Don't turn away from this MLK anniversary without watching this important interview

[bigtree]

Joy Reid @JoyAnnReid 7h7 hours ago
Here's the full interview between Dr. King and NBC's Sander Vanocur that I referenced in my @thedailybeast article Wednesday: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-black-lives-matter-deaths-that-preceded-dr-kings?ref=author …

"Dream to a Nightmare" MLK full interview with Sander Vancour (NBC) 1968

A year almost to the day before his death, on May 8, 1967, and four years after his famed “I have a dream” speech at the March on Washington, King gave an interview to NBC News’ Sander Vanocur in which he lamented the human- and economic-resource-draining war and the deep persistence of racism.

“I think the biggest problem now,” King told Vanocur, “is we got our gains over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak. It didn’t cost the nation anything. In fact, it helped the economic side of the nation to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations. It didn’t cost the nation anything to get the right to vote established. Now, we’re confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars. Now I think this is where we’re getting our greatest resistance. They may put it on many other things, but we can’t get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nation something.”

Months later, in November 1967, King launched the Poor People’s Campaign in Jackson, Mississippi, where Medgar Evers had died trying to register black voters. It was conceived at the urging of Marion Wright, the first black woman to pass the Mississippi bar and the director of the Jackson office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Wright had brought Sen. Robert Kennedy to the Delta to visit hungry families and children that year, and at his outraged urging, enlisted King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to bring the poor to Washington to let the country see their suffering.

watch:

[malaise]

1. Thanks

Everyone should read this

Get thee to the greatest page

[bigtree]

2. you're welcome

...this is about my fourth MLK post in 24hrs.

There's as much interest expressed here for this post as for the rest.

[zipplewrath]

3. King's legacy has been hijacked

More than one contemporary has voiced the opinion that King has been "white washed" by history in many ways. His popular positions are celebrated, often as much by white America as anyone, but his positions on poverty and war are forgotten almost entirely. He saw the corrosive effects of poverty and how it was as damaging as Jim Crow in many ways. And he understood that although it disproportionately affected African-Americans, it was in many ways "color blind". He was recruited into the civil rights movement, but ultimately his own personal movement would have been about poverty and the disenfranchised in general.