Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Juniosr by Dave Jaffe. Part One

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe.




   Come. Let us now praise Martin Luther King Junior a very exceptional American.. So many people in the United States have done so. This short dark skinned minister shook America to its foundations between 1955 and 1968. His struggle for justice for African Americans and later for others ended when he was shot dead while still only in his late 30's.
     In fact whatever your politics are you can praise King. Hard core conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other right wingers have done so. So do American liberals. Yet there's a crucial difference that looms between the two political camps in America. The left wingers and liberals point out that their county is still a very unequal place and that white racism still thrives.
Limbaugh, Beck and others say no. America, they argue is a post racial country which people like Martin Luther King helped create.
     Yet why do right wing pundits and politicians praise King? For the reverend King in the closing years of his very life leveled many tough words at the U.S. of A. In a famous speech at a New York church in 1967 he denounced America's war in Vietnam. He even went further than this. My country, he told the congregation, "is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world."
     The year before in 1966 he led an unsuccessful campaign to desegregate the northern city of Chicago. "Chicago," he said in effect at the time," has few lessons to learn about racism from Mississippi." The state he was talking about was back then the most racist region of America.  Yet in Chicago King faced bitter and sometimes violent resistance from white people.
     And when he was shot dead in March 1968 in Memphis Tennessee he was in the middle of supporting a civic workers' strike of mostly black people. This supportive role was part and parcel of his anti-poverty campaign to wipe out poverty in America. In fact, Martin Luther King in 1968 was planning to lead a poor people's march on Washington, D.C. King vowed that his non-violent army of the poor would not end their sit in until poverty was abolished in America.
     So how could such a left leaning courageous man be praised by white conservatives? It's quite simple. This great man is dead and his earlier deeds are praised. The later King's actions are forgotten or smoothed over. Then after he was killed, his birthday was made into a national holiday.
     Let's just recap some of King's great deeds. His great campaign in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and the March on Washington in the same year, led directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act abolished parts of the terrible white segregation regime in the southern United States. Then this father of four led a march through Selma and the state of Alabama in 1965 that gave the U.S. the Voting Rights Act. This act finally allowed many black people and other people of colour  the right to vote. Today many black people and others sit in the halls of power which they were kept out of for many years. These were two awesome changes in the United States.
     In the middle of his campaign in Alabama King won the Nobel Peace Prize and his face and his struggle achieved world wide coverage. As people might have said  back then, if the internet had been around "King and his struggle for racial justice went viral."