Martin Luther King, Jr: a Victim of the United States’ 20th Century Anti-Communist Campaign
Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014
Wiping Away the Tears
Martin Luther King, Jr: a Victim of the United States’ 20th Century Anti-Communist Campaign
by HEATHER GRAY
On April 7, 1968, the body of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. laid in a coffin at Spelman College’s Sister’s Chapel in Atlanta. King had been assassinated three days earlier on April 4 in Memphis. That weekend, I was one of throngs of people on the Spelman campus paying homage to the great man. Walking toward to coffin at the front of the chapel all you could hear was the sound of footsteps and weeping.
You looked at him through a clear glass cover over the coffin that was constantly being wiped clean by pastors on either side. One of them was Reverend Lawrence Carter, now Dean of the Morehouse University King Chapel. He told me years later that the glass was placed on the coffin because as people walked by their tears fell on King’s exposed body. The pastors wiped away the tears.
King’s leadership role in America paralleled many initiatives and movements for justice throughout the world that faced challenges within the context of the struggle between the East and the West in the Cold War era. After World War II, in fact, anti-colonial movements spread exponentially throughout the world, including in the U.S. that incorporated demands for justice and independence. The reaction against these movements has not been benign.
Prior to his assassination in 1968, King had played what is a universally acknowledged instrumental leadership role in the Civil Rights movement in America. His and others leadership was a challenge to some of the most egregious discriminatory policies in American history, largely centered in the Jim Crow South. Some of the leading campaigns were the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955 resulting in a reversal of laws that had prevented integrated seating on public transportation; and the profound 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that swept away the unequal treatment of Black Americans that had been in place since the end of the reconstruction period in the 1800’s after the Civil War.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/martin-luther-king-jr-a-victim-of-the-united-states-20th-century-anti-communist-campaign/