THE LATE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. YOU DON'T KNOW

You ever wonder what MLK Jr was really like? The media gets so much wrong these days, have you ever thought that perhaps they are getting more than just current events wrong? Sure, NOW they say the Iraq war is going badly, but before the Iraq Attack, they barely talked about the symphony of naysingers preaching the toothless Saddam song. So, with that kind of evidence doesn't it make sense to question everything they tell us? Even the stuff that we actually want to believe? Well, Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote something for CommonDreams.Org that deals with this exact issue regarding the true Martin Luther King Jr. Check out a cutting from [http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/04/304/|an April 4, 2007 article] over at CommonDreams.Org:

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968). An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV. Why? It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years. In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow. Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power. "True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

So, he wasn't just a civil rights leader, but a human rights leader. Shortly after RFK started talking about the poor and running for president, he was assassinated. Seems like MLK Jr's final years were a similar precursor to his own targeted death. Seems like pointing out the real problems facing human life, your own human life gets ended fast. Go check out [http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/04/304/|that article] for more on MLK Jr's final years fighting for all of us. Well, maybe not for the rich folks.

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