In 1963, 250,000 people marched on Washington to demand equal rights. By 1968, laws had changed. But social progress has since stalled. United States Information Agency.
On Apr. 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while assisting striking sanitation workers.
Back then, over a half century ago, the wholesale racial integration required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act was just beginning to chip away at discrimination in education, jobs and public facilities. Black voters had only obtained legal protectionstwo years earlier, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act was about to become law.
African-Americans were only beginning to move into neighborhoods, colleges and careers once reserved for whites only.
I’m too young to remember those days. But hearing my parents talk about the late 1960s, it sounds in some ways like another world. Numerous African-Americans now hold positions of power, from mayor to governor to corporate chief executive – and, yes, once upon a time, president. The U.S. is a very different place than it was in 1968.
Or is it? As a scholar of minority politics, I know that while some things have improved markedly for Black Americans in the past 50-odd years, today we are still fighting many of the same battles as Dr. King did in his day.
That was then
The 1960s were tumultuous years indeed. During the long, hotsummers from 1965 to 1968, American cities saw approximately 150 race riots and other uprisings. The protests were a sign of profound citizen anger about a nation that was, according to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Economically, that was certainly true. In 1968, just 10% of white people lived below the poverty level, while nearly 34% of African-Americans did. Likewise, just 2.6% of white job seekers were unemployed, compared to 6.7% of black job seekers.
A year before his death, Dr. King and others began organizing a Poor People’s Campaign to “dramatize the plight of America’s poor of all races and make very clear that they are sick and tired of waiting for a better life.”
On May 28, 1968, one month after King’s assassination, the mass anti-poverty march took place. Individuals from across the nation erected a tent city on the National Mall, in Washington, calling it Resurrection City. The aim was to bring attention to the problems associated with poverty.
Ralph Abernathy, an African-American minister, led the way in his fallen friend’s place.
“We come with an appeal to open the doors of America to the almost 50 million Americans who have not been given a fair share of America’s wealth and opportunity,” Abernathy said, “and we will stay until we get it.”
This is now
So, how far have Black people progressed since 1968? Have we gotten our fair share yet? Those questions have been on my mind a lot this month.
In some ways, we’ve barely budged as a people. Poverty is still too common in the U.S. In 1968, 25 million Americans — roughly 13 percent of the population — lived below poverty level. In 2016, 43.1 million – or more than 12.7% – did.
Today’s Black poverty rate of 21% is almost three times that of whites. Compared to the 1968 rate of 32%, there’s not been a huge improvement.
Financial security, too, still differs dramatically by race. In 2018 black households earned $57.30 for every $100 in income earned by white families. And for every $100 in white family wealth, black families held just $5.04.
Another troubling aspect about black social progress – or the lack thereof – is how many black families are headed by single women. In the 1960s, unmarried women were the main breadwinners for 20% of households. In recent years, the percentage has risen as high as 72%.
This is important, but not because of some outmoded sexist ideal of the family. In the U.S., as across the Americas, there’s a powerful connection between poverty and female-headed households.
Black Americans today are also more dependent on government aid than they were in 1968. About 40% of African-Americans are poor enough to qualify for welfare, housing assistance and other government programs that offer modest support to families living under the poverty line.
That’s higher than any other U.S. racial group. Just 21% of Latinos, 18% Asian-Americans and 17% of whites are on welfare.
Finding the bright spots
There are, of course, positive trends. Today, far more African-Americans graduate from college – 38 percent – than they did 50 years ago.
Our incomes are also way up. Black adults experienced a more significant income increase from 1980 to 2016 – from $28,667 to $39,490 – than any other U.S. demographic group. This, in part, is why there’s now a significant black middle class.
Legally, African-Americans may live in any community they want – and from Beverly Hills to the Upper East Side, they can and do.
But why aren’t those gains deeper and more widespread?
Some prominent thinkers – including the award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and “The New Jim Crow” author Michelle Alexander – put the onus on institutional racism. Coates argues, among other things, that racism has so held back African-Americans throughout history that we deserve reparations, resurfacing a claim with a long history in Black activism.
Alexander, for her part, has famously said that racial profiling and the mass incarceration of African-Americans are just modern-day forms of the legal, institutionalized racism that once ruled across the American South.
More conservative thinkers may hold Black people solely accountable for their problems. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson is in this “personal responsibility” camp, along with public intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and Larry Elder.
Depending on who you ask, then, Black people aren’t much better off than in 1968 because either there’s not enough government help or there’s too much.
What would MLK do?
I don’t have to wonder what Dr. King would recommend. He believed in institutional racism.
In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council sought to tackle inequality with the Economic Bill of Rights. This was not a legislative proposal, per se, but a moral vision of a just America where all citizens had educational opportunities, a home, “access to land,” “a meaningful job at a living wage” and “a secure and adequate income.”
To achieve that, King wrote, the U.S. government should create an initiative to “abolish unemployment,” by developing incentives to increase the number of jobs for black Americans. He also recommended “another program to supplement the income of those whose earnings are below the poverty level.”
Those ideas were revolutionary in 1968. Today, they seem prescient. King’s notion that all citizens need a living wage portends the universal basic income concept now gaining traction worldwide.
King’s rhetoric and ideology are also obvious influences on Sen. Bernie Sanders, who in the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries has advocated equality for all people, economic incentives for working families, improved schools, greater access to higher education and for anti-poverty initiatives.
Progress has been made. Just not as much as many of us would like.
To put it in Dr. King’s words, “Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Against the "Triple Evils": The Biden Administration's Affront to Dr. King's Legacy
Lede: Joe Biden and other politicians may evoke Dr. King's legacy but their actions are an affront. The duopoly and the oligarchy who control them are the embodiment of the "triple evils" that King warned about.
(quote) On November 12, 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, the Black Communist William Patterson gave a speech honoring the extraordinary Civil Rights Congress petition We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People. In it, he argued that both the Democratic and Republican parties, along with all three branches of the U.S. government, were complicit in the racist warmongering that emanated from the genocide against Black people. "[T]he battle flag of the Confederacy flies today over hills captured by Americans, called 'UN forces,' fighting in Korea," he argued, "where the Chinese are called 'chinks,' the Koreans 'gooks' and the Negroes fighting under Confederate jim-crow ideology, if not a Dixie flag, remain McArthur's or Ridgeway's 'n iggers.'" Patterson held that "some Negro men and women" who had been bought by "money and a title" would travel around the world preaching "dollar democracy" to obfuscate this nexus of war, racism, and capitalist imperialism that was "monopoly's way of life - and death." Patterson's scathing analysis could easily be applied to the militarist domestic and foreign policy of the Joseph R. Biden administration, which has followed, uninterrupted, from that of Donald J. Trump and his forerunner, Barack H. Obama.
In 2021 alone, the U.S government continued its neocolonial occupation of Haiti; oversaw a chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and then imposed a brutal sanctions regime on the Taliban that has pushed the country to the brink of collapse; dropped bombs on Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen; imposed or renewed crippling sanctions and embargoes against countries including Cuba, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe; expanded AFRICOM throughout the continent under the guise of the "war on terror"; heightened tensions with Russia over Ukraine and NATO encroachment; and deepened the cold war with China.
As they acknowledged the MLK holiday, Biden and his band of intersectional imperialists, like their political predecessors, assert this widespread immiseration as an extension of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy and "dream." This distortion will likely rest on the claim that Biden has assembled the most diverse cabinet in U.S. history, including the first Black and Asian female as the second in command of the most powerful and dangerous war machine in the world. However, even a cursory examination of King's praxis reveals its incommensurability with Biden's blood-soaked racial capitalism thinly veiled by Black political class collaboration. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. King gave a speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" that echoed William Patterson's excoriation of war, racism, and capitalist exploitation. King stated, "A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will 'thingify' them, make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally economically... And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments. And will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together." Based on this stance, King would be horrified by the United States' unbridled imperialism - and the numerous ways that brutality has redounded within U.S. borders. This includes intensified Sinophobia, enthusaistic funding of the 1033 program and murderous police, and the failure to pass the lackluster Build Back Better bill while allocating an unprecedented $786 billion to U.S. militarism in the guise of "defense." State and local governments, abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court, have contributed to this widespread reaction, attacking voting rights and the ability of teachers to tell the truth about racism and oppression in their classrooms; criminalizing racial justice protesters while admonishing attempts to punish January 6 insurrectionists; launching an assault on abortion rights; and leaving workers to fend for themselves amidst another tsunami of COVID-19 infections.
King's presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in August 1967 further conveys the irreconcilability of the current administration's policies and King's position. He reiterated 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." He also castigated the United States for its willingness to spend billions on "an unjust, evil War in Vietnam" and on a Cold War space race with the Soviet Union instead of investing in an economy that ensured full employment, guaranteed annual income, the elimination of poverty, and decent housing and education for all. Likewise, King spoke affirmatively about the Cuban Revolution and its use of violence to overthrow the violent Batista regime - support that is at odds with the U.S. government's vicious embargo and attempt to undermine the Cuban revolutionary process through its financial and political support of reactionary elements in that country.
Moreover, King's admonition that we be "dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin," can be understood as a rejection of identity reductionism and the role of people like Kamala Harris, Lloyd Austin, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus in upholding U.S. imperialism and militarism at the expense of poor, colonized, and racialized people domestically and abroad. In other words, King's words render shameful the Biden administration's cynical multiculturalism that legitimates the moral and political bankruptcy of Black imperialists in the name of diversity and inclusion. By contrast, King believed the United States needed to "undergo a radical revolution of values" and to "get on to the right side of the world revolution" to achieve his global vision of peace, prosperity, and people over profit. In particular, the nation needed to "rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society" because "when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism [were] incapable of being conquered." Unfortunately, the immense profits gained by private corporations during the COVID-19 pandemic, on the one hand, and the widespread suffering of the global majority as a direct result of U.S. negligence, incompetence, and greed, on the other hand, have indeed rendered "the giant triplets" unconquerable under extant political leadership.
The racist, imperialist, war-driven, and anti-poor program of the Biden administration and the Black political class that dutifully upholds it is not only antithetical to King's stated principles but also disrespects his vision of what the United States could, and should, be. This regime's disingenuous invocations of Dr. King will thus ring hollow - just like its deceitful claim to offer a substantive alternative to Trump.
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2021-2022 Visiting Scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago and an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College. She is completing a book manuscript titled Black Scare/Red Scare to be published with University of Chicago Press. (/quote) -- https://blackagendareport.com/against-triple-evils-biden-administrations-affront-dr-kings-legacy
But surely the example of role models like Condoleezza Rice gives hope to black Americans.
That's what BBC Hardtalk interviewer Gavin Esler said to the novelist Alice Walker some twenty years ago. In response, a clearly shocked Alice Walker laughed, then shook her head in wonderment at the calibre of British journalism.
Video: The Whitewashing Of Martin Luther King - SOME MORE NEWS
This is alright - focuses more on the use of MLK by right wingers (eg the sainted tucker) plus some of the liberals - mostly based on focusing on that single 'colourblind' phrase from that one speech (content of character/colour of skin etc) as a way to moan about modern anti-racists (cos of course MLK would be anti-woke!). The rest of what MLK said and did, not so interesting to them for some strange reason.
Re: Video: The Whitewashing Of Martin Luther King - SOME MORE NEWS
Eugene Puryear interviewed by Katie Halper, mostly concerned with the assassination but also covers other area. Eugene knows his stuff.
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...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
on January 20, 2022, 10:08 am
said to the novelist Alice Walker some twenty years ago. In response, a clearly shocked Alice Walker laughed, then shook her head in wonderment at the calibre of British journalism.