2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: If MLK Were Alive, He'd Make White Folks Just as Uncomfortable as Black Lives Matter [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Just that his involvement as an organizer, not just a cheerleader, in the freedom movement demonstrated commitment to fighting racism (the thought being, if he didn't care and "didn't get it", why would Bernie have been an organizer for SNCC in Chicago, which was just as risky at that point as doing that in Mississippi if you know what Chicago was like at the time). It was a mistake to bring up the SNCC thing so much, but I attribute it to young people seeing a figure they admired under relentless attack and responding excessively.
Dr. King, from all I have read, never saw any distinction between fighting racism and fighting for economic justice. He believed those struggles were interlinked, and added the economic aspect back in when he saw that simply defeating Jim Crow was not enough to liberate PoC. Nobody is placing themselves before the freedom movement or Dr. King in saying that.
Economic justice is not more important than the defeat of racism...but it is a component of that struggle.
Those who ended up crushing the freedom movement in the late Sixties were defenders of capitalism, not white leftists(or black or Latino or Native American leftists, who between them were far more numerous than white leftists.
If Dr. King had left it at fighting Jim Crow, he'd have been allowed to die in bed at a peaceful old age. He was killed for going deeper in the struggle for liberation, for challenging the very nature of the system the white rich had created . They could accept the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts...it was the Poor People's Campaign that made the white power structure decide to kill him.
And for their heroism in this effort, people of all colors honor MLK and all others who died (the vast majority of whom were PoC) in the cause...a cause which is still being fought for to this day.