{"id":6295,"date":"2024-01-13T07:25:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-12T22:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/?p=6295"},"modified":"2024-01-10T19:43:01","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T10:43:01","slug":"martin-luther-kings-message-shook-the-powerful-vital-people-can-hear-it-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/news\/martin-luther-kings-message-shook-the-powerful-vital-people-can-hear-it-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Luther King\u2019s Message Shook the Powerful: Vital People can Hear it Today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Ralph Bunche received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s work as a United Nations mediator in the Palestine conflict. He called himself 'an incurable optimist'. Bunche was the first African American and person of color to be so honored in the history of the prize.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
ROME (IPS)\u00a0<\/strong>– All through this week, leading up to January 15th, the world will commemorate Martin Luther King. In a world as wounded as ours is today, the lessons of his life\u2019s work offer a vital opportunity for healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the opportunity to hear his message continues to be obstructed: too many of the soundbites of TV pundits and the tweets of politicians are, once again, not distilling the insights of Dr King, but are serving instead to obscure a library of wisdom behind wall-to-wall repetition of the same few lines, extracted from their context, of one speech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not a mistake, it is a tactic, and we owe it not only to the legacy of Dr King but to the future of our world to ensure that his authentic message is shared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The true message of Martin Luther King is not a saccharine call for quietude or acceptance, but an insistence on being, as he put it, \u201cmaladjusted to injustice.\u201d It represents not an idle optimism that things will get better but a determined commitment to collective action as the only route to progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Dr King said \u201cthe arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice\u201d, he didn\u2019t mean this process is automatic; as he noted, \u201csocial progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And he was clear that advancement of progress requires the coming together of mass movements, \u201corganizing our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Children from a dozen countries met with the President of the General Assembly and toured the United Nations on a federal holiday in the United States honouring the late civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Martin Luther King Jr. 17 January 2023. Credit: Paulina Kubiak, United Nations<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Justice, Dr King taught, is never given, it is only ever won. This always involves having the courage to confront power. Indeed, he noted, the greatest stumbling block to progress is not the implacable opponent but those who claim to support change but are \u201cmore devoted to order than justice.\u201d As he put it, \u201cfrankly I have yet to engage in a direct action movement that was \u2018well-timed\u2019 in the view of those who have not suffered unduly; this \u2018wait!\u2019 has almost always meant \u2018never.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the civil rights movement\u2019s 1962 Operation Breadbasket challenged companies to increase the share of profits going to black workers and communities, it was only after the movement showed that they could successfully organize a boycott that those companies, in Dr King\u2019s words, \u201cthe next day were talking nice, were very humble, and [later] we signed the agreement.\u201d As he noted when challenged by \u201cmoderates\u201d who asked why he needed to organize, \u201cwe have not made a single gain without determined pressure\u2026freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Advancing progress, he emphasized, involves challenging public opinion too. Organizers cannot be mere \u201cthermometers\u201d who \u201crecord popular opinion\u201d but need to be \u201cthermostats\u201d who work to \u201ctransform the mores of society\u201d. In 1966, for example, a Gallup Opinion poll<\/a> showed that Dr King was viewed unfavourably by 63 per cent of Americans, but by 2011 that figure had fallen to only four per cent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Often, people read the current consensus view back into history and assume that Dr King was always a mainstream figure, and imagine, falsely, that change comes from people and movements who don\u2019t ever offend anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr King\u2019s vision of justice was a full one. It called not only for the scrapping of segregation, but for taking on \u201cthe triple prong sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism.\u201d He challenged the \u201ceconomic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few\u201d and noted that \u201ctrue compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it understands that an edifice which produces beggars, needs restructuring.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He spoke out against war not only for having \u201cleft youth maimed and mutilated\u201d but for having also \u201cimpaired the United Nations, exacerbated the hatreds between continents, frustrated development, contributed to the forces of reaction, and strengthened the military-industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He noted how \u201cspeaking out against war has not gone without criticisms, there are those who tell me that I should stick with civil rights, and stay in my place.\u201d But he insisted that he would \u201ckeep these issues mixed because they are mixed. We must see that justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I went to Dr King\u2019s memorial in Atlanta I did so to pay my respects at his tomb. But arriving at the King Center I found a vibrant hub of practical learning, at which activists and organizers working for justice were revisiting Dr King\u2019s work and writings not as history that is past but as a set of tools to help understand, and act, in the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Together, we reflected not only on his profoundly radical philosophy, but also on his strategies and tactics for advancing transformational change. Conversations with Dr King\u2019s inspirational daughter, Bernice, were focused not on her father\u2019s work alone; instead, she asked us what changes we were working for, and how we were working to advance them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This year, on 10th January, the King Center is hosting a Global Summit, a series of practical conversations accessible to everyone, for free, online. I\u2019m honoured to be panelist. It is open for sign ups here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThose who love peace,\u201d noted Dr King, \u201cmust learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.\u201d And he even guided us how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ben Phillips<\/strong>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0How to Fight Inequality<\/a>, Communications Director of UNAIDS, and a panelist at the\u00a0King Center Global Summit on 10th January<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
INPS Japan\/ IPS UN Bureau Report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ralph Bunche received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s work as a United Nations mediator in the Palestine conflict. He called himself ‘an incurable optimist’. Bunche was the first African American and person of color to be so honored in the history of the prize. ROME (IPS)\u00a0– All through this week, leading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6296,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,39,32,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-north-america","9":"category-regions","10":"category-viewpoints"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6295"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6302,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6295\/revisions\/6302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}