Reality Check for Democrats: Would Martin Luther King Be Supporting Bernie?
Great question, Prof. Cohen...
Reality Check for Democrats: Would Martin Luther King Be Supporting Bernie?
by Jeff Cohen
Common Dreams, February 11, 2016
Corporate mainstream media have sanitized and distorted the life and teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., putting him in the category of a “civil rights leader” who focused narrowly on racial discrimination; end of story.
Missing from the story is that Dr. King was also a tough-minded critic of our capitalist economic structure, much like Bernie Sanders is today.
The reality is that King himself supported democratic socialism – and that civil rights activists and socialists have walked arm-in-arm for more than a century.
The same news outlets that omit such facts keep telling us that the mass of African American voters in South Carolina and elsewhere are diehard devotees of Hillary (and Bill) Clinton – implying that blacks are somehow wary of Bernie Sanders and his “democratic socialism.”
Here are some key historical facts and quotes that get almost no attention in mainstream media:
1909: Many socialists – both blacks and whites – were involved in forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), our country’s oldest civil rights group. Among them was renowned black intellectual W.E.B. Dubois.
1925: Prominent African American socialist A. Philip Randolph became the first president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union that played a major role in activism for civil and economic rights (including the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”).
1952: In a fascinating letter to Coretta Scott, the woman he would marry a year later, Martin King wrote: “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. . . . Today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.”
1965: King wrote an essay in Pageant magazine, “The Bravest Man I Ever Knew,” extolling Norman Thomas as “America’s foremost socialist” and favorably quoting a black activist who said of Thomas: “He was for us before any other white folks were.”
1965: After passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, King became even more vocal about economic rights: “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”
1965-66: King supported President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” but urged more – calling for a “gigantic Marshall Plan” for our naton’s poor of all races.
1966: In remarks to staffers at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King said:
“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. . . . It really means that we are saying something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
March 1967: King commented to SCLC’s board that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”
April 1967: In his speech denouncing the U.S. war in Vietnam at New York’s Riverside Church, King extended his economic critique abroad, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
May 1967: In a report to SCLC’s staff, King said:
“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power . . . this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together . . . you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others . . . the whole structure of American life must be changed.”
August 1967: In his final speech to SCLC, King declared:
“One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. 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. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?’”
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he and SCLC were mobilizing a multiracial army of the poor to descend nonviolently on Washington D.C. demanding a “Poor Peoples Bill of Rights.” He told a New York Times reporter that “you could say we’re involved in the class struggle.”
A year before he was murdered, King said the following to journalist David Halberstam: “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
Unlike what Hillary Clinton professes today, Dr. King came to reject the idea of slow, incremental change. He thought big. He proposed solutions that could really solve social problems.
Unlike corporate-dominated U.S. media, King was not at all afraid of democratic socialism. Other eminent African American leaders have been unafraid. Perhaps it’s historically fitting that former NAACP president Ben Jealous has recently campaigned for Bernie Sanders in South Carolina.
If mainstream journalists did more reporting on the candidates’ actual records, instead of crystal-ball gazing about the alleged hold that the Clintons have over African American voters, news consumers would know about the deplorable record of racially-biased incarceration and economic hardship brought on by Clinton administration policies. (See Michelle Alexander’s “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.”)
With income inequality even greater now than during Martin Luther King’s final years, is there much doubt that King would be supporting the progressive domestic agenda of Bernie Sanders?
Before Bernie was making these kinds of big economic reform proposals, King was making them – but mainstream media didn’t want to hear them at the time . . . or now.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America. In 2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC News). He is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media - and a cofounder of the online action group, www.RootsAction.org.
SOURCE (with links to original sources): http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/11/reality-check-democrats-would-martin-luther-king-be-supporting-bernie
= new reply since forum marked as read
about "inner city Super predators"...
Dog whistling far into KKK land while defending the 3 strikes you're out laws.
So in what way have the Clintons helped the African American community the last 20 years?
What have they done for the NATIVE Americans the last 20 years?
Or veterans?
Or LGBT?
Or American workers? How many jobs did Clinton create with NAFTA?
Hillary! What a champion for civil rights!
Why dont you like it?
I would think by now you would be used to the kind of white privilege and arrogance that allows it.
POC vote in NH:
Clinton 52 %
Sanders 48%
Imagine what will happen if he ever connects with POC.
Feel the Bern
We will not be silent.
We will repeat our message over and over.
They will hear us !!!!
Enough is Enough.
FEEL THE BERN
Double woot!
A living Buddha put it into words...
The American Empire is in decline. Our market-driven culture is in decay. The criminal justice system has failed us. And the political system is collapsing due to the weight of corrupt lobbyists and greedy capitalists. Only organized power of courageous and compassionate people can turn around these catastrophic realities. Social movements in the streets and jails over against the Establishment in both decrepit political parties are fundamental. And prophetic politicians -- always with their faults and blind spots -- who tell the truth about Wall Street, white supremacy, empire, patriarchy and homophobia, deserve our critical support. Yet even more important is the issue of integrity.
Brother Bernie and Brother Trump are authentic human beings in stark contrast to their donor-driven opponents. Yet only Bernie has authenticity and integrity, whereas Trump is for real but not for right. Trump's attacks on precious Mexican brothers and sisters are unconscionable -- even as his blessed mother was born in Scotland and grandfather (Mr. Drumpf) was born in Germany. His kind of nativistic hostility could have excluded them. And Trump's unpatriotic complicity with the plutocratic corruption of our political system for over 30 years calls into question his integrity, including his commitment to "make America great again."
My endorsement of Brother Bernie in the primaries is not an affirmation of the neo-liberal Democratic Party or a downplaying of the immorality of the ugly Israeli occupation of Palestinians. I do so because he is a long-distance runner with integrity in the struggle for justice for over 50 years. Now is the time for his prophetic voice to be heard across our crisis-ridden country, even as we push him with integrity toward a more comprehensive vision of freedom for all.
SOURCE: https://www.facebook.com/drcornelwest/posts/10155953989390111
PS: You are most welcome, FlatBaroque! Thank you for grokking.
Keep it up... 
we all of us have some tendency not to change our beliefs but to instead dig in even stronger. And some of us a lot more than others. I'm guessing the "worse" is probably an indication of being embattled by too much reality. But don't expect any changes. Of course. When dealing with righteous ones, it is up to OTHERS to learn and change.
And if you'd please just hurry the heck up, Bravenak? With all due respect, dear, you have to be the worst of the slow learners. 
Or doesn't the narrative fit with your model?
This gets stranger by the moment.
They are making an appeal to a deceased icon and then answering for him.
While interesting from a historical 'what if' angle, I feel that such writing only leads to divisive responses and commentary.
I think Kings words and actions can speak for themselves within the time they occurred.
Our world is not King's world, so we need new leaders (of which we have many) and those are the voices we should focus on.
my .02
I just think that speculating on who he would support or what he would support are based on a snapshot in time that has passed us by.
He very well may have supported Sanders, but he could just as easily have supported Clinton as John Lewis does.
In the end I think that writers should skip on the historical endorsements and focus on the message and how it resonates today.
Too bad, so sad about all the little people who didn't go along with the big plan. Oh well. "Progress."
"The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll"
Orlando Letelier
August 28, 1976
EXCERPT...
The Economic Prescription and Chile's Reality
SNIP...
These are the basic principles of the economic model offered by Friedman and his followers and adopted by the Chilean junta: that the only possible framework for economic development is one within which the private sector can freely operate; that private enterprise is the most efficient form of economic organization and that, therefore, the private sector should be the predominant factor in the economy. Prices should fluctuate freely in accordance with the laws of competition. Inflation, the worst enemy of economic progress, is the direct result of monetary expansion and can be eliminated only by a drastic reduction of government spending.
Except in present-day Chile, no government in the world gives private enterprise an absolutely free hand. That is so because every economist (except Friedman and his followers) has known for decades that, in the real life of capitalism, there is no such thing as the perfect competition described by classical liberal economists. In March 1975, in Santiago, a newsman dared suggest to Friedman that even in more advanced capitalist countries, as for example the United States, the government applies various types of controls on the economy. Mr. Friedman answered: I have always been against it, I don't approve of them. I believe we should not apply them. I am against economic intervention by the government, in my own country, as well as in Chile or anywhere else (Que Pasa, Chilean weekly, April 3, 1975).
SNIP...
A Rationale tor Power
SNIP...
Until September 11, 1973, the date of the coup, Chilean society had been characterized by the increasing participation of the working class and its political parties in economic and social decision making. Since about 1900, employing the mechanisms of representative democracy, workers had steadily gained new economic, social and political power. The election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile was the culmination of this process. For the first time in history a society attempted to build socialism by peaceful means. During Allende's time in office, there was a marked improvement in the conditions of employment, health, housing, land tenure and education of the masses. And as this occurred, the privileged domestic groups and the dominant foreign interests perceived themselves to be seriously threatened.
Despite strong financial and political pressure from abroad and efforts to manipulate the attitudes of the middle class by propaganda, popular support for the Allende government increased significantly between 1970 and 1973. In March 1973, only five months before the military coup, there were Congressional elections in Chile. The political parties of the Popular Unity increased their share of the votes by more than 7 percentage points over their totals in the Presidential election of 1970. This was the first time in Chilean history that the political parties supporting the administration in power gained votes during a midterm election. The trend convinced the national bourgeoisie and its foreign supporters that they would be unable to recoup their privileges through the democratic process. That is why they resolved to destroy the democratic system and the institutions of the state, and, through an alliance with the military, to seize power by force.
In such a context, concentration of wealth is no accident, but a rule; it is not the marginal outcome of a difficult situation -- as they would like the world to believe -- but the base for a social project; it is not an economic liability but a temporary political success. Their real failure is not their apparent inability to redistribute wealth or to generate a more even path of development (these are not their priorities) but their inability to convince the majority of Chileans that their policies are reasonable and necessary. In short, they have failed to destroy the consciousness of the Chilean people. The economic plan has had to be enforced, and in the Chilean context that could be done only by the killing of thousands, the establishment of concentration camps all over the country, the jailing of more than 100,000 persons in three years, the closing of trade unions and neighbourhood organizations, and the prohibition of all political activities and all forms of free expression.
While the Chicago boys have provided an appearance of technical respectability to the laissez-faire dreams and political greed of the old landowning oligarchy and upper bourgeoisie of monopolists and financial speculators, the military has applied the brutal force required to achieve those goals. Repression for the majorities and economic freedom for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin.
CONTINUED...
http://www.ditext.com/letelier/chicago.html
Three weeks after this was published in The Nation (Aug. 28, 1976), Orlando Letelier was assassinated by a car bomb in Washington, D.C.
FWIW: Then-CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush knew all about Operation Condor and didn't stop them from killing Orlando Letelier and his American companion, Ronni Moffit.
DCI Bush even told then-Congressman Ed Koch (D-NY), threatened anonymously for his work uncovering Operation Condor and its associated evil at the time, "Nothing I can do."
Why does this matter today? What the CIA and Big Money Boys did in Chile in 1973, they're doing to Greece and the USA now.
Something else: They know if We the People are sufficiently worried about keeping a roof over the family and food on the table, We won't have much time to worry about little stuff like Democracy. Dr. King talked about it:
"We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists."
-- MLK quotes you are unlikely to hear on Fox News or Glenn Beck's show today
SOURCE: http://www.examiner.com/article/mlk-quotes-you-are-unlikely-to-hear-on-fox-news-or-glenn-beck-s-show-today
More on the subject: from the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
—By Tim Murphy
MotherJones | Thu Feb. 11, 2016
EXCERPT...
Although Sanders did attend the 1963 March on Washington, at which Lewis spoke, most of his work was in and around Hyde Park, where he became involved with the campus chapter of CORE shortly after transferring from Brooklyn College in 1961. During Sanders' first year in Chicago, a group of apartment-hunting white and black students had discovered that off-campus buildings owned by the university were refusing to rent to black students, in violation of the school's policies. CORE organized a 15-day sit-in at the administration building, which Sanders helped lead. (James Farmer, who co-founded CORE and had been a Freedom Rider with Lewis, came to the University of Chicago that winter to praise the activists' work.) The protest ended when George Beadle, the university's president, agreed to form a commission to study the school's housing policies.
Sanders was one of two students from CORE appointed to the commission, which included the neighborhood's alderman and state representative, in addition to members of the administration. But not long afterward, Sanders blew up at the administration, accusing Beadle of reneging on his promise and refusing to answer questions from students on its integration plan. In an open letter in the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, Sanders vented about the double-cross:
Chicago Maroon
That spring, with Sanders as its chairman, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of SNCC. Sanders announced plans to take the fight to the city of Chicago, and in the fall of 1962 he followed through, organizing picketers at a Howard Johnson in Cicero. Sanders told the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper, that he wanted to keep the pressure on the restaurant chain after the arrest of 12 CORE demonstrators in North Carolina for trying to eat at a Howard Johnson there:
CONTINUED...
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2016/02/bernie-sanders-core-university-chicago
PS: A most hearty welcome to DU, Respect 88! Thank you for grokking.
And by commenting I bumped it to the top of the forum did I not? So that's kind of the opposite of shutting down discussion.
I'm not a fan of the tactics being used in this OP and I think it's distasteful as hell, so I said so.
Not sure what the added "fuck" there is supposed to mean.
The Swarm arrives, and then they fall like bewildered mosquitoes.
And he has a whole platform on racial justice: https://berniesanders.com/issues/racial-justice/
Hillary *still* doesn't have a racial justice message on her campaign site.
Just prior to the 1960 election, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy risked alienating the conservative Southern Democrats by talking to Coretta Scott King while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rotted in a "backwoods Georgia jail." The photo below was taken when Dr. King visited President Kennedy at the White House.
Robert Kennedy-His Life by Evan Thomas
EXCERPT…
(Robert) Kennedy seemed to fret about what to do as John Seigenthaler drove him to the airport early that afternoon. He was flying to New York for a campaign event. Maybe, he told Seigenthaler, he should take the heat off his brother and act as a "lightning rod" by calling the judge himself. Seigenthaler, whose phone had been ringing all morning with calls of angry southern politicians protesting JFK's call to Mrs. King, urged Bobby to stay out of it. Bobby wearily agreed.
The next day, a press aide told Seigenthaler that the wires were reporting that the judge had released King -- at the intervention of Robert Kennedy.
Can't be true, Seigenthaler said; Kennedy had assured him he wouldn't call the judge. But it was true. Seigenthaler called Kennedy, who sheepishly disclosed the call. He said that, on the plane to New York, he had got to thinking about the whole matter. It was "disgraceful...It just burned me up," Kennedy said. "It grilled me. The more I thought about the injustice of it, the more I thought what a son of a bitch the judge was." So Kennedy called the judge and gave him a lecture on the constitutional right to make bail, and the judge agreed to release King. Later, speaking with Wofford, Kennedy said he told the judge, "If he was a decent American, he would let King out by sundown. I called him because it made me so damn angry to think of that bastard sentencing a citizen to four months hard labor for a minor traffic offense."
The impact of JFK's call to Mrs. King and RFK's intervention with the judge was immense. Daddy King, Martin Luther King's father, an extremely influential Baptist preacher, openly shifted his endorsement from Nixon to Kennedy. The Kennedy campaign brilliantly exploited the symbolism of phone calls with a samizdat campaign in the black community. Careful not to tout the Kennedy-King connection in the popular mainstream press, lest southern voters take umbrage, the Kennedy campaign published hundreds of thousands of leaflets and handbills that were distributed at black churches and bars. On one side, a flyer read: "Jack Kennedy called Mrs. King" On the other side it said: "Richard Nixon did not." Many political analysts believe that this PR offensive decided the election. In a half-dozen states in the East and Midwest carried by Kennedy by very narrow margins on election day, black turnout made the difference. Richard Nixon's chauffeur understood. "Mr. Vice-President," he told his boss after the election, "you know I had been talking to my friends. They had been all for you. But when Mr. Robert Kennedy called the judge to get Dr. King out of jail -- well, they just all turned to him."
CONTINUED…
Excerpted from "Robert Kennedy: His Life” by Evan Thomas, pages 101-102.
I recall when MLK was lambasted for his "sympathies" to "Communism" and later "Marxism" by the John Birchers in 60's and 70's, which after his assassination, MLK's supporters attempted to whitewash or delete altogether from the record in order to appease the masses and the TPB.
Happy to see Cohen write on the subject with a sharp and clear eyed analysis based on historical fact.
Again thanks for posting, think I'll share it on my fb. 
This whole idiotic speculative exercise reeks with desperate white privileged pandering. Let the man rest in peace.
Your Honor, is the prosecution really asking the witness to speculate on how a deceased human would vote?
/sarcasm off 
who was an icon who could make the most racist Ahole laugh.
And, um, Andy Young is endorsing...lemme guess...starts with an Hillary and ends with a Clinton?
is a resounding "YES".
Thanks for posting (and for all you do).
MLK never endorsed a candidate when he was alive. Dunno why people think he will do it from beyond the grave. Let the man rest.....
