How Should Working Class People Remember MLK?
Martin Luther King, Jr. might now be 95-years-old had he not be assassinated in 1968 -- and the world would be a completely different place.
By Joe Maniscalco
It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day again, and what’s uppermost in my mind right now is how he’s not here. He could be. Sure, he’d be 95, but Martin Luther King, Jr. could still be around walking the earth today. Instead, he’s long since dead — gunned down — murdered before even making it to 40.
The world we’re living in now? It’s the consequence of that barbaric crime. That’s the important thing I want to remember today.
It would simply not be possible for working class people and the American labor movement to be struggling the way we are today had Martin Luther King, Jr. not been slain in 1968 and, instead, continued to live fully throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond.
MLK was a union man — “a fellow 1199er” as he declared the same year he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee while supporting striking Sanitation workers in the city. He had little tolerance for sellout union leaders, freely admitting how he was often “disenchanted with some segments of the power structure of the labor movement.” He instead took heart in those unions he said will “always maintain the radiant and vibrant idealism that brought the labor movement into being.”
It similarly would not be possible for our “Corporate States of America” — with its faux elections and selected candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties — to be rampaging around the world bombing and pillaging for big business, while waging all-out war on working class people at home — had MLK not been shot to death and taken away from us.
MLK denounced “a society gone mad on war” and warned that a nation — our nation — that continues "year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift” was “approaching spiritual death.”
MLK, along with all the other class-conscious heroes like him who defied the corporate class in the 1960s and were murdered in their prime — murdered, even, in their youth — simply raised too much awareness and spurred too much collective action in the streets for the sad withering world we now live in to exist.
That’s why they’re not here today. Allowing them to continue would have meant revolution — a beautiful democratic and non-violent revolution against the corporate class.
That “Beyond Vietnam” speech MLK gave on April 4, 1967? It was delivered exactly one year prior to his assassination — to the day.
And so, Martin Luther King Jr. was taken from us — and here we are in the year 2024.
That’s what I want to remember on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I want to remember that the same craven interests who slew MLK, Fred Hampton, and so many other working class heroes of the era — are the same fascistic forces of greed who are now bent on burning down the whole wide world around our ears for a dollar — the almighty U.S. dollar.
Make America great again? You bet. Let’s do it. ASAP. We need to reach back right now to that prior era when union power was still strong, overall income inequality didn’t look like Oliver Twist, and Martin Luther King, Jr. — in all his courage and wisdom — was able to help the American public begin to confront and correct the terrible contradictions the cunning elites baked into our economic system from the start.
Today, enough working class people know everything we need to know about the bosses and how they operate to follow through on that momentous work.
It’s been painful, but they can never again tell us to shut up and get back to work because enough of us now know we run things and are essential.
It’s been painful, but they can never again say there’s not enough money for the things we need because — back up the Brinks truck — we see that there’s always money for more and more war.
That’s why today, I also want to remember something else MLK said about there being “such a thing as being too late” to act. And are we too late — already a quarter century into this new millennium? Well, I dunno. Looks bleak.
It’s already too later for far too many being ground up in the greusome gears of war or poisoned with poverty and unable to even see a doctor. It might, indeed, be too late.
However, if that doesn’t sit right with you on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it might also be wise to remember what MLK’s 1199ers often declare from the streets. It’s simple, although never easy: “When we fight, we win.”