"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
The People's Forum
warmly welcomes the Cuban dictatorship’s Foreign Minister, Bruno Eduardo
Rodríguez Parrilla in New York City, but should be celebrating the life and legacy of
Celia Cruz instead.
Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering without pain.” – Celia Cruz
The centennial of Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso's
birth will be celebrated on October 21, 2025. She is better known by her
stage name Celia Cruz.
Celia had agency and she decided not to
bend the knee to the dictatorship. She wanted to live and perform in
freedom, which meant leaving Cuba after 1959.
Fidel Castro attempted to force the salsa singer to pay him homage, but Celia refused. Salserísimo Perú, a Youtube site
founded by three Peruvian journalists to disseminate knowledge on salsa
and tropical music, provides a more comprehensive and accurate history
than the Smithsonian Institution.
The following is an account of Celia Cruz’s first “encounter” with Fidel Castro.
“In
the early months of 1959, Celia Cruz was hired to sing with a pianist
at the house of the Cuban businessman Miguel Angel Quevedo. Quevedo
owned the magazine Bohemia, the most influential in Cuba and who had
supported the revolution in the last few years. The guerrilla movement
with a certain Fidel Castro in front proclaimed in Santiago the
beginning of the revolution. At that moment Celia enjoyed great
popularity for “Yebero Moderno”, “Tu voz” and “Burundanga” songs she had
recorded with the Sonora Matancera. As a guest artist of Rogelio
Martinez’s group the Guarachera (Celia) was free to accept other
contracts as a soloist. This allowed her to show her talent on different
radio stations in Havana, and perform in Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru.
Since the regime of Fidel took power, it had begun to systematically
seize businesses, radio and television stations. [Fidel Castro speaking:
‘The revolution was something like a hope and that joy, possibly,
prevented us from thinking all that we still had to do.’ For the
Guarechera, Fidel was ending free expression and the arts in her
country. The night of the show in the home of Quevedo, Celia was singing
standing next to the pianist, when suddenly the guests started to run
to the front door of the house. Fidel Castro had arrived. Neither she
nor the pianist moved and continued singing. Suddenly, Quevedo
approached Celia and told her that Fidel wanted to meet her because in
his
guerrilla days, when he cleaned his
rifle he was listening to Burundanga. Celia replied that she had been
hired to sing next to the piano, and that was her place. If Fidel wanted
to meet her, he would have to come to her. But the commandant did not
do that.”
Castro barred Celia Cruz from visiting her dying mother
Since
Celia Cruz refused to bow to the new dictator, and wanted to continue
to live the life of a free artist, she had to leave Cuba on July 15,
1960. However, when her mom was ill she tried to return to see her in 1962, but was barred from entering the country by Fidel Castro. When her mother died Celia was again blocked by the dictatorship from attending her funeral. Because she was not an active supporter of the regime, her music was banned in Cuba.
Regime
apologists and their agents of influence have attempted to pretend that
things have changed with regards to artistic freedom.
On August 8, 2012 BBC News reported
that Cuba’s ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted and on
August 10 the BBC correspondent in Cuba, Sarah Rainsford, tweeted that she had been given names of forbidden artists
by the central committee and the internet was a buzz that the ban on
anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted. Others soon followed reporting on the news. The stories specifically mentioned Celia Cruz as one of the artists whose music would return to Cuban radio.
There was only one problem. It was not true. Diario de Cuba reported on August 21, 2012 that Tony Pinelli, a well known musician and radio producer, distributed an e-mail in which Rolando Álvarez, the national director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión
(ICRT) confirmed that the music of the late Celia Cruz would continue
to be banned. The e-mail clearly stated: “All those who had allied with
the enemy, who acted against our families, like Celia Cruz, who went to sing at the Guantanamo Base, the ICRT arrogated to itself the right, quite properly, not to disseminate them on Cuban radio ”
Celia
is in good company. Other major Cuban artists who have had their music
banned by the Castro regime are Olga Guillot, Rolando Lecuona, Paquito
D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Israel Cachao López, Ramón “Mongo”
Santamaría, Mario Bauza, Arsenio Rodríguez, Willy Chirino, and Gloria
Estefan.
Cuban cultural genocide
According to the 2004 book Shoot the Singer!: Music Censorship Today edited by Marie Korpe,
there is growing concern that post-revolution generations in Cuba are
growing up without knowing or hearing censored musicians such as Celia
Cruz, Olga Guillot, and the long list above. This could lead to a loss
of Cuban identity in future generations. This approach has been referred
to as a Cuban cultural genocide, denying generations of Cubans their
history.
Communists are celebrating the centenary of the
birth of Fidel Castro with a series of propaganda stunts over the next
year. They should be called out and fact checked.
One of these stunts was carried out by the People's Forum in New York City on September 21, 2025, and was an effort to whitewash the racist legacy of the Cuban dictatorship.
This was known by 1961 when Cuban black nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay, "Castro and the Cuban Negro", published in the NAACP publication The Crisis in 1961 detailed how it was done.
“Of
the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, many have had to close their doors and
others are in death agony. One can truthfully say, and this is without
the slightest exaggeration, that the Negro movement in Cuba died at the
hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is the man who had the cynical
impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the purpose of
censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil obviously
exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man to offer
America solutions, nor even to pass judgement.”
Between 1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and
Black-Cubans was based on their being part of an international black
diaspora. This relationship ended when the Castro regime ended
autonomous black civil society in 1962, and consolidated totalitarian
rule.
It was replaced by Castro and his white revolutionary elite
allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa while
criticizing racism in the United States.
For decades, the Castro
regime expected Black Cubans to be obedient, submissive, and grateful to
the white revolutionary elite, and this was reflected in official
propaganda with racist tropes.
The elimination of Afro-Cubans from this dynamic by the new communist revolutionary elite turned racism into a political tool outside of Cuba
to advance the Castro regime's communist agenda, but turned it into a
taboo topic by ungrateful blacks, labeled counter-revolutionaries by the
dictatorship.
"But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation." - Luke 17:25
MLK Jr. shot in Memphis, TN at the Lorraine Motel on 4/4/68 at 6:01pm CST
Today is Easter Sunday, but it is also the 53rd observance of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. On Good Friday, I quoted Reverend James Lawson, who like King is an apostle of nonviolence and a Christian pastor, said that “if you want to understand King, you must look at Jesus.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., like Jesus, was rejected by all. He was rejected by conservatives, by liberals, by radicals, and by communists.
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomonpublished today an interesting piece titled, "The Liberal Contempt for Martin Luther King’s Final Year" calling to account Liberals who condemned Dr. King for his anti-militarist ideals and opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967, but then also engage in the same "evasion by omission" that they criticize liberals for today. They fail to mention how radicals and communists also hated him for his commitment to nonviolence and the beloved community.
Reverend King's opposition to the war in Vietnam was a position he evolved into, much like Gandhi did in South Africa, a rejection of all violence, including warfare to resolve problems of human conflict. He listened to others, and engaged in dialogues with a Socratic quality. This is clearly seen in the line of argument he laid out in his April 4, 1967 speech "Beyond Vietnam":
"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I
have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their
problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while
maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully
through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about
Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of
violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my
voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake
of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling
under our violence, I cannot be silent."
Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Frederick H. Brooks and others that believed violence was a legitimate means to confront white supremacy in the United States did not view Dr. King favorably. Cleaver following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. wrote honestly about how Reverend King was viewed in these circles prior to his murder.
"To black militants, Dr. King represented a stubborn
and persistent stumbling block in the path of the methods
that had to be implemented to bring about a revolution in the
present situation. And so, therefore, much hatred, much venom
and much criticism was focused upon Dr. King by the black
militants/And the contradiction in which he was caught up cast
him in the role of one who was hated and held in contempt,
both by the whites in America who did not want to free
black people, and by black people who recognized the attitude
of white America and who wanted to be rid of the
self‐deceiving doctrine of nonviolence. Still, black militants
were willing to sit back and watch, and allow Dr. King to
play out his role. And his role has now been played out."
Malcolm X had led the way, among black radicals, slandering Martin Luther King Jr. in a June 24, 1963 interview titled "Negro and the American Promise"as an Uncle Tom who was teaching African Americans how to be defenseless:
Dr. Kenneth Clark: I see. Well, Reverend Martin Luther King preaches a
doctrine of non-violent insistence upon the rights of the American
Negro. What is your attitude toward this philosophy?
Malcolm X: The white man pays Reverend Martin Luther King,
subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther
King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless. That's what
you mean by non-violent: be defenseless. Be defenseless in the face of
one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken a people into
captivity. That's this American white man. And they have proved it
throughout the country by the police dogs and the police clubs.
A hundred years ago they used to put on a white sheet and use a
bloodhound against Negroes. Today they've taken off the white sheet and
put on police uniforms, they've traded in the bloodhounds for police
dogs, and they're still doing the same thing. And just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound, or resisting the Ku Klux Klan,
by teaching them to love their enemy, or pray for those who use them
spitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a 20th century or modern
Uncle Tom, or a religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today,
to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of an attack, that Uncle Tom did
on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attacks of the Klan in that day.
"When they threw eggs at me in New York, I
think that was really a result of the Black Nationalist groups. They had
heard all of these things about my being soft, my talking about love,
and they transferred that bitterness toward the white man to me. They
began to feel that I was saying to love this person that they had such a
bitter attitude toward. In fact, Malcolm X had a meeting the day
before, and he talked about me a great deal and told them that I would
be there the next night and said, "You ought to go over there and let
old King know what you think about him." And he had said a great deal
about nonviolence, criticizing nonviolence, and saying that I approved
of Negro men and women being bitten by dogs and the fire hoses. So I
think this kind of response grew out of all of the talk about my being a
sort of polished Uncle Tom.
My feeling has always been that they have
never understood what I was saying. They did not see that there's a
great deal of difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent
resistance. Certainly I'm not saying that you sit down and patiently
accept injustice. I'm talking about a very strong force, where you stand
up with all your might against an evil system, and you're not a coward.
You are resisting, but you come to see that tactically as well as
morally it is better to be nonviolent. Even if one didn't want to deal
with the moral question, it would just be impractical for the Negro to
talk about making his struggle violent."
Malcolm X, prior to his February 21, 1965 assassination revealed that in 1961 he had met secretly with the Klu Klux Klan, representing the Nation of Islam, to divide up the United States along racial lines. He was also an admirer of Mao Zedong.
“I
declare emphatically that I am no longer in Elijah Muhammad's ‘strait
jacket,’ and I don't intend to replace his with one woven by someone
else. I am a Muslim in the most orthodox sense; my religion is Islam as
it is believed in and practiced by the Muslims here in the Holy City of
Mecca.
“This religion recognizes all
men as brothers. It accepts all human beings as equals before ‐God, and
as equal members in the Human Family of Mankind. I totally reject Elijah
Muhammad's racist philosophy, which he has labeled ‘Islam’ only to fool
and misuse gullible people, as he fooled and misused me. But I blame
only myself, and no one else for the fool that I was, and the harm that
my evangelic foolishness in his behalf has done to others.”
Malcolm
wrote that he was neither anti‐American, un-American, seditious nor
subversive, but an open‐minded man who was trying to weigh everything
objectively."
Stokely Carmichael: American Barabbas
Carmichael clapping at Organization of Latin American Solidarity in Havana (1967).
However, Stokely Carmichael, many in the Black Panther movement, and others had embraced Maoism, and the aid of Havana to overthrow the American system through violent means.
Many Leftists highlight the FBI's spying and active measures against Martin Luther King Jr., but only a handful discuss the campaign of active measures by the Soviet KGB, and the desire that Reverend King be replaced by someone they could control such as Stokely Carmichael.
During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to
spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of
communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.
I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin.
In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have
remained with me to this day.
First I rejected their materialistic interpretation
of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no
place for God.4
This I could never accept, for as a Christian I believe that there is a
creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence
of all reality—a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms.
History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical
relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no
absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles;
consequently almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a
justifiable means to the “millennial” end.5
This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can
never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in
the final analysis the end is preexistent in the mean.
Third, I opposed communism’s political
totalitarianism. In communism the individual ends up in subjection to
the state. True, the Marxist would argue that the state is an “interim”
reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges;
but the state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that
end. And if any man’s so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of
that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his
freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to
choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in
communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was
objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an
end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the
state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to
the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a
person. Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state,
but always as an end within himself.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a radical in the sense that he was going to the root of things, and seeking solutions informed by his Christian faith. Reverend King was a Christian Democrat who sought to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor with a politics focused on the person because "he is a child of God." The "Beloved Community" seeks justice for all not through a violent class struggle, but through a "critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence."
Not all that joined him could follow him down this road. Stokely Carmichael enrolled in Howard University and joined "the school's Non-Violent
Action Group, a civil-rights organization. In 1961 he participated in a
number of anti-segregation initiatives in the Deep South, including "freedom rides" organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Carmichael graduated from Howard University in 1964, with a degree in philosophy. Two years later he replaced John Lewis as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Followers of King that viewed him as not being sufficiently radical abandoned him and criticized him. Stokely Carmichael who had derisively called the 1963 March on Washington,
a "middle class picnic" left the nonviolent Civil Rights movement and
rejected King's approach.
In 1967 Carmichael was interviewed by Mario Menendez, editor of Sucesos, a Mexican magazine, while he was staying in Havana, Cuba attending
the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), a communist
alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS)and made claims about the SNCC that others would reject:
"Now, we used the word nonviolent because at that time the central
figure in the struggle to defend the black race was no one less than
Martin Luther King and anyone who resorted to violence was considered a
traitor. Consequently we resolved to use the word nonviolent. However we
knew that our struggle would end up in violence, that it was only
necessary to wait for the right time. So we accepted this name for the
grouping and coordinated activities from city to city, wherever we could
engage in nonviolent demonstrations."
Stokely Carmichael told an audience in Havana in 1967:
''We are moving toward guerrilla warfare in the United States. We are
going to develop urban guerrilla warfare and we are going to beat them
in this field because there is one thing the imperialists do not have:
their men don't want to fight, they don't want to fight what they call
guerilla warfare, which is really hand-to-hand combat."
He believed that, "[u]rban
guerrilla warfare is the only means by which we can win in the United
States because they cannot use bombs against us, since we are inside the
country. They will have to fight us in hand-to-hand combat and we will
defeat them."
"We have to recognize the major enemy is the honky and
his institutions of racism." ... "Whenever anyone prepares for
revolutionary warfare you concentrate on the major enemy." ... "We will
not fight each other. There will be no fights in the black community
among black people. There will just be people who will be offed." ... "We
must first develop an undying love for our people ... an undying love
as is personified in brother Huey P. Newton ... If we do not do that, we
will be wiped out."
In
1992 a high ranking Russian intelligence officer defected to the
United Kingdom and brought with him notes and transcripts compiled over
the previous thirty years as he moved entire foreign intelligence
archives to a new headquarters just outside of Moscow. The Russian
intelligence officer’s name was Vasili Mitrokhin and the information he
gathered became known as The Mitrokhin Archive. In the groundbreaking book, The Sword and the The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published in 1999 details
were obtained from The Mitrokhin Archive on Soviet efforts to replace Martin Luther King Jr. with a “more radical and malleable leader” such as Stokeley Carmichael to provoke a race war in the United States. Andrew Mitrokhin, in their book, outlined the KGB's active measures to achieve the goal of race war in America and mentioned Carmichael's visit to Cuba in 1967.
King’s assassination on
April 4, 1968 was quickly followed by the violence and rioting which the
KGB had earlier blamed King for trying to prevent. Within a week riots
erupted in over a hundred cities, forty-six people had been killed,
3,500 injured and 20,000 arrested."
The false claim made by Holly Genovose in Teen Vogue on April 4, 2018 to a new generation of youngsters that the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King Jr shared "many of the same ideologies," must be challenged. She should have revisited the interview in 2017 with John Lewis, who rejected the violence of both Carmichael and Malcolm X. There is a world of difference between the social democracy and beloved community advocated by Martin Luther King Jr., and the Maoist revolutionary vision advocated by the Black Panthers who viewed King's nonviolent movement as an obstacle. Genovese also failed to mention that King had been a target of active measures by the KGB, while highlighting the terrible history of the FBI towards the Civil Rights leader.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolent change
Reverend King outlined the purpose of the overall nonviolent struggle in broad terms in his final speech on April 3, 1968:
"And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any
negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are
saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people.
We are saying -- We are saying that we are God's children. And that we
are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live."
He spoke of the importance of maintaining unity, noting how in Ancient
Egypt pharaoh had sought to maintain control over his slaves by having
them fight among themselves. King then explained the failings of violence, even a little violence and the specific issues of the campaign for the sanitation workers.
"Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is
injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in
its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation
workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the
problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day,
and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles.
They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand,
three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not
being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor.
They didn't get around to that."
King addressed the resilience and persistence
of the Civil Rights movement to resist water cannons and police dogs,
and the restraining order to block the march, challenging the
authorities to live up to the American traditions of liberty and the
rule of law.
"Now about injunctions: 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 some of these illegal injunctions. 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 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 dogs or water hoses turn us
around, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are
going on."
"Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our
external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we
are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with
white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that
collectively -- that means all of us together -- collectively we are
richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine.
Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet
Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the
others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of
the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a
year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and
more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power
right there, if we know how to pool it.
We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go
around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles.
We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these
stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say,
"God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his
children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item
on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now,
if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must
follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from
you."
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out
and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell
them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other
bread? -- Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse?
Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now,
only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of
redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they
haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them
because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support
the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they
can move on town -- downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call
upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your
money in Tri-State Bank. We want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. Go by
the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we
don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we
have an account here in the savings and loan association from the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We are telling you to follow
what we are doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black
insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance
there. We want to have an "insurance-in."
Now these are some practical things that we can do. We begin the
process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we
are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through
here."
The following day they had won in court
and the march was on. The civil rights leaders were in good spirits.
Reverend King had been suffering from a fever and had been resting
throughout the day, but feeling better he got dressed to go out to dinner at 5:30pm.
Less than 24 hours after his historic speech, the 39 year old Baptist
Minister and Nobel Laureate was struck down by a sniper's bullet at the Lorraine Motel and by 6:03pm he lay there dying. Andrew Young checked and found a slight pulse. King was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. at St. Joseph Hospital.
Lorraine Motel 4/4/68: Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, MLK Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams,
"When White America killed Dr. King last night,
it declared war on us. There will be no crying there will be no
funerals. The rebellions that have been occurring around the cities of
this country is just light stuff to what is about to happen. We have to
retaliate for the deaths of our leaders. The executions of those deaths won't be in the
courtroom but in the streets of the United States of America. Last
night we led all of those youngsters up and down the street to close
every store in this area. Because Dr. King was shot and they should have
closed those doors. Now some of them kicked glass door windows in. We
are not stopping them from kicking in the store
windows. We are stopping them from coming out on the streets without
guns. When they come out on the streets we want them with guns. If they
don't have guns we won't let them throw bricks and bottles, but when
they get guns we will be out on the street."
Carmichael had already been advocating for armed insurrection
on American streets prior to Dr. King's assassination and on February
17, 1968 explicitly made the case for "offing" blacks who did not agree
with hm. Following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Carmichael's
threat was made reality. Newsweek reported
that "riots broke out in dozens of cities across the United States. The
rampage left 39 dead, 21,000 arrested, more than 2,600 injured and was
responsible for damages estimated at $65 million." The negative impact for black communities is still felt today.
Meanwhile in Memphis the local government met the demands
that had been made by Reverend King and the striking sanitation
workers.
The King family held solemn services for Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by thousands including the Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey and then former Vice President Richard Nixon.
Coretta Scott King requested that King eulogize himself: His last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a recording of his famous 'Drum Major' sermon, given on February 4, 1968, was played at the funeral. The King family went on to found the King Center
and continued his nonviolent legacy to the present day. Other activists
from King's inner circle continued their civil rights work, while some,
like John Lewis, entered political life and continued the long hard journey to realize Reverend King's beloved community.
The lunch counter sit-in campaign (although called a movement) began on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina by the end of March 1960 the movement had spread to more than 55 cities in 13 states. The 1960 documentary Integration Report set down on film the mood of the country and the courage of the activists who had set out to put an end to Jim Crow segregation.
People were beaten, imprisoned, and killed in this struggle to bring an end to segregation but despite great sacrifices and hardship achieved this goal via non-violent means. The end of segregation and the passage of the 1965 National Voting Rights Act were achieved through non-violent means, and were the high water mark for the Civil Rights movement.
Unfortunately the unfounded belief that violence could achieve more led to the emergence of the Black Power movement, the black panthers, and the sidelining of the non-violent movement for the sterile and impotent riots that would destroy inner cities and wreak economic havoc.
Diane Nash, a great pioneer of nonviolence from the sit-ins to the Selma march, rejected nonviolence and took up with the siren call of Black Power. Nash described her reasoning:
"If we've done all this through nonviolence, think what we could do if we were just willing to be urban guerrillas and knock over a few banks. [...] "Of course, ten years later I looked up and I hadn't knocked over any banks and I hadn't been a guerilla. I hadn't even been to the rifle range. But I had withdrawn from this painful, creative engagement with nonviolence and democracy behind a big smokescreen of noise."
In addition to deactivating serious activists the lure of violence and urban guerrilla warfare would exact a terrible cost. According to Virginia Postrel, from 1964 to 1971, there were more than 750 riots, killing 228 people and injuring 12,741 others. After more than 15,000 separate incidents of arson, many black urban neighborhoods were in ruins. The end results were ruined neighborhoods; an explosion in crime; and increased poverty.
Malcolm X, one of the leaders of the black power movement, in the video above accuses Martin Luther King Jr. of being paid and subsidized by the white man to maintain African Americans defenseless. He went on to accuse Rev. King of being an "Uncle Tom." Reverend King in the video below responds to the charges laid out by Malcolm X arguing that he has confused non-resistance with non-violent resistance.
Fifty years later with an African American president in the White House thanks in large part to the legacy of the nonviolent civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and on the other hand the legacy of riots and violence encouraged and fueled by the Malcolm X's and Stokely Carmichael's of the black power movement has left a legacy of economic and social ruin in the inner city and an explosion in crime.
Anyone suffering from injustice and oppression should take a long hard look at the fruits of these two movements and choose nonviolence. A strategic approach to nonviolence taken as seriously as so many others take violence have and could yield positive results which leads to the final video below which deals with non-violent simulations and developing a non-violent strategy.
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