Martin Luther King – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

MLK, Jr. Was a Sci-Fi Geek (and It Shaped His Idea of Justice, Too)

By Joseph Orosco (January 22, 2019)

By now, a lot of people have heard the story of how Star Trek was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite TV show.

It was, according to Nichelle Nichols, the only program he allowed his children to watch because it portrayed African Americans living in a future where they were treated equally and with dignity and respect. He believed that this representation was an important image for young Black people to see and he urged Nichols not to leave the show. (She stayed and her role had tremendous impact—it encouraged Whoopie Goldberg to seek her role as Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and inspired Mae Jemison to become the first African American female astronaut. Soniqua Martin Green has recently said that Nichols motivated her as the star of the most recent Star Trek series Discovery).

It’s interesting to speculate how Star Trek might have influenced King’s thinking. Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) premiered in September 1966. This was after the two big legislative victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was also a year after Watts burned and the same year race riots broke out in Cleveland and Omaha. King had moved to Illinois at this point to extend his organizing into urban issues in the North, including unemployment, housing discrimination, and poverty. He had started to think about the effects of the Vietnam War and how it robbed people of life and the means the sustain themselves. It was a particularly difficult time for him politically, emotionally, and spiritually. How did a science fiction story about human beings living in the 23^rd Century–in which war, hunger, racism, and poverty had been overcome–affect his sense of hope for the future and what was possible for humanity?

It’s not a far fetched idea to think Star Trek touched King’s imagination. We know that he was a fan of speculative fiction from his earliest days—and we know that his wife Coretta was partly responsible for stoking his creativity along this path.

When they were first dating in 1952, Coretta gave King a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward. She instructed him that she wanted him to read it and return to tell her his thoughts about it. Bellamy’s book, written in the 19^th century, imagines what a socialist United States would look like in the year 2000 (free medical care and unemployment benefits for everyone!).

In an amazing and touching note, the 23-year old King writes to his future wife and tells her how much he enjoyed the book—so much so that he admits he wants his future ministerial work to be guided by the kind of vision of progress hinted at in it—a world free of war, with a better distribution of wealth and resources, and solidarity instead of racism. He admits that he agrees with Bellamy that capitalism has no future for humanity but he worries what revolutionary socialism can justify in terms of violence. For the next sixteen years, he would reflect and refine his thinking on these subjects, leading him to not only imagine the Promised Land, but also to the devise the organizational strategies and policies—the Poor People’s Campaign, universal basic income, demilitarization—to try and get there.

Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have given us this notion of visionary fiction in their collection of stories Octavia’s Brood:

Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice…Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless. (p. 4)

I would argue that some of King’s works, such as the “I have a dream” speech and his idea of the Beloved Community are verging on visionary literature in this sense. As the King Center puts it:

Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger, and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice will be replaced by an all inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.

All in all, King’s vision of the future for humanity is a clear example of the power of utopian speculative fiction, and Star Trek, in particular, to nourish an imagination in the pursuit of justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Struggle of Northern Ireland

Charlotte O’Sullivan (April 4, 2018)

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the leader of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in America. But here in Ireland, Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy goes far beyond the improvements he brought to the lives of African American people in the US; for example, his actions and his words were taken up by nationalist civil rights campaigners in the North of Ireland.

These civil rights campaigners were not agitating for equal rights for people of different races, but for people of different creeds. In the North of Ireland, unlike the Republic of Ireland, there is a majority of Protestants. During the first half of the 20th century, many Protestants were afraid that the Catholic population would try to force ‘’Northern Ireland’’ to unify with the Republic of Ireland, and so efforts were made to make sure the Catholic citizens of the North remained in the political minority. This was done by gerrymandering electoral boundaries and limiting who was allowed to vote to ensure more Protestants were elected. The ‘’Northern Irish’’ government and local politicians were accused of discriminatory hiring and housing practices, as were the RUC, and now the PSNI accused of anti-Catholic bias.

As the civil rights campaigners in the North of Ireland were unable to change these problems from inside the government due to their political impotence, they looked elsewhere to see how other states were trying to force change through different means. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement in America was an inspiration for these campaigners. They encouraged nonviolent protests, aiming to force the ‘’Northern Irish’’ government to change their ways by large demonstrations of up to 15,000 people.

Although these peaceful protests did not last long, as the British Army chose to bring these marches to an abrupt and bloody end on the 30th January 1972, known as Bloody Sunday. There are still signs of Martin Luther King Jr.’s influence in the North of Ireland, in Derry in particular, King appears in many murals as a symbol of peaceful, nonviolent protest for civil rights. One mural includes the closing part of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which would have resonated strongly with the people of the North of Ireland:

“I have a dream… we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!'”

On the Unfinished Work of Extending Rights to All Americans

By Irami Osei-Frimpong (February 13, 2018)

The basic problem is that our rights were conceived with property owning white men in mind. These rights presupposed economic security and independence. Security and independence came in the form of property. And that’s why the Constitution is primarily concerned with securing property rights. Also the exercise of rights relies on the collegiate fraternity of white men, but I’ll consider this later.

When you start formally extending rights to dependent women, how do you secure the independence of their actions in exercising those rights, i.e., how free can you be if you are economically dependent on a guy who is threatening to kick you out if you speak out? Furthermore, even if you do become economically independent, these rights presuppose a balance of power, so how can you exercise them if men clique up against you, to, for example, lock you out of the press. Again, remember that you are fighting both economic dependence upon and the fraternity of white men.

This set of problems births the need for family law, and if we had thought of how we baked in the presuppositions of economic independence and white fraternity from the beginning, family law would have more robust constitutional protections, so that the government secured free and equal relations between spouses (and the economically dependent spouse and society) the way it secures free and equal relations between property owning white men.
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A similar set of problems emerges when we talk about extending rights to employees who are economically dependent upon their employer. How free can you be if you can be fired for speaking out of turn? The Founders were worried that employees would be used as tools of their employers. They were right to worry about this. But they were wrong to use that as a reason to deny employees political power. Once again, the particular social position of the Founders skewed their conception of rights, so if you are going to constitutionally secure the economic foundation for the exercise of rights for property holding white men, that is, property rights, then you have to constitutionally secure the economic foundation for employees, also, protect employees from the collusion of the fraternity of white male propertied employers. This is why you need worker and organized labor protections in the constitution if you expect workers to ever be able to exercise their other rights. This is why we have property rights in the constitution because we DID expect white property holders to exercise rights.

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Now you have black people who are both without property and without the fraternity of whiteness, and more pointedly, whose inability to exercise their rights is directly tied to their economic and political dependence, rendering them targets for exploitation by property owning white men and their auxiliaries.

The question is always going to turn on how do we constitutionally secure the ability to exercise rights for everyone, including women, the property-less, and non-white people, the way we constitutionally secured the ability of propertied white men to exercise rights.

The analogy I used was fighting so hard to get into a poker game, only to find out that you can’t afford the ante. Then fighting so hard to get the ante, only to find out that the other players are colluding against you because they’ve known each other for so long.

So in order to actually play the game you need to both have the ante (economic security) and protections against collusions/cliques of the other players.

Loving the Radical King: Remarks for the City of Corvallis Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration

By Joseph Orosco (February 1, 2018)

I was asked by several folks to share my talk that I gave for the City of Corvallis Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration 2018, sponsored by the King Legacy Advisory Board. This is a talk that builds on an essay I wrote shortly after the white nationalist gathering in Charlottesville in summer 2017.

Loving the Radical King

City of Corvallis Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration 2018

As someone who regularly teaches about the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I often spend time discussing with students the ways in which King’s ideas are taken out of context and turned into sound bites in order to support positions he would not himself have taken. The most obvious example is how his most memorable line from the “I Have a Dream” speech about not judging people based on the color of their skin but the content of their character is used to justify attacks on affirmative action—a policy he definitely endorsed—or cited in a way to claim that the best path forward for racial justice is to somehow ignore race and become colorblind.

The white supremacist violence we witnessed in the Portland MAX train last summer; the shocking Nazi imagery flowing out of Charlottesville; the vile and degrading way our President talks about some human beings not being worthy to be our fellow citizens because of their origin in non-European nations—all that is proof that we cannot simply ignore the problems of racism now or imagine white supremacy is a thing of the past.

Last year, all across the country, marches and vigils were held to honor the victims of racist violence and to stand against the surge of white nationalist groups in the United States. People are still seeking guidance about how to think about the public and proud resurgence of this form of bigotry, especially since it echoes in the halls of our highest government offices.

Inevitably, the words and ideas of Dr. King are being invoked, especially his thoughts on the power of love in times of hate. One of his quotes, often bandied about, is this: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

But the hard question is what does it mean to love and not hate in the aftermath of Charlottesville? Does it mean it’s somehow wrong to feel angry or violated when people proudly brandish neo-Nazi symbols on their weapons and shields or chalk white supremacist sayings on the sidewalks of our Waterfront Park? Does it mean the loving response is to forgive the purveyors of hatred and violence like the young man who ran over protestors, killing Heather Heyer, in Charlottesville?

In the speeches in which King talked about love, he often spent time explaining what he meant; love has several meanings. In saying that supporters of racial justice had to have love in their hearts, he didn’t mean that they had to be continually positive and upbeat, or that they had to approach racists in friendship. That’s the kind of love we share with intimates or friends. King said the love that we ought to have in the struggle for justice is the kind that acknowledges all people, even the white supremacists, as human beings. And human beings are capable of making their own moral choices and being held responsible for their actions. We aren’t called upon to like or be friendly to those who are racists. It means we ought not to dehumanize or murder them as part of our fight for justice.

Someone asked me recently if, out of love, King wouldn’t have asked to sit down with a white supremacist and try to listen to their concerns and understand where they were coming from, in hopes of some kind of reconciliation and dialogue. I thought about this and realized that the answer was probably no. King never asked, for instance, to meet with Bull Connor, the rabidly racist police chief in Birmingham, Alabama who sent police dogs to attack protestors. He never called for public meetings with ordinary Black and white citizens to dialogue.

Instead, he called for marches, boycotts, and urged legislation that would halt business as usual in that city, deplete the pocketbooks of segregationist business owners, and to criminalize racist attacks and intimidation. He wrote in 1963: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is important also.”

This is not to say that fellowship and dialogue are not important, especially when friends approach one another to talk about their fears, hopes, and biases. Indeed, love, fellowship, and dialogue are all integral parts of the way of life that King called The Beloved Community. For King, the Beloved Community was not an image of a perfect, heavenly, paradise but a guiding ideal of what human beings could accomplish if they cared to bring out the best in each other. King believed that all civilization was the result, not of a competition and a survival of the fittest, but of the “mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.” The Beloved Community would be the future world of humanity if we nurtured those tendencies to care and to “life up every voice”:

“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way the world is made.”

King wrote those inspiring words in 1961, even before the great victories of the Civil Rights Movement that seemed to indicate we as a people were getting closer to the Promised Land. But by December 1967, just a few months before he was killed, King struck a different tone. In his Christmas Sermon, he admitted that he had over the years witnessed the Dream he had spoken of in his famous speech in Washington DC turn into a nightmare. Four little innocent girls had been blown up in Birmingham; millions of Black men and women languished in poverty and unemployment; and thousands of young people were shipped out to die and to kill countless others in Vietnam. As Cornel West reminds us, on the day that King was assassinated in Memphis, he had a sermon in his coat pocket entitled “Why America May Go to Hell”

So toward the end of his life, King grew in awareness of the enormous obstacles that stood in the way of achieving the Beloved Community. But he did not fall into despair or get paralyzed by the vast pockets of hate around him. Instead, he renewed his activist efforts and called for a revolution of values that would utterly transform the United States.

The Beloved Community could not be built if the US continued its commitment to what he called the triplets of evil: materialism, racism, and militarism. The fight against white supremacy had to be tied to issues of poverty, economic inequality, lack of jobs, reducing our military and the number of nuclear weapons, curbing police brutality, and providing decent health care and education for everyone. These were all issues of concern for King; this is what he meant by love.

Corvallis is a special place with some very dedicated organizers and activists, people committed to living by King’s words. But if we are to take all of King seriously, not just the hopeful King, but the radical King–the King of 1968 who is the closest to us now–then I think its clear we have to think about many of the institutional obstacles that hinder Beloved Community here.

We need to know that we live in a place with tremendous disparity between rich and poor. Benton County joins Multnomah and Lane Counties as the three counties in the state with the largest economic inequality. Indeed, we have such high inequality here that we are among the top 20% of most unequal counties in the whole US. We have the highest extreme poverty rate in the entire state, with almost 13% of our residents living in poverty. This is most likely the result of our large student population whose fortunes may change as they graduate and move on; but my own experience at OSU has seen an increase in the number of students who are food insecure, living on food stamps, and camping in their cars.

One of the strongest groups of activist work in Corvallis has been that of the peace and antiwar movement. Veterans for Peace, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and communities of faith have organized hundreds of people over the years I have been here to speak out against militarism. The Daily Courthouse vigil reminds us of the long-standing commitment to war by our national leaders.

Yet, we ought to remember that King tied militarism not just to the actual military but also to the ways in which military ideals seep into our everyday lives and systems of power. Just last year, the Benton County sheriff acquired a surplus military armored vehicle. President Trump has said he wants to put more military hardware into the hands of local law enforcement departments. Last fall, we the citizens approved a bond measure to increase the capacity of the County Jail and the number of police in the streets. We worry about crime, drugs, and the growing presence of people living in the streets and we respond with a tank, more armed personnel, more beds in cells. Can we commit as a community not to ratchet up the military capacity of our police forces, not to increase our pipelines to the prison industrial complex?

The past few years have seen an increase in white supremacist chalking, flyers, stickers indicate the presence of the alt-right and neo Nazis in our community. Some recent research of the Eugene Antifa has tied people in our city to the neo Nazi networks that gathered in Charlottesville last summer. I think we need to be careful and not dismiss these incidents as the acts of just a deranged few. We need to recognize that the hatred and exclusion represented by these people was the status quo of this community until only a few decades ago.

A few years ago, Walidah Imarisha came on this stage to remind us about the way in which Oregon was founded as a white utopia, legally excluding African Americans from settling here. And we need to remember that our founding father, Joseph Avery, built his political career promoting the idea of Oregon statehood founded on slavery. Whether he was a white supremacist himself is beside the point; he advocated for slavery until it was politically inconvenient to do so. The Corvallis School District decided over a decade ago that his namesake was not something it wanted to honor; recently OSU decided that Joseph Avery was not someone that a public university honoring diversity and inclusion should revere with building names. Yet, we still have streets and a major public park bearing his name in our city. Moreover, our county bears the name of man who advocated for the forced removal of Native peoples in order to give their lands to white settlers.

So when the white supremacists walk in our community, they can know that for most of the history of this place, their ideals were considered normal and right, and that men who promoted their ideas are still remembered as pioneers and heroes. What would it mean to be a community that committed itself to revering civic heroes who struggled against the tide of dehumanization, and that consigned the champions of racism not necessarily to oblivion, but to the exhibits of a new museum downtown?

In this last public speech, King told his audience

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.

We all know that long life was not his to have. He was cut down the next day by a white supremacist. But in that talk he urged people not to give in to pessimism. He knew that the Promised Land could be reached but it would be through each of supporting one another, holding each other up, carrying one another.

In caring for each other like this, along the way we would eventually become the kind of people worthy of the final destination, we would make the road by walking it, our deeds invoking the Beloved Community:

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when ‘every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

Be Wary of the Sunken King: Reflecting on the Humanity of Our Heroes

By S. (January 16, 2018)

If you’re a black person who was born after Dr. King died you were probably subjected to white people (possibly teachers, professors, mentors, role models, actors, friends, etc.) tell you how amazing Dr. King was and then have the same person turn around and engage in a racist behavior.

Since his death, Dr. King has been invoked by white people to gaslight and deny. Somehow the visage of Dr. King was pulled down into the Sunken Place and transformed into the ‘good negro’. The Sunken King tells us to play nice, not get all uppity, to be nice, and behave. The Sunken King demands this from all of us regardless of our race. We are taught to see Dr. King as a something bigger than human, something better than you, or I could ever hope to be. Dr. King was special, he was burn special with special gifts, gifts that you can’t access. You can try to be like him but you will never be as good as him. Of course it is not just Dr. King, Albert Einstein is better than you too. His genius is something that no matter how hard we work we can never attain. Mother Teresa was literally sainted because she’s so much better than you too (spoiler: she was actually quite monstrous in denying pain meds to sick and denying people because their suffering glorified Christ). There’s also Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela (the dangers of being placed on a pedestal perfectly embodied by one woman), Golda Meir, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Aung San Suu Kyi, and many many more.

The idealization of these people pisses me off. It’s a way that we control ourselves or our controlled by those who prefer the status quo. Dr. King is transformed from a defiant figure of resistance into a tool of the status quo. Einstein’s significant life challenges are erased with the conferral of genius status. Mother Teresa’s work with the poor goes underscrutinized be we’ve placed her on a pedestal.

These were human beings. They had some specific gifts that they were born with. They were all fortunate to end up in situations that nurtured their gifts. In addition to gifts, they gained skills. Somebody, possibly many bodies, invested time and money into each of them so that they could develop their skills and gifts. They then found themselves in situations in which they got to demonstrate those skills and gifts to the world.

Guess what?

You were born with gifts. You might be able to nurture them. You might not. You might not be able to gain the type of skills that thrust you into the global spotlight. You might not. Life can be challenging and capricious. The truth is none of these people are better than you (and most of them would be the first to tell you if they could). They may have had more impact than you. They may have done more than you but no one person is better than any other.

Let these people inspire you, but be inspired by their weaknesses and their failures as much as their successes. Be inspired by their real humanity, not their Sunken Place personas. If you need someone to look up to who is better than you, look up to who you will be tomorrow, and try to be that better person.

Socialism in the US Must Contend with Racism and Militarism

By Mark Rudd (August 29, 2017)

I woke up at 2 am last night thinking: How can you talk about socialism in the US without taking into account two salient characteristics of this country’s history and present: racism and militarism?

Obviously John Judis has no problem with this question, since he never mentions either. I love Scandinavian socialism as a utopian model as much as anyone, but those countries are pretty different from this behemoth.

What would Black Lives Matter say about the Judis piece? How do we deal with the fact that the military and the corporations feeding off it have had complete free reign for almost 80 years and have now found a pot of gold in the Trump administration? Or that a separate military caste involving millions now exists apart from civil society?

At least Rev. Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign has four elements that address the realities of US society: racism, poverty and economic exploitation, destruction of the environment, and the effects of war and militarism. This seems like a much more realistic basis for creating a liberal and democratic socialism.

It will take some time to change the nature of what is “common sense.” Right now “government bad, free markets good” is dominant (that is, has achieved “ideological hegemony”). We have to keep in the forefront of all our work that WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER AND TIME IS SHORT.

That’s my socialism.

What Did Dr. King Mean by Love?

By Joseph Orosco (August 15, 2017)

All across the country, marches and vigils are scheduled to honor the victims of racist violence and to stand against the surge of white nationalist groups in the United States. People are seeking guidance about how to think about the public and proud resurgence of this form of bigotry. Inevitably, the words and ideas of Dr. King are being invoked, especially his thoughts on the power of love in times of hate. One of his quotes, often bandied about, is this: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

But the hard question is what does it mean to love and not hate in the aftermath of Charlottesville? Does it mean it’s somehow wrong to feel angry or violated about people proudly brandishing neo-Nazi symbols on their weapons and shields? Does it mean the best response is to forgive the purveyors of violence like the young man who ran down protestors, killing Heather Heyer, in Charlottesville?

In the speeches in which King talked about love, he often spent time explaining what he meant; love has several meanings. In saying that supporters of racial justice had to have love in their hearts, he didn’t mean that they had to be continually positive and upbeat, or that they had to approach racists in friendship. That’s the kind of love we share with intimates or friends. King said the love that we ought to have in the struggle for justice is the kind that acknowledges all people, even the white supremacists, as human beings. And human beings are capable of making their own moral choices and being held responsible for their actions. We aren’t called upon to like or be friendly to those who are racist. It means we ought not to dehumanize or kill them as part of our fight for justice.

He never called for public meetings with ordinary Black and white citizens to dialogue. Instead, he called for marches, boycotts, and urged legislation that would halt business as usual in that city, deplete the pocketbooks of segregationist business owners, and criminalize racist attacks and intimidation. King wrote in 1963: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is important also.”

This is not to say that fellowship and dialogue are not important, especially when friends approach one another to talk about their fears, hopes, and biases. But in thinking about responses to white supremacy in the country today, we ought to be clear that King’s emphasis on love did not mean only sticking to individual efforts and trying to change the implicit racism of our friends and relatives.

Toward the end of his life, he called for a revolution of values that would utterly transform the United States and its commitment to materialism, racism, and militarism at institutional levels. The fight against white supremacy must be tied to issues of poverty, jobs, reducing our military and nuclear weapons, curbing police brutality, and providing decent health care and education for everyone. These were all issues of concern for King; this is what he meant by love.

Angela Davis, MLK, and the “Intersectionality of Struggles”

By Joseph Orosco (April 6, 2017)

In an interview in her new collection, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis is asked about being a pioneer in developing the concept of intersectionality. She responds:

There were many pioneers of intersectionality but I do think it is important to acknowledge an organization that existed in New York in the late sixties and seventies called the Third World Women’s Alliance. That organization published a newspaper entitled Triple Jeopardy. Triple jeopardy was racism, sexism, and imperialism. Of course, imperialism reflected an international awareness of class issues. Many formations were attempting to bring these issues together. (p. 18)

Davis goes on to cite her own work in a lineage of pioneers that includes Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, bell hooks, and Michelle Wallace.

She rounds out her response by saying that there were many pioneers in this field, but she wants to center her work in what she calls the “intersectionality of struggle” and not so much the intersectionality of “individual analysis”: “Initially intersectionality was about bodies and experiences. But now, how do we talk about bringing various social justice struggles together, across national borders?” (p. 19)

This way of talking about intersectionality struck me this week as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous Riverside speech “Beyond Vietnam”. In it, King spoke out publically for the first time against the Vietnam war and called on the United States to engage in a deep reflection about its role in promoting violence in the world. What is significant about this speech is that King says we need to recognize the intertwined “triple evils” of racism, capitalism, and militarism that have deeply infected most of our major social, political, and economic institutions. In the end of it, he called for a movement to initiate a “revolution of values” to restructure the foundation of US American society.

Mark Rudd has called this speech the “origin story” of the modern Left in the United States because it lays out the value foundation for social justice struggles ever since. I think there may be more to it than just a foundational document. If we take Davis’s distinction seriously, then we ought to think of King’s speech as one of the pioneering visions of what an “intersectionality of struggle” might look like. If today we need to investigate how to strengthen the kind of the transnational solidarity that can link movements from Ferguson to Palestine and beyond, then King’s later work seems to be an important stepping stone.

King’s Riverside Speech the Origin Story of the American Left

By Mark Rudd (April 4, 2017)

Today is April 4, the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. M.L. King Jr’s historic speech at Riverside Church in NYC in which he broke his long silence on Vietnam and made the crucial link between militarism and poverty and racism. I consider this the left’s origin speech. It’s who we are, what we stand for.

Please take just five minutes to watch this beautiful video of excerpts from the speech presented by members of the US Dept. of Arts and Culture, progressive intergenerational arts organizers. It’s called A Revolution of Values.

Unleashing Rage and Yearning for Liberation: The Real Lessons of Dr. King for Urban Uprisings

By Chris Crass

Let’s be clear, when those in power and their media call for people to be “peaceful” in the face of endemic and sanctioned racist state violence, they aren’t calling for a return to disruptive and militant non-violent direct action unleashed by the Civil Rights movement, even if they insultingly call up Dr. King to denounce the ‪#‎BaltimoreUprising‬. Continue reading “Unleashing Rage and Yearning for Liberation: The Real Lessons of Dr. King for Urban Uprisings”

Thoughts on Selma

By Mark Naison

Spring, 1965. A junior at Columbia, I joyously prepared for the tennis season, which offered me the opportunity to play number-one singles. Two high-profile political issues deeply troubled me: the bombing of North Vietnam and President Johnson’s unwillingness to move aggressively to secure voting rights for African Americans in Southern States. Continue reading “Thoughts on Selma”