Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe: Part Three

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Three..




       Martin Luther King Junior was an apostle of non-violence. All his campaigns were based on the ethic of never meeting violence with violence. In his lifetime King was imprisoned. handcuffed, tear gassed and assaulted. He and other members of his organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were committed to never lifting their fists to reply to violence, King himself was nearly killed twice before he was shot dead.
      African Americans paid a terrible price for their campaign against racial injustice. Medgar Evers was one of the American south's promoters of racial justice. He was shot dead in his house in the summer of 1963. A few months later a bomb went off in a church mostly attended by black people and killed four African American children. Arsonists burned down many churches in Mississippi where black people  came together and planned to tear down white racism. Police frequently sprayed protestors with tear gas, hosed them with water cannons, unleashed attack dogs on anti-racist marchers and clubbed many of them to the ground.
    "I don't believe in this non-violence," one black man told me tin the summer of 1963. To this man it only meant that "we black people get hurt. Nobody else does." Three people were killed in the Mississipp Summer of 1964, two of whom were white and one who was black. Two people were killed in the middle of the 1965 demonstrations in Selma. And when King was assasinated, major rebellions broke out across the United States and involved mostly African Americans
      When the fires of this revolt were crushed, close to 170 people nearly of whom were  black, had been killed mostly by police or national guard troops. King was a believer in non-violence. His faith in this tactic was grounded in his religious faith and his study of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian struggle for independence. "I haven't been elected as the King's first minister," said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill "to negotiate independence" with what Churchill called "a half naked fakir". This  was Churchill 's name for  Gandhi. Yet in the end Gandhi's non-violent campaign did win India its independence. King thought he could use Gandhi's tactics to win equality for African-Americans.
   Unfortunately many white people in the United States reacted to King's nonviolent campaigns with terrible brutality. They were anything but apostles of non-violence. Even before King was killed police and others killed black people. The great riot in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965 was triggered by police violence. The great Detroit riot in 1967 was met by police and National Guard force. Over two dozen African Americans were killed in this rebellion.
    The Reverend King's hopes that he could win his campaigns for racial justice didn't always get respect from American forces of law and order.