“I have a dream...” You’ve heard those words, but what is that speech’s impact
today and is it used as a shield by casual racists when they talk about the “right
way” and the “wrong way” to protest? We’re talking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
on today’s Nutty History! Now be inspired to hit that subscription button and notification
bell. And like this video and leave a comment. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister
and activist, born in 1929, that led the American Civil Rights Movement for 13 years from 1955
until his assassination in 1968, advancing the movement through nonviolence and civil
disobedience. He was inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma
Gandhi. Dr. King is considered one of the greatest nonviolent leaders in world history,
and a symbol of social change. But many people forget all the things he actually said and
did and instead hold him up as an example for how they think protestors and justice
reform activist are “supposed” to behave. To them, people are going about demanding
change in the wrong way because they don’t act like Martin Luther King. Well, who was
Martin Luther King Jr? Was he a justice reform activist and a peaceful protestor or a socialist
that knew sometimes a riot was inevitable and necessary? Or could he be both? We’ll
get to that in a moment... wait no, I’ll get to it now... It’s both. People can be
a lot of things. Dr. King was not universally loved in his day. In 1966, just 2 years before
his death, 63% of Americans held a negative view of Martin Luther King. Peaceful protests
that he led were met with police brutality and violence. He was harassed and threatened
by government agencies including the CIA and the FBI and he was ultimately assassinated,
in what may have been a government assisted conspiracy. In 1955, King gained national
attention leading the Montgomery bus boycott in support of Rosa Parks, which lasted 385
days. During this King was arrested and had his house bombed. The boycott ended with a
United States District Court ruling that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public
buses. King became a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover took one look at that and thought, “they gotta be doing
communist activities in there” and began a wiretapping campaign. Because, you know,
black people aren’t demanding civil rights because they want them. They’re doing it
because they’re communists. Makes sense. MLK was no communist. He had no ties to the
USSR and those FBI and CIA stings were unfounded and unconstitutional. But communism and socialism
are two separate things. Dr. King advocated for the nation’s poor, and hey if you’re
going to do that you might start to bad mouth capitalism just a little bit. King once wrote
“I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he added that
capitalism had “out-lived its usefulness” because it had “brought about a system that
takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” Okay, I get it.
He wrote that in 1952 when he was young. I can see how he might view things that way,
especially with the inequality around him. Let’s take a look at a quote from him a
few years later in 1967 to see if he softened his stance. “The evils of capitalism are
as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” Nope. Stance not softened. So
yeah, Dr. King was opposed to the racial inequality inherent in this country and that racial inequality
was tied to the wealth inequality and the wealth inequality was a result of capitalism.
I guess that would make Dr. King kind of a socialist wouldn’t it? Remember that next
time you use him as an example for how you wish protestors would behave. You don’t
get to pick and choose which parts of this man’s teachings matter. The SCLC took their
Civil Rights campaign to Birmingham, Alabama, organizing marches and sit-ins that openly
violated the racist laws. The media wasn’t paying attention, so they recruited kids and
young adults to join. The Birmingham Police Department used high pressure water hoses
and vicious dogs against them. The images were broadcast nationwide and a horrified
nation looked on until the Jim Crow signs were removed. Hmm... this seems eerily similar
to something I may have seen recently. Peaceful protesters.... Being attacked by police...
public outrage....leading to reform! So when your Aunt posts that meme on Facebook of MLK
walking that says “this is how a protest is supposed to look” remind her of this
and then lock her up in the cheapest old folks home you can find. The March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom happened on August 28, 1963 and brought the major civil right organizations
of the day together. The event was organized by Bayard Rustin which is why President John
F. Kennedy originally opposed the march. Rustin was an openly gay man, a democratic socialist,
and had been associated with the American communist party. But at King’s insistence,
Kennedy relented. JFK secured the participation of the United Auto Workers to increase turnout
and put the focus on jobs. 250,000 people showed up for the one mile walk from the Washington
Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. The event’s stated goals were demands for desegregated
public accommodations and public schools, redress of violations of constitutional rights,
an expansive federal works program to train employees, protection of civil rights workers
from police brutality and a $2 minimum wage for all workers, equivalent to $17 an hour
in 2020. Hmmm. Those goals seem kind of similar to modern day democratic socialists like AOC
and Bernie Sanders. So, modern people that say they love Martin Luther King and stand
for what he stood for must also support AOC and Bernie and democratic socialist policy,
right? I dunno. Ask them next time you see someone co-opting Dr. King on social media.
The speech came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the American history. The
March, and the speech, helped put civil rights at the forefront of American politics and
facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act ended segregation in public
places, prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, and banned
employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
In the years after however, Martin Luther King’s popularity with the American public
and politicians cratered. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam and linked the excessive
government spending there with the poverty back home. Government agencies, which had
routinely spied on him and undermined him, began to go even further. The FBI sent a letter
and a tape recording to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, and later to King himself, allegedly
containing recordings of King's sexual indiscretions and instructions to King for him to commit
suicide. Dr. King went to Memphis in 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers
demanding higher wages, equal to that of their white counterparts and better treatment. There
in Memphis, on April 4, 1968, as King stood on a motel's second floor balcony, he was
assassinated by James Earl Ray. Ray later claimed his confession was forced. The owner
of a nearby coffee shop, Loyd Jowers, claimed he was paid $100,000 by local mobster Frank
Liberto in a plot that also involved the Memphis Police, the CIA, and the FBI. King’s family
sued Jowers and “unnamed conspirators'' for only $100 in 1999 just to bring the case
to a civil trial. The jury took one hour to decide that King had indeed been assassinated
by conspiracy. The US Department of Justice disagreed with the results, reopened the case,
and threw it out. After Dr. King’s assassination, riots swept over 100 cities in the United
States in what was then the largest wave of social unrest since the Civil War. People
were horrified that a man that preached non-violence had been murdered by white supremacy. King
did not advocate rioting in his life, but in a 1967 speech by King at Stanford University
Dr. King did say “Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned
as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language
of the unheard.” The passage ended with King saying “And as long as America postpones
justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over
and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention”
The King Assassination Riots led to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. This contains
the Indian Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. This expanded on the 1964 act and added
federal enforcement provisions. Too many of us look at Dr. King’s struggles, the Civil
Rights Movement, and the violence perpetrated against black Americans as they fought for
their rights as things that happened long ago, deep in the past. But remember, Martin
Luther King Jr. died when he was 39 years old. If he was still alive in the year 2020,
he would be 91. This isn’t ancient history. This is our great-grandparents, grandparents,
and parents. And it’s us, growing, learning ourselves, and teaching the future generations
after. Please take a moment to like and subscribe. Thanks for watching.