Photo by Unseen Histories

“When I say poor, I don’t just mean black people.”

–Martin Luther King Jr.

“The true enemy is war itself.”

–Martin Luther King Jr.

For thirteen years he lived and worked with the knowledge that a violent death awaited him, that it might come at any moment from a knife thrust out of a crowd, a sudden gunshot, a bomb tearing him to pieces. His wife was plagued with nightmares about it.

Reminders were frequent: a shotgun blast through his front door, the bombing of his home, a dozen sticks of dynamite found smoldering on his porch, a razor-sharp Japanese letter-opener plunged into his chest by a crazy woman, and, of course, the regular late-night phone threats that began with, “Nigger . . . .”

Prayer and a deep Christian faith dissipated his paralyzing fear, giving him the strength to act. His eloquence, soaring idealism, and amazing composure under relentless pressure inspired millions to act with him, leading to the fall of Jim Crow, and contributing to the collapse of public support for the Vietnam War, the most criminal military intervention in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, the public image of Dr. King handed down to us by our mind-managers bears only the faintest resemblance to the impassioned rebel he was in real life. These days Dr. King tends to be remembered as a reformist, African-American preacher who went to college to better himself, believed in God and his fellow man, and won a Nobel Prize for Peace, along with the admiration of both whites and blacks for his decency and non-violent reminders of the nation’s essential goodness. Lost completely are his feverish intensity, tactical brilliance, and anguished incomprehension of a society permeated by racism, exploitation, and deceit.

From the very beginning King was a political radical whose aspirations went far beyond reform, a Christian revolutionary who dedicated himself to creating a culture of social justice that would give substance to the freedom and equality the U.S. political system merely talked about. He opposed in principle “systems of oppression” like colonialism, imperialism, and segregation, and denounced capitalism for being “predicated on exploitation.” He saw racism not as a feudal anachronism of the Old South, but as anational problem implicating all Americans. He found all those isms incompatible with “the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.”

Though he had gone to school in the North and only with reluctance returned to the South, he was never naive about the informal apartheid that characterized life above the Mason-Dixon line. (No one had wanted to rent to him during his student years in Boston.) As a pastor, he regularly traveled to the North years before the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s, plugging into activist structures pushing back against racist exclusion and police brutality.

One such visit was to Los Angeles in the wake of the police killing of Ron Stokes outside a Muslim mosque in 1962 (an event usually associated only with Malcolm X), where King supported locals calling for the ousting of openly racist Police Chief William Parker,* expressed zero tolerance for police brutality, and talked of the need to build black power, by which he meant blacks organizing themselves into a force for real democracy.

The year after the Stokes killing he visited Los Angeles multiple times to protest segregation, and did so again right before the Watts rebellion (1965), when he declared that Los Angeles........

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