Martin Luther King Was A Liberal Progressive Who Favored Left Wing Causes & Don’t You Forget It
Martin Luther King Was A Liberal Progressive Who Favored Left Wing Causes & Don’t You Forget It
Oliver Willis · August 23,2013
As we head towards the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, it is worth pausing for a second to solidly stake out the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of the left.
For years the right has sought to either de-politicize Rev. King or expunge his leftist sentiment from the public record. We are told time and again that King was somehow beyond ideology and that his quest for civil rights and justice didn’t deal in politics.
Bull.
Rev. King was a liberal. A dyed in the wool liberal. He was on the left. He favored liberal solutions and liberal policies. He wasn’t a centrist, moderate, on the center-left or God forbid anywhere near the right.
HE WAS A LIBERAL.
......................
the rest:
= new reply since forum marked as read
Martin Luther King, Jr. began his education at the Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia. Following Yonge School, he was enrolled in David T. Howard Elementary School. He also attended the Atlanta University Laboratory School and Booker T. Washington High School. Because of his high score on the college entrance examinations in his junior year of high school, he advanced to Morehouse College without formal graduation from Booker T. Washington. Having skipped both the ninth and twelfth grades, Dr. King entered Morehouse at the age of fifteen.
In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse College with a B.A. degree in Sociology. That fall, he enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. While attending Crozer, he also studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He was elected president of the senior class and delivered the valedictory address; he won the Pearl Plafker Award for the most outstanding student; and he received the J. Lewis Crozer fellowship for graduate study at a university of his choice. He was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer in 1951.
In September of 1951, Martin Luther King began doctoral studies in Systematic Theology at Boston University. He also studied at Harvard University. His dissertation, "A Comparison of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Wieman," was completed in 1955, and the Ph.D. degree from Boston, a Doctorate of Philosophy in Systematic Theology, was awarded on June 5, 1955.
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/mlk/srs218.html
He had a mission, as does PBO. Rosa Parks, also, was not just an older woman, but also an organizer for civil rights. What she did was necessary to point up the insanity of the culture she lived in, the crime of discrimination.
The time had come to fight the oppression this nation codified and was built upon, slavery, then sharecropping, the workers righta and the right to vote. They suffered not just by indentured servitude, but merely by the color of their skin, the notion that they were born to be a slave in the eyes of generations.
It is a shame that all the souls that inhabit human bodies have had trouble relating to each other. Women were not given the right to vote along with black men after the Civil War and during the First Reconstruction, even though they were among the abolitionists. They had to wait for the right to vote by law. Not one given by the free market that profited off slavery, not the church that justified their status.
One group lived under 'America's peculiar institution' for centures that harmed black men, women, gays and straights, it was total. Justified with a library of specious arguments made publicly, even to the point of requiring a Civil War to dissuade those who felt they had a right to own and confine blacks to a permanent lower caste.
Black equality or lack of it part of the fabric of America since slavery began. Their equality is the key to freedom for all of us whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Centuries of brutality are still yet unspoken. The story of all of who have been oppressed for any reason and their freedom falls upon all of us.
That Bayard was left out of the March, was bad and it was 50 years ago. I am glad we have gone beyond that and he is receiving his due in this time. We cannot change the past. We are coming closer to the dream of universal equality, the goal sought by Bayard, King, Obama and the Democrats. But it is anathema to the forces arrayed against us.
We cannot go back and allow anyone to take our eyes off the prize, which supercedes all of our diferences. If there is such a thing as evolution in the human race, we must unite to work for it.
Because too many of our countrymen have grown rich off of inequality and will not give it up. They ae not crazy, but they're greedy. The value of equality will overcome the economic cost. We can bear it and will be stronger for it
And I do not think that a mind such as that of MLK, who truly saw the universe and made even have touched on what we might call eternity, in a way few will ever be able to comprehend, can be confined by politics or labels. He belongs to no one and to everyone. He was a gift to the human race taken from us far too soon.
MLK, such a brilliant man.. the forces that represented evil thought they had no choice but to assassinate him. But, it was in vain. His brilliance outshined his life that was taken from him so early.
"That Bayard was left out of the March, was bad and it was 50 years ago. I am glad we have gone beyond that and he is receiving his due in this time. We cannot change the past. We are coming closer to the dream of universal equality, the goal sought by Bayard, King, Obama and the Democrats. But it is anathema to the forces arrayed against us.
We cannot go back and allow anyone to take our eyes off the prize, which supercedes all of our diferences. If there is such a thing as evolution in the human race, we must unite to work for it."
These great men and women all have their place in history. Not as perfect beings but with imperfections like any of us.
I appreciate them all in each era they lived in, freshwest. 
I remember how feared and hated he was by the right wingers.
Kick and rec. 
Planned to take place in summer of '68 (a few months after he was killed early April in Memphis).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign
From the Wikipedia entry:
Witnessing the anger that led to riots in Newark (July 12–17, 1967) and Detroit (July 23–27, 1967), King released a report in August (titled "The Crisis in America's Cities"
which called for disciplined urban disruption, particularly in Washington:[12]
To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to society but not wantonly destructive. Moreover, it is more difficult for government to quell it by superior force. Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed, they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society. Civil disobedience can utilize the militancy wasted in riots to seize clothes or groceries many did not even want. Civil disobedience has never been used on a mass scale in the North. It has rarely been seriously organized and resolutely pursued. Too often in the past was it employed incorrectly. It was resorted to only when there was an absence of mass support and its purpose was headline-hunting. The exceptions were the massive school boycotts by Northern Negroes. They shook educational systems to their roots but they lasted only single days and were never repeated. If they are developed as weekly events at the same time that mass sit-ins are developed inside and at the gates of factories for jobs, and if simultaneously thousands of unemployed youth camp in Washington, as the Bonus Marchers did in the thirties, with these and other practices, without burning a match or firing a gun, the impact of the movement will have earthquake proportions. (In the Bonus Marches, it was the government that burned down the marchers' shelters when it became confounded by peaceful civil disobedience.) This is not an easy program to implement. Riots are easier just because they need no organization. To have effect we will have to develop mass disciplined forces that can remain excited and determined without dramatic conflagrations.[13]
Also in August, Senator Robert F. Kennedy asked Marian Wright Edelman "to tell Dr. King to bring the poor people to Washington to make hunger and poverty visible since the country’s attention had turned to the Vietnam War and put poverty and hunger on the back burner."[14] Edelman transmitted Kennedy's message to King in September.[15]
*********************
This is the same Dr. King who so eloquently and publicly came out against the Vietnam War in April 1967 (almost a year to the day before his death). Do yourself a favor and listen to King's reasons (and his points are still correct today):
consider this
Centrism and compromise is the only way to get things done.
This needs to be SHOUTED over and over again till every right wing hack get the memo.
MLK WAS A LIBERAL!!!!