Fifty-three years ago, as Autumn turned chilly in the Peach State, MLK was sick; he went to Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist to preach anyway. He felt a critical need to deliver a November, 1957 message that has particular resonance in relation to contemporary events of war and peace and social justice and social upheaval. Most commentators on this famous sermon focus on King’s ‘love-your-enemies’ prescription. But MLK’s purpose in preaching-while-sick was more pointed than moral generality. His was a profoundly political hallelujah.
He contended that Americans failed to honor democracy. “(W)e have often taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. …(W)e have often … trampled over individuals and races with the iron feet of oppression. … (T)hrough our Western powers we have perpetuated colonialism and imperialism.” He might easily have been speaking of Egypt, just pilloried in the Suez war a year prior to his presentation.
In the fifty four years that have passed since then, the United States has ‘befriended’ nations such as Egypt, seeking to keep them away from such influences as, first, ‘communism,’ and, more recently, ‘terrorism.’ However, the political result of supposed U.S. benevolence uniformly, almost without exception, worked to enrich a thin upper crust at the expense of masses of humanity left to wallow in poverty and disenfranchisement.
Now, as if by a miraculous fiat, the U.S. ruling authorities say that ‘human rights’ are indeed important, and the ways of repression and impunity are no longer acceptable. But anyone with a sense of history will recognize that, at the first sniff of social democracy–Mossadegh, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Lumumba, and Allende are among the dozens of leaders, many deposed or ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’–the SOP of the USA is likely to be to seek out a new Mubarak, a modified version of Mobutu, a slightly-more-urbane model of thuggery than Somoza, someone like Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, resplendent in tailored suits and sporting a Harvard degree to justify his following IMF and CIA directives.
In 1957, one of the ‘enemies’ that King warned against hating was Russia. He contended that anti-communism was a large component of U.S. policies and that many grassroots organizations scoffed at such mandates for ideological purity. One source that fought against such insistence was the Highlander Center, where Rosa Parks studied just before she made her historic 12/1/1955 decision to break an unjust law and go to prison in Montgomery.
In fact, on Labor Day, 1957, MLK delivered an important speech to celebrate Highlander Folk School’s(HFS) founding. There, a supposed ‘freelance photographer,’ Ed Friend, spied on events for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia’s White-Supremacist governor, Marvin Griffin.
One thorough annalist has pointed out, “Th(is) attack upon HFS was part of a larger effort to discredit and demonize anyone connected to the civil rights movement — in particular to … prominent national civil rights organizations.”
In the tumultuous decade of liberation-and-struggle that followed–from sit-ins to mass demonstrations to Black Panther insistence on “self-defense,” one can see many similar scenes of upsurge and oppression as are appearing on the front pages of the press now. Throughout this process, under the auspices of Cointelpro and like machinations, a subversion and co-optation of the civil rights, peace, and social-justice movements was taking place.
Photographer-spy Friend’s pictures showed-up in bigoted, ‘patriotic’ mass-mailings, calling King Communist. The ‘grain-of-truth’ in this assertion was the support that socialists had long offered civil-rights. Red-baiting campaigns-against-King soon went national, with billboards plastered around the South, bearing the caption, “MLK at Communist Training School.”
Lifelong social-justice-proponent, Anne Braden, sent MLK a 1959 letter cautioning him that Ed Friend had just testified in hearings to close HFS. Friend lied, “The greatest objection I had was that one… Negro preacher… there said that white people should be murdered to force the Federal Government to support integration…–that was Martin Luther King.”
Those of us observing the uprisings currently occurring across a swath of the Islamic world would do well to recall the infiltration and undermining of similar surges of human passion as part-and-parcel of policies of rule by the elites and their institutional watchdogs in agencies with well-known acronyms. Martin Luther King remonstrated about the inherently class-based systems of disempowerment that have ever been the operational protocols of rulers.
Fifty four years and three months ago, he addressed the moronic assertion that he was calling for ‘death to Whitey’ when he sermonized in Atlanta, closing by noting the historical tendency for some to be oppressors and some oppressed. He continued that neither violent uprising nor passive acquiescence was an appropriate response to tyranny.
However, “there is another way. … to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. …(T)his is the only way as … . we look out across the years and across the generations… Love is the only way.” That’s what the man from Nazareth said too, obviously.
Both of them agreed with Mother Jones too, though. She stated an integral piece of the puzzle of justice. “Don’t mourn. Organize.”
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