineffectiveness of its leadership to reach out to the civil rights movement and the national liberation movements inside the U.S. and worldwide. Dr. King, in his own moralistic way, was making an attempt to bridge the gap between these movements. The U.S. government felt threatened by the potential of this kind of mass unity, and that is why they orchestrated his demise. I feel very confident that if Dr. King had been alive today he would oppose the anti-poor, anti-worker, foreign and domestic policies of the U.S. Dr. King would speak out for the right to self-determination and the right to sovereignty of the most oppressed peoples. I also think that Dr. King would be heartened to see the youth participation in the anti-globalization movement and would encourage that movement to reach out in solidarity to the most oppressed youth, both here and abroad, who face police brutality, incarceration and poverty on a daily basis. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. 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