"So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved..."

[WilliamPitt]

(snip)

That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era.

Please let this sink in. It wasn't marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.

So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears. So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.

That is what Dr. King did -- not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives.

Once the beating was over, we were free.

The rest: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/29/1011562/-Most-of-you-have-no-idea-what-Martin-Luther-King-actually-did#

An absolutely TREMENDOUS read.

[daleanime]

1. K&R....

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. I'd say 80%, but not all of it

There's still a good deal of racism in the USA, but certainly immeasurably less that there was.

[Orsino]

5. Yeah, the dream re: judgment of character rather than race...remains elusive.

King had more than one dream, and not all of them have been realized yet.

[Zorra]

3. I highly recommend the movie "The Butler" as a complement to

this story; it really helps drive home the depth of the institutionalized racist evil that has been unjustly inflicted upon the black community since the first Africans were stolen from their homes by white slavers.

[Demeter]

4. Tremendous, indeed

Something to give Occupation a lift and a new lease on life

[Number23]

6. From former DUer HamdenRice too

So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears.

K&R