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MLK Day

jasperkent

jasperkent

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May 19, 2015
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Tomorrow is MLK Day. Bad for me cuz all Monday holidays are bad for me (restaurant gets slammed), but in remembrance of a helluva great guy I watch/listen to the I Have A Dream speech every year. If ya haven't heard it in a while, I encourage you to check it out. Probably the best speech I've heard in my entire life. Peace y'all....
 
I think the most fascinating thing about MLK is he had a vision. A dream. That alone made him great. Whether humanity gets there or not does not take away from that vision.

It was a dream of oneness. We are Earthlings, all one. The divisions are mental constructs that humans create and make a truth for themselves, Step far enough back and those constructs dissolve and we can see things as they are.
 
It is a great speech...such evocative imagery, rhetoric etc. Really powerful, a classic for sure

Hatred and division can be such a powerful force, but forces like mutual aid, solidarity etc can be just as powerful imo. I wouldn't have left-of-center political beliefs if I felt otherwise, and some of the stuff that MLK said like judging a person based on the content of their character and not the color of their skin, it just has an elemental ring of truth about it for many people...it will always be a powerful idea, IMO.

I like this civil rights-related image, from closer to where I grew up, depicting the completion of part of the Alaska-Canada highway (part of which was constructed by an all-black regiment during the early 1940s)

sims-jalufka.jpg


On October 25, Refines Sims Jr. of Philadelphia, with the all-black 97th Engineers was driving a bulldozer 20 miles east of the Alaska-Yukon line, when the trees in front of him toppled to the ground. He slammed his machine into reverse as a second bulldozer came into view, driven by Kennedy, Texas Private Alfred Jalufka. North had met south, and the two men jumped off their machines, grinning. Their triumphant handshake was photographed by a fellow soldier and published in newspapers across the country, becoming an unintended first step toward desegregating the US military.
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todayinhistory.blog

November 21, 1942 The Alcan Highway

Construction began in March as trains moved hundreds of pieces of construction equipment to Dawson Creek, the last stop on the Northern Alberta Railway. At the other end, 10,670 American troops arr…
todayinhistory.blog todayinhistory.blog
 
MLK was a wife beater, a womanizer, a plagerizer (his doctoral thesis) a traitor and a trained communist. There are THOUSANDS of honest Black people who deserve recognition for their honest work and talent.

Malcom X is better
 
MLK was definitely a womanizer. I don't know about the other stuff. Great people are still people and thus are flawed.
Malcolm X was quite a guy and i like him, too, but MLK is better known for his oratory.
 
A womanizer, yeah probably. He was known as someone who sought out the attention of women other than his wife

The other stuff, I don't know. I have no idea what a "trained communist" is, but I don't think it's accurate to refer to him as a "communist", although his politics were generally left-wing, I think it's fair to say. At the time he was very pro-worker and his opposition to the Vietnam War earned him a ton of negative press attention at the time he died. It's funny, if you read some of the last major publications related to King before he died, from publications like Time magazine etc, they often have a very condemnatory tone when discussing King over the issue of Vietnam...I think a lot of people assume that he was worshiped in the media at the time he died but that is definitely not the case

MLK was also the victim of a very shady campaign of character assassination by the United States government (prior to his literal assassination). So that should obviously be taken into account when evaluating some of this stuff
 
Only now just realizing he was only 39 when he died 🤯

If I was forced to guess I would have probably said 47 or 48
 
Burnt Offerings said:
A womanizer, yeah probably. He was known as someone who sought out the attention of women other than his wife

The other stuff, I don't know. I have no idea what a "trained communist" is, but I don't think it's accurate to refer to him as a "communist", although his politics were generally left-wing, I think it's fair to say. At the time he was very pro-worker and his opposition to the Vietnam War earned him a ton of negative press attention at the time he died. It's funny, if you read some of the last major publications related to King before he died, from publications like Time magazine etc, they often have a very condemnatory tone when discussing King over the issue of Vietnam...I think a lot of people assume that he was worshiped in the media at the time he died but that is definitely not the case

MLK was also the victim of a very shady campaign of character assassination by the United States government (prior to his literal assassination). So that should obviously be taken into account when evaluating some of this stuff
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All of this is very true and I remember it well. I also remember that even as a little white kid I could tell that he was being portrayed unfairly by the media.
 
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