(I wrote this diary last year for MKL’s B-Day, and I thought it was just as relevant today as we prepare to inaugurate our first African American President as it was last year. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. You Don’t See on TV
With just a couple revisions and a brief update, here it is again.)
I want to talk about the Dr. King you likely won’t see on TV.
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
More, after the fold.