Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg
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Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?:
rekindling the revolutionary King’s ideas and the activism that followed
on this 50th year since his martyrdom!
with
Clayborne Carson - “His earlier life is remembered. The last three years of
his life and what he was working on are forgotten, ” said Clayborne Carson, a
Stanford University history professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr.
Research and Education Institute, which edits and publishes King's papers.
and
Michael K. Honey – historian and author of the just released To the Promised
Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice and the acclaimed
Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last
Campaign, who returns a decade later with an exploration of King's call for
"a moral revolution" against an American economic system that "takes
necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”
As King asked, in a twist on Jesus' words in the Gospel of Mark:
"What does it profit a man to eat at an integrated lunch counter
if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup
of coffee?"
In the 1967's Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? an activist's
guide that has lost none of its relevance or radicalism King endorses the idea of a
government-organized "guaranteed income" for all U.S. adults. Our discussion
with Clayborne Carson and Michael Honey will pick up on these threads of Kings
thinking that go well beyond his role in the civil rights movement. While many view
King mainly as a civil rights advocate, from his earliest years he called on us to
abolish nuclear weapons and eliminate war; to overturn centuries of racism based
on slavery and segregation; and for economic justice, and in his final days, he
organized the Poor People’s Campaign to demand housing, health care, education,
and jobs or adequate income for all. In Memphis, he died supporting the rights of
public employees to union recognition and a contract, dues deductions to support
their union, and civil rights as a part of the labor movement. King’s nuanced roles
as an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised became muddled as his legacy
was mainstreamed about the time his birthday became a national holiday,
recognized on the third Monday of January. But, Clayborne Carson and Michael
Honey in their re-evaluations, have found that King’s moral and political vision was
more profound than what many thought at the end of his life and much of it speaks
directly to the sociopolitical conditions today.
King said the freedom movement had two phases, one fighting for civil and voting
rights, and a second phase for economic justice, and all of the things he fought for
are under threat today. Fifty years since King’s death, we should learn about the
whole King and honor his legacy by fighting for an end to racism, poverty and war.
Says Carson, "most people looked upon voting (rights) as sufficient. Much of white
America looked at the civil rights gains and said, `We're not going to give you any
more” but "King was asking for a major redistribution of wealth." “King had a
different vision, a vision of where we should have been going for the last 50 years.
That's the unfinished business of the 1960s" says Clayborne Carson.
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Building Bridges is regularly broadcast live over WBAI,
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