{"id":31975,"date":"2017-01-16T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T17:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/kings-shift-from-dreamer-to-radical-resonates-for-activists\/"},"modified":"2017-01-16T09:00:14","modified_gmt":"2017-01-16T17:00:14","slug":"kings-shift-from-dreamer-to-radical-resonates-for-activists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/kings-shift-from-dreamer-to-radical-resonates-for-activists\/","title":{"rendered":"King’s shift from dreamer to radical resonates for activists"},"content":{"rendered":"

PHILADELPHIA \u2014<\/strong> For Abdul Aliy-Muhammad, the Martin Luther King Jr. he learned about as a child was a man of love, peace and racial harmony, a gifted orator.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until Aliy-Muhammad became an activist that he came to know, and appreciate, the King who decried the Vietnam War as \u201cunjust\u201d and made a firm, insistent case for economic justice for black Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a Martin Luther King that is important to the resistance movement that we don\u2019t hear about,\u201d said the 33-year-old co-founder of the Black and Brown Workers Collective in Philadelphia. \u201cWe always hear about love and forgiveness. … There was also a King who was radical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Younger black activists say they prefer the pointed, more forceful King to the Nobel Prize-winning pacifist who preached love over hate as he led nonviolent marches across the segregated South. They like the fact that the urgency in King\u2019s demand for equality in the years just before his assassination in 1968 is in keeping with the tenacious nature of today\u2019s Black Lives Matter rallying cry.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen as now, it was about promises not translating into substantive transformation,\u201d said Princeton University professor Imani Perry. \u201cThe questions young people are asking and the way they\u2019re challenging the status quo are important. If we don\u2019t have that kind of vision, we end the possibility for change before we even have the conversation. In that sense, they really are carrying the torch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fifty years ago this month, King retreated to the Caribbean with his wife, Coretta, and a few friends to write his final book, \u201cWhere Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?\u201d In the book, published in June 1967, King argued for racial equality for black Americans through the wholesale embrace of social and economic reform.<\/p>\n

During the book\u2019s promotional tour, King spoke out against the Vietnam War and criticized U.S. leaders for allowing slum conditions to persist in the cities. \u201cEveryone is worrying about the long hot summer with its threat of riots. We had a long cold winter when little was done about the conditions that create riots,\u201d King said in June 1967.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s young activists say King\u2019s harsher words resonate just as much as his methods of peaceful protest.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do King a disservice when we try to tell a flat story of turning the other cheek,\u201d said 31-year-old Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100 in Chicago. \u201cIt was never simply that.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Carruthers sees it, \u201cagitation\u201d was the core of King\u2019s work. \u201cTheir agitation shows up differently than how our agitation shows up today. However, I think King\u2019s work and the work we do are part of the larger tradition of black radical resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an August 1967 speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King pointed out disparities in unemployment, housing, education and infant mortality. He called for black Americans \u2014 then barely a century out of bondage \u2014 to \u201cassert our dignity and worth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy,\u201d King told the audience. \u201cPsychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

King fought to end public segregation and fought for the right to vote. But he also advocated for a living wage and worked to close the employment gap for blacks and spoke out against discrimination in policing \u2014 to which rioting was a common response. King reacted to the Feb. 29, 1968, release of the report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner commission, by noting that the solutions suggested \u201chave been made before almost to the last detail and have been ignored almost to the last detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a familiar climate for some working in the Black Lives Matter movement, who see their efforts in cities like Ferguson, Missouri, Chicago, Baltimore and Cleveland on a continuum that reaches back to King.<\/p>\n

They identify with the fact that King was only 26 when he was thrust into a leadership role in the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. When he died at 39 in 1968, before he could launch his Poor People\u2019s Campaign, King was still far younger than civil rights establishment figures such as A. Philip Randolph and Adam Clayton Powell.<\/p>\n

Remembering King as a community organizer places his movement alongside contemporary activism, said Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was really focused on poor black people,\u201d Cullors, 33, said. \u201cLet\u2019s remember the King who was invested in changing the country that he loved so much, who called out elected officials who continued to endanger black people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PHILADELPHIA \u2014 For Abdul Aliy-Muhammad, the Martin Luther King Jr. he learned about as a child was a man of love, peace and racial harmony, a gifted orator. It wasn\u2019t until Aliy-Muhammad became an activist that he came to know, and appreciate, the King who decried the Vietnam War as \u201cunjust\u201d and made a firm, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":31976,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-31975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31975"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=31975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}