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

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Six




     Would Martin Luther King  have condemned the movements that sprung up after he died? Some he might have praised. Others he might have shied away from.
     Tamara Burke is  an Alabaman born social activist  She was talking to a 13 year old girl in the 1990's. "My mother's boyfriend is sexually abusing me," this girl said in effect. After this, Burke started a #MeToo movement. It targeted men who sexually harassed women. In October 2017, this movement went viral after one woman alleged she'd been sexually harassed by media mogul Harvey Weinstein Soon scores of women publicly denounced certain men who they claimed had molested them. People like Charlie Rose, Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful men were toppled from power after being accused of sexual molestation.
     The #MeToo movement would never have become so powerful if feminism hadn't been reborn in the early 1970's. King probably would have supported this movement. On the other hand, he might have had trouble dealing with the movement of transgendered people.
     For the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior in some ways was a very conventional man. He grew up in the 1930's and 1940's, in the very conservative U.S. south. His father and smother ran  a very conventional home. And King didn't always get on with assertive women. He clashed with black activist Ella Baker, a brave woman who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
    King didn't stand alone on this issue. "Women's position in the civil rights movement is prone," said Stokely Carmichael the charismatic leader of SNCC. Many women, black and white ones, were repelled by the machismo of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War protestors. That was one reason why women set up feminist women-only groups in the 1970's.
     Nearly all the leaders of the civil rights movement were men. Until the 1970's men ruled the roost in left wing, right wing and all movements of whatever political persuasion. Male domination of nearly everything was the order of the day. This only started to change with the emergence of feminism. Even to-day most of the top people in the world are men.
     Yet that said, Martin Luther King Junior deserves the praise heaped on him. He was an exceptional man. His tactics probably wouldn't have worked to-day For in the past fifty years, the world has changed dramatically from what it was in say, 1965. "I have a dream," he said in his famous speech in Washington, D.C,. in 1963. His dreams didn't all come true. Yet his struggles on behalf of social and racial justice, peace and equality stand out as an awesome example of activism in this age of conservatism.
     He was truly a great American.