The Revolutionary King with Dr. Clayborne Carson -28:37
The Revolutionary King:
MLK’s The Three Evils of Society, "the sickness of racism, excessive materialism
and militarism" and his prophetic work then for the path forward
today!
with
Dr. Clayborne Carson, African
American professor of history at Stanford University, and director of the Martin
Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985 he has directed
the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish
the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
For anyone that is preoccupied with the current local-global
condition affecting the human family with the visible ravages of racism eating
at our soul, poverty's death march and the ever expanding military industrial
complex cancer devouring everything in sight our two-hour special The
Revolutionary King will truly aid us on our journey to become more affective
agents for social change.
On Aug. 31, 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King
delivered The Three Evils of Society speech at the National Conference on New
Politics, which is the most prophetic and revolutionary address to date on the
questions of militarism, poverty, and racism. "We are now experiencing the
coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness" was how MLK framed the problem
that "has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning."
Identifying "the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism" and
considering the three problems as the "plaque of western civilization." Dr.
King understood that the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement was from the
outset a battle against the system itself.
At the time of the speech, MLK
was facing increasing white opposition to black empowerment and equality, an
expansion of crony capitalism and open ended commitment to military expenditures
on the Vietnam war that all together led to deepening poverty and rising
discontent in the African American community. The conditions in today's America
and the world resemble what MLK described in "The Three Evils of Society" speech
in 1967.
MLK spoke of America's "schizophrenic personality on the
question of race" with two conflicting personalities. One professing "the great
principles of democracy" and another that practices its antithesis. Every step
forward in confronting racism in America has an equal step backward, which MLK
perceptively identified as the white backlash -- the "old prejudices,
hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. The white backlash of
today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since
the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation." Racism, for MLK,
was that "corrosive evil that will bring down western civilization" and white
backlash was nothing more than good old White Supremacy that is never content
with equality.
Dr. King was a great leader in the Black Revolutionary
Tradition whose work should help shape our understanding of capitalism and
organizing today. Now is precisely the time to recount and be instructed by Dr.
King’s revolutionary legacy against the system’s efforts to white wash and
degrade his frontal challenge to its crimes. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one
of the great revolutionaries in U.S. and world history. He was a leader of the
Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement, a fierce internationalist,
anti-imperialist, and Pan Africanist, a Black militant, a socialist, and part of
The Movement that was far to the left of the Democratic Party.
Since
1980, with the rise of Ronald Reagan, the two party system, aka U.S.
imperialism, has waged a counter-revolution against the great victories of the
revolutionary sixties, where the revolutionary left won so many of the
ideological battles against U.S. hegemony. In the past 40 years, in particular,
it has been profoundly painful to witness, and difficult to combat, the lies and
slanders against the historical, and political achievements of the Black and
Third World led movements.
In the case of Dr. King, the establishment has
tried to distort King’s life by putting him forth as an accommodating, dreamer
and use him as a counterforce against Malcolm X, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Paul
Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fidel Castro, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer, and
the great Third World revolutionaries throughout history. In truth, Dr. King was
one of their colleagues and comrades and in turn, they all had great
appreciation of his unique and courageous role in
history.
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