The enduring legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Fight against racism, poverty and war continues

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Jan. 15 marks the 81st birthday of civil rights and anti-war martyr Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A federal holiday in his honor is held every year on the third Monday of January, when federal offices, state and local municipal agencies are closed. Some private businesses also give their workers the day off.

This recognition of Dr. King, an African-American clergyperson who was born in Atlanta on the eve of the Great Depression, grew out of a struggle that lasted for nearly two decades. Numerous civil rights organizations, artists like Stevie Wonder and African-American politicians such as Detroit Rep. John Conyers led the fight for the adoption of the holiday.

In 1986, after the King holiday bill was passed by Congress, it was reluctantly signed into law by perhaps one of the most ideologically right-wing presidents, Ronald Reagan. Every year the government, transnational corporations and their media counterparts present a view of Dr. King that strips his legacy of the broad social movements in the civil rights and anti-war struggles between the mid- 1950s and late 1960s.

The corporate media reduce his contributions to the struggle to a few sound bites from his classic “I Have a Dream” speech — a speech that was delivered to hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C., and millions more over national television and radio on Aug. 28, 1963.

Those who participated in those struggles or studied that history understand that although Dr. King was a tremendous orator and charismatic figure, his efforts were a reflection of the mass consciousness and political commitment of millions within the U.S. and around the world.

This understanding of the historical and social context that produced Dr. King and countless other leaders, who sacrificed their well-being and lives to fight institutional racism, poverty and war, is fundamental to the ongoing efforts to complete the revolutionary movements that made such a monumental impact during the 1950s and 1960s.

The election and inauguration of the first African-American president, as significant as it was, by no means resolves the social contradictions that have characterized the U.S. since its inception. In fact, the election of President Barack Obama has created new and more complex challenges that activists are grappling with.

Why King’s legacy remains relevant today

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee realized that the African-American struggle would need to shift focus toward addressing the fundamental institutional racism and class oppression that were still prevalent in the U.S. With the passage of civil rights legislation and the mass mobilizations surrounding the movement against segregation, a new wave of repression by the ruling class was launched in the South.

The eventual failure of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” due to lack of funding and disempowerment of the poor, coupled with the escalation of military involvement in Vietnam during the mid-1960s, created a political crisis in the U.S. that remains unresolved. During the 1960s the ruling class stifled the mass movement towards genuine equality and self-determination by both channeling the aspirations of African Americans into the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party and by intensifying the repressive apparatus of the state and the corporations.

This reaction to the gains of the civil rights struggle was illustrated in an article cited in Samuel Yette’s “The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America.” In the Jan. 31, 1967, issue of the New York World Journal Tribune, Marianne Means reported that “the practical economics of wage increase (to 84 cents per hour) hardly warrant the sudden eviction of huge numbers of impoverished Negro families ... but political realities are something else again.”

Yette quotes a letter written by Dr. King to President Lyndon Johnson on Aug. 10, 1966, where he addressed the mass removal of African Americans from the land they had farmed for decades as a result of wage and political demands put forward by the movement.

Dr. King said: “Last January, numerous poor, homeless Mississippi Delta Negroes went to the empty Greenville Air Base seeking shelter from the winter cold. They were forcibly driven off by Federal troops.

“Some fled to Northern ghettos. Some burdened already overcrowded Mississippi kinfolk. Others are trying desperately to survive today on 400 acres of land in Washington County without adequate permanent housing, jobs, education, on the verge of starvation, and with little hope. Another group of poor, evicted Mississippi Negroes at Tribbett, Washington County, Mississippi, struggled through the long winter in tents because of the Federal Government’s failure to respond to their pleas for housing. They have no jobs and almost no food.”

Yette places the mid-1960s expulsion of African Americans from Southern agricultural areas within broader trends in the labor market. He quotes a June 15, 1964, press release issued by then-Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz: “We are piling up a human scrap heap of between 250,000 and 500,000 people a year, many of whom never appear in the unemployment statistics.

“They are often not counted among the unemployed because they have given up looking for work and thus count themselves out of the labor market. The rate of nonparticipation in the labor force by men in their prime years increased from 4.7 percent in 1953 to 5.2 percent in 1962. The increase has been the sharpest among nonwhites, increasing from 5.3 percent to 8.2 percent in that period.”

It is obvious that things have now worsened tremendously. The actual unemployment rate among African Americans and the working class in general is far higher than the 10 percent the federal government acknowledges in its monthly job loss report. Rates of joblessness among youth and the oppressed are much higher, with African Americans and teenagers suffering the highest levels of unemployment.

It was estimated that 85,000 people were thrown out of work in December. This figure is not reflective of the broader trends towards declining social wages for the class as a whole.

There have been three stimulus or recovery packages enacted by Congress and two presidential administrations over the last three years. During this same time period 8 million workers were laid off, according to official government statistics. Millions of working people have lost their homes and apartments.

The federal government and the corporations have no effective plans to put the estimated 34 million people back to work at decent wages with benefits.

The principal objectives of the U.S. ruling class are the widening of the so-called “war on terror” and the maximization of profits for the bankers, industrialists and insurance companies. By promoting fear of “terrorism” among all segments of the working class, the ruling class is seeking to build public support for its aggressive wars of domination in Central Asia, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Latin America.

Working class and oppressed must advance their own program

With the escalation of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration, at the behest of the Pentagon, is dashing the hopes that millions of working people and nationally oppressed embodied in their mass support of the 2008 Obama campaign. Just as the prospects for improvement of African-American social conditions in the 1960s and 1970s were eviscerated through the “war on poverty” and the occupation of Vietnam, today the rising militarism of the U.S. around the world has trumped the material needs of the masses.

When Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in late 2009, he claimed that U.S. imperialism had underwritten world security for the last six decades. However, what he did not say is that during the post World War II period the U.S. has utilized its military might, funded by profits accrued from the exploitation of labor, to fight against every progressive and revolutionary movement that has developed to challenge world capitalism and racism.

It has been the United States ruling class that waged wars against the peoples of Korea, China, Vietnam and Southeast Asia, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Cuba and other geopolitical regions throughout the world. The U.S. ruling class has waged war against the people of this country by stifling the civil rights, Black power, anti-war, women’s and working-class movements.

Organizers must raise issues that address the needs of the workers and the oppressed. What the majority of people in the U.S. and the world need today are jobs, income, health care, quality education, housing and a life free of intimidation and harassment by the armed agents of the capitalist and imperialist states. This is the only way that the true legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King  Jr. can be realized.

On March 4 students around the U.S. will protest the drastic cutbacks in education funding, which has been taken away from the people to fund the Pentagon and Wall Street bankers. Youth must militantly ask: How can the ruling class and its state talk about national security, when tens of millions inside the country are without jobs, decent incomes, utility services, health care and quality education?

The peoples of the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Latin America and other areas of the world have not taken anything away from the working class and oppressed inside the U.S. The true enemy of the people of the U.S. is the bourgeoisie, who have not only taken trillions of dollars in wealth away from the people but have also sent youth into battle to carry out the bidding of the bankers and militarists.

A major jobs initiative being planned for April 10 must politically challenge the false notion of a “jobless recovery.” Increasing profits for the corporations do not translate into better conditions for the workers and nationally oppressed. Taxpayer bailouts of the banks and insurance companies have resulted in depression-like conditions for greater numbers of working people.

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