Rev. Barber: MLK and the next American Revolution

[Tanuki]

https://www.thenation.com/article/martin-luther-king-poverty-poor-peoples-campaign/

"Fifty-one years ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became a martyr in the struggle for beloved community and multiethnic democracy, few imagined that he would, within a half century, achieve the status of a founding father on the National Mall. Dr. King had long been a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and was no longer on speaking terms with President Lyndon Johnson. He had been put out of his own church denomination and was rejected by many civil-rights organizations because he questioned the violence of the war economy in Vietnam. We cannot celebrate him today alongside Lincoln and Jefferson without recognizing how he showed us that America’s experiment in democracy has always required radical struggle to move us toward a more perfect union. Indeed, to honor King’s legacy today is to reread our tradition in the light of his radical witness.
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The direction of the nation must be altered when 140 million live in poverty and low wealth. When systemic racist voter suppression and gerrymandering work in collusion to keep extremist in office despite new demographic progressive majorities. We must expand health care to all, provide just immigration policies, and curb gross militarism. This is why we have relaunched the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 to honor the work King was doing at the end of his life by insisting that it is still needed today. Our work today echoes the call for radical commitment that Dr King noted in his last sermon 24 hours before his death when he said that in the fight for true democracy, “nothing would be more tragic than for us to turn back now.”

Black, white and brown, gay, trans and straight, as people of faith and people who believe in the moral arc of the universe, we are standing together to say that America’s future depends on yet another revolution—a movement of people committed to reconstructing democracy and guaranteeing equal protection under the law for all people. This is what those who struggled before us fought and died for. We must not be satisfied with anything less. It’s our time now." (More-at link)

[pazzyanne]

1. Amen!