Economic Justice: Dr. King’s Legacy
The conventional media image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has him frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 giving his inspirational “I Have a Dream” speech. Little attention is paid to King’s remarkable political and social evolution in the last five years of his life. He became a trenchant critic of the Vietnam War. In his classic sermon at the Riverside Church in New York he denounced the war and “the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism.” King increasingly saw the link between economic justice and racial equality and insisted that one was impossible without the other. His final days were spent in Memphis where he was actively supporting a strike by black sanitation workers and he was planning to launch a poor people’s march on Washington, D.C.. An assassin’s bullet ended his life on April 4, 1968.
Recorded at the University of Denver.
Speaker
Julianne Malveaux
Julianne Malveaux is an economist and political commentator. Her articles appear in leading newspapers and magazines. She has taught and lectured at major colleges and universities. She is the author of Sex, Lies and Stereotypes, Wall Street, Main Street and the Side Street, and Surviving and Thriving.
R Alexander –
Sugarcoating not included – truths can be bitter – but once you digest it, you have a chance of seeing things clearly.
Tell me again what century we are in?
Justin Kalm –
An eye-opening speech, full of trenchant arguments to make us question our assumptions about the nature of violence in our society, and about Dr. King’s legacy as he would have wanted it. Malveaux is not as polite as some would want an MLK Day speaker to be, but in the context of the obscenity that has been America’s treatment of African-Americans, Malveaux vents no more than we deserve. It is an important speech, that I am going to share with a lot of friends.
Dana Franchitto –
yes, her larger theme is spot on and as a vegetarian,I entertain no illusions about Dr.King being a vegetarian nor do I demonize MS Malveaux for not being one, but her dismissive comment about the “right of a chicken to land in a frying pan” is the kind of callousness the oppressors visit upon the oppressed. At least show respect and appreciation for what you eat. It puts a blemish on her thesis.
Michael –
Wow, I thought we, as a nation, we were beyond this. Guess not. Sure you want to pick this ‘fight’ again?