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

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




       It's hard to know whether Martin Luther king Junior would have agreed with some of the groups that sprung up after the civil rights movement appeared.
    Even in his lifetime some African-Americans had no time for his non-violent approach to social change. "Violence is as American as apple pie,"  said H."Rap" Brown,  a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or "Snick" as it was called. Snick in the mid-sixties swerved away from the path of peaceful change and embraced black nationalism. King never denounced Snick. Rap Brown was later imprisoned and is still in prison to-day.
     The black revolutionary Malcolm X. jeered at the 1963 March on Washington , D.C. He dubbed it "The farce in Washington". In 1966 Huey Newton and young other African Americans paraded in some African American areas armed with guns and confronted police. At  one time, Newton who grew up in the Oakland Bay area  went along with some of his friends to California's state capitol of Sacramento to confront the state government. On that day most of the Panthers openly carried guns.
     Police clashed with the Panthers in several cities and killed some Black Panthers. Under these police attacks, the Panthers faded away or then supported moderate African American politicians. At the start of their movement, the Panthers set out ten basic points to lift African Americans out of poverty and free them from white racism. I don't think King denounced the Panthers. Yet I doubt he would have embraced the Panthers who had no time for King's non-violent approach.
     Native Americans were the poorest of all U.S. citizens in the 1960's. I forgot to mention them in the previous parts of this entry. In the late 1960's many of them looked at the civil rights movement and were spurred into protesting their status. Some of them joined with King in 1968 in his proposed march on poverty in Washington. Others occupied the former prison and island fortress of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay. Others picked up guns and had shootouts with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
     The Lakota Sioux native Leonard Pelletier fled the U.S. for Vancouver, Canada in the mid-1970's. Pelletier was charged with killing two F.B.I. agents in a clash on an Indian reservation  at Wounded Knee. He was later deported back to the U.S. where he was tried and then imprisoned. He's still in prison to-day.
      Other people from the white New Left like the Weathermen and some maybe who were African Americans planted bombs at draft boards, companies that made war products, police stations
  and U.S. government  offices. In 1971 alone, over 2,000 bombs went off in the U.S. many of them aimed at political targets. "America was born out of a genocidal impulse," said U.S. activist Tom Hayden.in  effect. True or not, many left wing Americans condemned the U.S. war in Indochina, drawing parallels between the U.S. past wars on native Americans and the prevailing war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
     U.S. prisons were also the scene of many uprisings in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Many of these protests were led by African American prisoners. George Jackson was a black man and prisoner who wrote a best selling book called 'Soledad Brother'. He was killed in a shootout with prison guards. His brother Jonathan also died in a hostage taking incident in Bay area courthouse. The last great rebellion in the U.S. occurred in the Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971. "You're doing a great job," New York state governor Nelson Rockefeller told journalist Tom Wicker who was invited by hostage holding prisoners to the prison.
     Later Rockefeller sent in police and others to crush this rebellion. Close to three dozen people were killed in the shootout that ensued. Among this group were some prison guards.
     The yippie Jerry Rubin went even further in his verbal assault of American institutions. "Kill your parents," he told some of his audiences in the late 19760's. Rubin later modified this statement
     It's unlikely that Martin Luther King would have agreed with Rubin or many other revolutionary groups that surfaced in the late 1960's or early 1970's. He wouldn't have endorsed their open embrace of violence. He was a Christian minister, a believing Baptist and was close to his well-known minister father. King embraced non-violent protest and had no time for bloodshed.