On Facebook, around MLK’s birthday this year, I noted that that, at the time of his death, Martin Luther King Jr. was hated by much of white America, and that the adoration with which he is now held is a function of a civil rights leader frozen, and distorted, over time.
This Facebook friend of a friend took exception to my assertion. “With a statement like that, you obviously were unaware that the only white people who were glad he was dead were the white bigots in power: Hoover and his cohorts being the prime suspects. Not all of us belong to the KKK and I take resentful issue with such a broad statement.”
I had never asserted that most people wanted him dead, only that he was increasingly unpopular. The numbers don’t lie. According to the Gallup poll:
“In 1963, King had a 41% positive and a 37% negative rating; in 1964, it was 43% positive and 39% negative; in 1965, his rating was 45% positive and 45% negative; and in 1966 — the last Gallup measure of King using this scalometer procedure — it was 32% positive and 63% negative.”
Read how King believed All Labor Has Dignity:
In his introduction to the newly published anthology of King speeches and writings, Cornel West writes, “This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize.” West writes of a charismatic leader who was “anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-racist” and embodied “democratic socialist sentiments.”
A month into the Memphis sanitation workers strike, on March 18, “strikers and their supporters packed Bishop Charles Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ… With few notes, King addressed the overflowing church by connecting the localized strike to the plight of all workers, especially those in the service economy.” [The following speech was delivered by Dr. King… just two weeks before he was assassinated in the same city.]
You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America. The vast majority of Negroes in our country are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
My friends, we are living as a people in a literal depression. Now you know when there is mass unemployment and underemployment in the black community they call it a social problem. When there is mass unemployment and underemployment in the white community they call it a depression. But we find ourselves living in a literal depression, all over this country as a people.
Now the problem is not only unemployment. Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.
The notion that there would be a question of where Dr. King would have stood in the 1%/99% struggle is addressed in his own words. Those saying otherwise clearly have no idea what Martin Luther King actually believed. He had hopes for the poor, a dream America has yet to realize.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated 47 years ago today.
FBI’s “Suicide Letter” to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance
Bayard Rustin: Martin Luther King’s Views on Gay People.
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The Speeches of Martin Luther King.
