Dr. King's Struggle Continues!

By Socialist Action's editors

Almost 37 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, he remains a symbol of struggle, not merely for the rights of Black people, but for the right of self-determination of all peoples, international democracy, and social justice.

The day before Dr. King was assassinated, he spoke in Memphis in defense of striking sanitation workers and in defense of class-struggle methods abandoned by today’s trade-union bureaucracy.

“Now about injunctions,” said Dr. King, “We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’

“If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.” In the days when unions fought for the workers and won concessions from the bosses, they defied injunctions issued by the bosses’ courts. The trade union leaders were not afraid to go to jail.

“Now we're going to march again,” King continued, “and we've got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be. And force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God's children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That's the issue. And we've got to say to the nation: we know it's coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.

“We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Ala., when we were in that majestic struggle there we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, ‘Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round.’

“Bull Connor next would say, ‘Turn the fire hoses on.’And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses….”

Dr. King praised the principle of solidarity that was the cardinal principle of the trade-union movement in its heroic period: “Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis.

We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.”

At the time, Dr. King’s support of striking workers was seen as a move toward throwing his weight into economic struggles between workers and bosses, as a social radicalization of his political work. The U.S. rulers were particularly worried about that, because it was a time of proliferation of radical social movements in the United States and in the world.

Dr. King said: “And I see God working in this period of the 20th century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding—something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee—the cry is always the same—‘We want to be free.’”

Only a year before, Dr. King had confronted the policy of the U.S. government on a fundamental issue, the war in Vietnam. In a speech in the Riverside Church in New York City on April 3, 1967, he said:

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

“Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

Although some of the worst injustices that Dr. King fought have been moderated or formally abolished, the situation of Black people in the United States has not changed fundamentally since the days of the Vietnam War.

In September, according to the official (understated) statistics of the U.S. Bureau of Labor, Black unemployment was running at 11.8 percent, more than twice the average for whites (5.5 percent).

Parallel to this, there is a rapid increase in the number of Blacks in prison, and the butchering of affirmative action is drastically reducing the number of Black people admitted to universities. Virtually every statistic continues to show a huge gap between whites and Blacks, and one that in key areas, as as employment is growing.

Furthermore, Dr. King did not limit his vision to the problems of the poor in the United States, but spoke on behalf of all the exploited and oppressed: “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 an American to the leaders of my own nation.”

These words are just as applicable today to the war that the U.S. rulers are waging on Iraq, in which the destruction of Iraq has gone hand in hand with huge payoffs to big companies like Halliburton and Bechtel, while the minimal programs for the most disadvantaged sections of the American people are being cut to pieces.

Dr. King’s fight is still before us, as is his inspiration.