Great Stuff Around The Web About Dr. King

These are all must-reads.

Kai Wright on Dr. King's forgotten legacy as a radical who pushed an economic and political agenda that was stridently antiwar and opposed to the demons of "racism, materialism, and militarism". Actually I don't know how lost this radical vision was, at least today. Even on the usually vapid cable news, you heard about economic justice and saw quotes from bystanders at McCain's ill-received speech saying "He's a war guy, Dr. King was all about peace." CNN ran a pretty powerful piece about the Memphis sanitation workers, and they aired copious excerpts from black radio that was really revealing. I think a lot of these concepts have become internalized, and kind of exploded today.

Maybe that's because Dr. King's ideas, including his 1967 speech protesting the Vietnam War at a time when it was uncomfortable to do so, was so evergreen, and could be applied to this very day.

See also Rick Perlstein, pushing back on the painted-over history that conservatives try to use to forget their incendiary hatred of the civil rights leader.

Martin Luther King was shuttling in and out of Memphis in support of striking garbage workers. Or, as Governor Buford Ellington put it, "training 3,000 people to start riots." 500 Tennessee citizens signed a complaint asking a U.S. district judge to suspend Governor Ellington's frightening plans for National Guard training exercises that would simulate riots in black neighborhoods. Ellington huffed in return: "When we say we are going to train the guard to protect the lives of people and their property, there is a big hullabaloo about it" from "people who would like to see riots." A third of the New York Times's dispatch on the controversy focused on the fact that one of the 500 petitioners had been arrested for possession of marijuana.

The 1968 civil rights bill moved to the House. Minority leader Gerald Ford announced he would fight the open housing provision. Southern governors, ignoring outright a 1967 decision of the Fifth Circuit articulating an "affirmative duty...to bring about an integrated, unitary school system in which there are no Negro schools and no white schools--just schools," were served a deadline by the dreaded Harold Howe II: comply by September of 1969, or else. The California Democratic Council adopted a pro-Gene McCarthy resolution at their annual convention. The keynote speaker--Martin Luther King--refused to indicate a preference for McCarthy or RFK, but made it clear he opposed the incumbent: "Flame throwers in Vietnam fan the flames in our cities--I don't think the two matters can be separated."

The next morning, a Saturday, the President popped around to the Sheraton Park Hotel for a breakfast speech to the National Alliance of Businessmen that all but accused his critics [like King] of being against the troops:

"Earlier this week in the East Room of the White House, I awarded the Medal of Honor to two of our bravest fighting Marines....

"As your President, I want to say this to you today: We must meet our commitments in the world and in Vietnam. We shall and we are going to win.

"To meet the needs of these fighting men, we shall do whatever is required."

Maybe the finest historian on the conservative agenda. That's a REAL must-read.