The Other Dr. King

Each year we hear of many well deserved tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was one of the great Americans of the 20th century. But if someone looked closely at the records they would ask, if one only followed the media, did Dr. King die in 1965 or in 1968? There seems to be a three- year gap where the efforts of Dr. King are never discussed. Why don't they ever mention what happened after 1965?

This is because the national media refuses to come to grips with what Dr. King stood for in his final years. Soon after the passage of the civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965, Dr. King began to assert that the just recently passed laws were meaningless without basic "human rights." Dr. King began to go in another direction. He said that the right to a job, the right to afford a decent home were the next stages of the civil rights movement. He began to talk about a radical redistribution of "political wealth and economic power."

What Dr. King was trying to do was move beyond the civil rights movement and into the area of class perspective. He understood that the majority of Americans below the poverty line were white. Dr. King spoke out against the wide disparity between the rich and the poor. "True compassion," said Dr. King. "Is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see an edifice, which produces beggars, needs restructuring."

He began to question the war in Vietnam and the whole direction of American foreign policy. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year before he was murdered, Dr. King described the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." He said that we were on the wrong side of the revolutions across the globe. Dr. King argued that the U.S. was suppressing justified revolts instead of helping them. King maintained that the West was investing "huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.

For this he was denounced by the national press. The Washington Post said that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." The New York Times called it "demagogic slander." The liberals, who had started the war in Vietnam, attacked him as well. They were joined by academics like John P. Roche of the Americans for Democratic Action who commented to President Johnson that Dr. King's speech "indicates that King, in desperate search for a constituency, has thrown in with the commies...The civil rights movement is shot, broke and disorganized and King who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination) is thus looking for a promising future."

Black columnist and CIA operative Carl Rowen said Dr. King was "more interested in embarrassing the United States than in the plight of either the Negro or the war weary people of Vietnam." Other Johnson aids said civil disobedience was really "criminal disobedience" and warned against the upcoming "Poor Peoples March." The march would assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington and use tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience until Congress enacted a "Poor People's" bill of rights. The Readers Digest labeled it as an "insurrection."

Dr. King was asking for a massive job program that would rebuild American cities. He felt the need to confront a Congress which had displayed its "hostility to the poor." He said the Congress appropriated "military funds with alacrity and generosity and poverty funds with miserliness." Unfortunately, that sounds as accurate today as in 1968. When people speak about justice for the poor, they are said to be inviting class warfare, when missile defense systems are made for no other reason than to line the pockets of defense contractors, that is called the public interest.

Maybe that is why they refuse to tell us about the last years of Dr. King's life. Dr. King died in a labor struggle, fighting so that garbage workers could earn a decent living, rather than working forty hours a week and still qualify for food stamps. This is the Dr. King that they never tell us about in the mass media. Perhaps, that should be of no surprise considering what little attention they pay to the plight of millions of Americans and the hatred they have shown to organized labor throughout the years. It's not that the press lies, it's just that they never tell the whole truth.

Sources: Film, The FBI's War On Black America. 
               Film, The Assassination of Martin Luther King 
               David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr.