America lauds Martin Luther King, but undermines his legacy every day

[tpsbmam]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/31/usa.race

Forty years after King's death, the ability of America to both mythologise the man and marginalise his meaning is all too cruelly apparent. His symbolic likeness is effortlessly incorporated into America's self-image as the land of relentless progress. Meanwhile, his legacy of struggling against poverty and imperialism is undermined with every passing day. Had he lived he would most certainly have been loathed. In order for America to love him, he first had to die.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the stewardship of the museum itself. For while the exhibits showcase King's struggles for equal rights, the executive director of its board, JR "Pitt" Hyde, has been actively working against the selfsame principles. Hyde is a wealthy Republican who worked for the defeat of Harold Ford Jr (a black candidate) in a Senate race that was generally acknowledged to be the most racist campaign of the 2006 elections.

The contradictions between the life's work of King and Hyde couldn't be more stark. King fought racial injustice. Hyde for several years fought a racial harassment lawsuit that was backed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the company that he founded, AutoZone. King was in Memphis to support a garbage workers' strike over pay and conditions. Hyde has packed his board with corporate types who hire out the museum for functions.

This cognitive dissonance between what has proved to be morally right and what remains politically expedient is deeply entrenched. The absurdity it engenders will crest over the coming week as the nation watches, as though on a split screen, as King is lauded on one side and Barack Obama's former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, remains lambasted on the other.

Wright is no King. His delivery is too shrill, his demeanour too hectoring, his message insufficiently unifying. Nonetheless, Wright and King come from the same tradition of militant religious leadership that has been a hallmark of black political life for well over a century. Under slavery and then segregation, the church was one of the few places that African-Americans could gather and organise autonomously - giving primacy, for better and for worse, to the pulpit and the preacher in black politics.

(worth reading the rest at the link)

[melody]

1. That's right, we have a black frontrunner Presidential nominee and we're still backward primitives

Oookay. That's fair. :sarcasm:

[Blue_Tires]

2. thanks for this...