From: John Lacny (jplst15+@pitt.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 30 2002 - 20:44:34 EST
This is a column I've written about MLK on the occasion of the April 4
anniversary. I thought people might find it useful in some way on the
National Student/Labor Day of Action.
John Lacny
------ Forwarded Message
From: John Lacny <jplst15+@pitt.edu>
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 20:37:30 -0500
To: "It's No Accident" <lacny@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [It's No Accident] A Dream Deferred -- 34 Years Later
It's No Accident, March 30, 2002
A Dream Deferred -- 34 Years Later
by John Lacny
April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. Long the target of wiretaps engineered by FBI
chief J. Edgar Hoover and approved by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and
having been the victim of at least one FBI attempt to get him to commit
suicide, King was murdered at a time of great social upheaval, when he was
speaking with an even more forthrightly radical voice than before.
In the spring of 1968 King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
was in the midst of the Poor People's Campaign, an attempt to renew and
deepen the promised War on Poverty that -- as King did not fail to point out
-- had been betrayed by the Johnson Administration's imperialist adventure
in Vietnam.
King had laid out his vision in no uncertain terms in what turned out to be
his last presidential address to the SCLC, "Where Do We Go From Here?" There
he said that it was high time for the movement to "begin to question the
capitalistic economy." Further:
"We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace.
But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring."
In numerous writings, interviews, and speeches, King was calling for
ever-more-radical measures such as a guaranteed minimum income.
But King was neither a bloodless policy wonk nor a visionary in the
impractical sense. He sought to connect his broader hopes for the country to
the day-to-day struggles of ordinary people. He knew from experience that
the lofty rhetoric of moral suasion was not enough, and that change would
come only when people were willing to take action, up to and including
defying the law if necessary.
King wanted to begin the Poor People's Campaign in Memphis because in the
spring of that year it had become a flashpoint for all of the changes he was
fighting for. There, 1,300 sanitation workers -- almost all of them black
men -- had gone on strike when a garbage truck malfunctioned and crushed two
men to death.
The deaths were the final insult on top of the day-to-day regimen of poverty
and petty indignities that the strikers faced. Their wages were so low that
they qualified for public assistance. So despite a Tennessee law prohibiting
strikes by public employees -- and without the prior sanction of their
international union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME) -- the workers walked out in defiance of the racist city
administration.
Because the sanitation workers had drawn the lines of struggle so starkly,
King made their fight a national priority. In his speeches in Memphis King
unwaveringly defended the human dignity of the poor:
"So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in
professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let
me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves
humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has
worth."
Here was a manifestation of the movement King had called for in the book
version of "Where Do We Go From Here?": a "coalition of an energized section
of labor, Negroes, unemployed and welfare recipients" with a view to "the
total elimination of poverty, now a practical responsibility."
Long critical of those labor unions that failed to put civil rights at the
center of their agenda, King was also a critic of what he called
"middle-class prejudices toward the labor movement" in the black community.
As he knew, it was not just the lawyers, politicians and other professionals
but the millions of working-class African-Americans who had been the engine
of the civil rights movement.
In the charged atmosphere of the late 1960s, King's support for the
struggles of the poor and his forthright opposition to the war in Vietnam
made him even more of a danger in the eyes of the authorities than he had
ever been. Those authorities are morally -- if not literally -- responsible
for his death.
Therefore pay no heed to those shameless souls who quote King and then claim
that all of the injustices of our society are a thing of the past. He called
this sort of thing "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism." We owe him and
his memory much more than that.
- - - - - - - - - -
"Tell no lies, claim no easy victories."
-- Amilcar Cabral
"It's No Accident" is a political column by John Lacny, a student activist
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