FOCUS
Martin Luther King was an activist for all races
By Marsha Joyner
As we commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. tomorrow with parades, picnics and prayers, we will focus on the role ordinary "heroes" play in our everyday lives.
Advertiser library photo
We'll pay homage to the workers in the vineyard who give so much and get so little.
Martin Luther King Jr. visited Hawai'i. The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition-Hawai'i will hold a parade in his honor tomorrow.
How many of our refuse workers today know that it was for them — for their union — that King was in Memphis, Tenn., that day he was killed?
That's why the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition-Hawai'i asked that refuse workers be in our parade tomorrow.
Through the media, King has been totally transformed from activist to dreamer. Everyone has heard "I have a dream ..."
What else do they know?
He was the nation's preacher and our most prominent moral philosopher. His photograph is on display in elementary and secondary schools all across America, and it's difficult to visit a major American city and not find a street or a public building named after him.
Most of our states honor the national holiday established in his name.
But despite the overwhelming presence of this man in our lives, he is strangely absent. He was more than a dreamer and much more than a march. The mainstream media have ignored the fact that he was speaking and organizing until the moment of his death.
In 1968, King traveled to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, members of AFSCME Local 1733. The strike was in many ways more than a dispute over workplace issues. It was a struggle for the dignity of workers joining together with a union to create a voice on the job and in their community.
Advertiser library photo
It was while supporting these striking union members that King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
King, center, led marchers down Constitution Avenue in the nation's capital in August 1963, and gave his "I have a dream" speech.
The Rev. Jim Lawson Jr., a retired United Methodist minister and noted civil rights activist, disdains the familiar term "civil rights movement" as a descriptor of his and King's mission:
"We called ourselves a liberation movement, a freedom movement, a justice movement, a movement to transform America, to redeem the soul of America." It was a movement "not only for black people, or for the defeat of white people," he says. It was a movement, Lawson explains, that concerned itself with strikes (notably, of course, the 1968 strike in Memphis which would be King's last crusade) and with nuclear weaponry and with the condition of working people in general.
We have lost sight of the real meaning of the movement. The mythical man and the stone monuments that King has become disturb me. Every January, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."
The amazing thing about this cavalcade of media pabulum is what is missing. Whole generations of Americans have been spoon-fed King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963) overlooking the promissory note marked insufficient funds; marching for voting rights in Selma, Ala. (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
How many white people below the poverty line know that it was also for them that King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities?
Associated Press library photo • 1963
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign.
Rev. Ralph Abernathy, left, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a civil-rights march in Birmingham, Ala., in April 1963. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multi-racial army of the poor," an army of whites, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and others who would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights.
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."
As we look around in the beginning of 2002, we can see plenty to disturb us. As King said, "Homelessness, hungry children, battered women and children, worn-out educational system and a government that spends $500 for military to every $50 for people."
We see the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media.
Perhaps it's no surprise that the media have told us little about the last years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, his support for the refuse workers, for the unions, for the poor.
Today — 34 years after King's murder — let us remember him as he truly was.
Tomorrow, let us rededicate ourselves in our support of civil and human rights for all. This is the message that King gave his life for, and it is the one worth remembering.
