The MLK they don't talk about too much

[SHRED]

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He was a true hero in standing up to the status quo on much more than just racial equality.
Although the mainstream media keeps this part toned down.

Just substitute 'Vietnam" with "Iraq".

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"At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.


http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

[patrice]

1. Being one of the Better Angels of Our Nature, MLK could See the Worse

Angels of Our Nature very Clearly. That's why they murdered him.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

2. Happy MLK day !

Remeber the the dream. Live the dream.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

3. Damn spell check.

Remember the dream. Live the dream. Be the dream.

[goclark]

4. How We Miss This Man of TRUTH to POWER

To Celebrate his Birthday is a tribute to a REAL Hero!

[alcibiades_mystery]

5. Michael Dyson called for a 10 year moratorium on the "I Have a Dream Speech"

His excellent book, I May Not get There With You makes a good case for how the "content of their character" line has been used by American dominant culture to authorize a wholesale revision of King's works. His solution: No "I Have a Dream" speech for ten years. I think it's a great solution, albeit tongue-in-cheek; it certainly helps make the case that the "I Have a Dream" speech rises to the top of King's ouevre in American culture - and only in an extremely limited way - precisely because it is READ to confirm pretensions of white American culture, pretensions that King's other speeches undermine significantly. And so we really just get what for King was a crucial rhetorical strategy in a particular context ("content of their character") as a universal signifier for the whole of King's work, thereby authorizing all sorts of bastardizations, like the conservative "embrace" of King as a "colorblind" and "anti-affirmative action" figure.

Vietnam is only the half of it, if that. King was far more radical in his racial ideas than the mealy-mouthed rhetoric of context and history-free "colorblindness" (parroted in no small part by "liberals" as well as "conservatives") makes him out to have been in the white cultural imaginary.