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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Late Night Memorial Open Thread: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Cannot yet RIP

Late Night Memorial Open Thread: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Cannot yet RIP

by Anne Laurie|  January 21, 201911:54 pm| 19 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Post-racial America, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republican Stupidity, All Too Normal, Daydream Believers

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I’ve always drawn inspiration from what Dr. King called life’s most persistent and urgent question: "What are you doing for others?" Let’s honor his legacy by standing up for what is right in our communities and taking steps to make a positive impact on the world.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 21, 2019

He was assassinated by an escaped violent felon who bought his Winchester .30-06 rifle legally and without a background check under a false name just 5 days before the assassination. The store that sold it is still in business today. https://t.co/x8is3UtKAD

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) January 21, 2019

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – #MLK

— Maya Wiley (@mayawiley) January 21, 2019

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! pic.twitter.com/7927zgP8gP

— Ashley C. Ford (@iSmashFizzle) January 21, 2019


Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his all for all. I have long agreed with his speeches and writings. Today I think of this MLK quote, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” May we renew ourselves in his teachings so that he can RIP.

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) January 21, 2019

In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act to honor Martin Luther King Jr’s memory.

In 1973, Donald Trump and his father were sued by the Nixon administration for repeatedly violating that same civil rights law.

It led to the first NYT story on him:https://t.co/p5yi3SGR1e

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) January 21, 2019

Happy MLK Day pic.twitter.com/MZutlDnpka

— son of an asylum seeker, father of an immigrant (@doctorow) January 21, 2019

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun, @fivefifths writes. #KingLegacy https://t.co/3hZRvBEwhw

— Nadege Green (@NadegeGreen) January 21, 2019

… In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome. But in the true accounting, his assassination was one of a host of reactionary assaults by a country against a revolution. And those assaults were astonishingly successful…

King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights. But by 1966, it had become clear that many of these whites chafed against further activism and greater demands for equality. They viewed the Voting Rights Act as a final concession; King saw it as a start. According to Gallup polls, King’s popularity waned in the coda years of his life; his unfavorability rating reached 63 percent in 1966. At the same time, public opinion turned firmly against the civil-rights movement…

… For white America, hostility toward the civil-rights movement turned into a cherry-picked celebration of the revolution’s victories over segregation and over easily caricatured, gap-toothed bigots in the South. Embracing King became a way to rejoice in overcoming and to reify white innocence, even while ignoring the cries of those who had certainly not overcome. Accordingly, the life of King past mid-1965, a radical three years spent fighting a tide that had turned against him, is barely mentioned today…

In a 1978 retrospective article on King, Baldwin looked back at his friend’s life and at how the country had changed since his murder. “A vast amount of love and faith and passion—and blood—have gone into the attempt to transform and liberate this nation,” Baldwin wrote. “This is not the land of the free, is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave, and all that can be said for the bulk of our politicians is that, if they are no worse than they were, they are certainly no better.”

How much has changed in the 40 years since that retrospective? Have politicians improved? If King were alive today, would he bask in the glow of achievement, or would he gird himself again to march?…

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Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 21, 2019 at 11:57 pm

    Did you mean to include Congressman Steve King’s (R-IA) tweet in there without any comment on the fact that Steve King is commenting on MLK?

  2. 2.

    mvr

    January 22, 2019 at 12:00 am

    @Adam L Silverman: And that it is apparently not anything King ever said.

  3. 3.

    Ruckus

    January 22, 2019 at 12:13 am

    @mvr:
    Is ole Stevie trying to get his committee assignments reinstated by one bullshit tweet? Or was this written by someone on his staff? Because I find it difficult to see him writing one word of that.
    Snopes says no he didn’t say those words but in one speech he did say:

    A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

  4. 4.

    AThornton

    January 22, 2019 at 12:18 am

    @mvr:

    The Right Wing specializes in misquoting people and then using it against them.

    **********************************************************************************************************************

    And I was promised a 1980s Hasbro commercial for their GI Joe APC toy 3 threads back and I had to go find it myself.

    “Full service blog” indeed.

    *Har-rumph*

  5. 5.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    January 22, 2019 at 12:22 am

    @Adam L Silverman:
    He must be trying to improve his image. I see it as a hail mary to save his committee assignments. An Iowan congressman isn’t worth anything if he’s not on the Agricultural committee or so I’ve heard. I assume the caucus vote to remove him failed.

  6. 6.

    Plato

    January 22, 2019 at 12:33 am

    So the racist totus thug has been getting away with it all since 1973? That’s over four decades of systematic failures.

  7. 7.

    Mary G

    January 22, 2019 at 12:37 am

    @Ruckus: I tweeted back that his intern is a good writer, but you are shameless. No way he wrote that.

  8. 8.

    Anne Laurie

    January 22, 2019 at 12:41 am

    @Adam L Silverman: I figured I’d harped enough about Rep. Pigmuck King that y’all could draw yer own conclusions!

  9. 9.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    January 22, 2019 at 12:45 am

    @Ruckus:

    Is ole Stevie trying to get his committee assignments reinstated by one bullshit tweet?

    Were they ever taken away in the first place? I understand the full GOP House caucus needed to vote unanimously to remove him from them. I have a hard time seeing that happening given some of the shitheads in the R House.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 22, 2019 at 12:51 am

    @mvr: MLK or Steve?

  11. 11.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    January 22, 2019 at 12:55 am

    Off to bed for me.

  12. 12.

    Aleta

    January 22, 2019 at 12:57 am

    Saw a saccharine MLK Day quote from the NRA on twitter, and another one from the FBI.

  13. 13.

    Yutsano

    January 22, 2019 at 12:59 am

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??: It isn’t unanimous, but the caucus does have to vote on it. That’ll probably happen this week if it hasn’t already.

    (Note to self: Tense Agreement Matters)

  14. 14.

    Mike G

    January 22, 2019 at 1:29 am

    Winchester .30-06 rifle…The store that sold it is still in business today.

    And I’ll bet they pull a lot of business by bragging about that sale.

  15. 15.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    January 22, 2019 at 1:29 am

    Matt Fuller @ MEPFuller
    Isn’t it ~interesting~ that none of the first-person accounts of the White House present Trump as, like, the 3D chess player some supporters believe he is.
    Every account is him watching TV, sipping Diet Coke, and wandering out of meetings with Paul Ryan.

    another ex-staffer, another book

  16. 16.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    January 22, 2019 at 1:29 am

    @Yutsano:
    Thanks!

  17. 17.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    January 22, 2019 at 1:33 am

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    President Trump watched on television, increasingly angry as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan criticized his handling of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. He held the remote control “like a pistol” and yelled for an assistant to get the Republican leader on the phone.
    “Paul, do you know why Democrats have been kicking your a– for decades? Because they know a little word called ‘loyalty,’ ” Trump told Ryan, then a Wisconsin congressman. “Why do you think Nancy [Pelosi] has held on this long? Have you seen her? She’s a disaster. Every time she opens her mouth another Republican gets elected. But they stick with her . . . Why can’t you be loyal to your president, Paul?”
    The tormenting continued. Trump recalled Ryan distancing himself from Trump in October 2016, in the days after the “Access Hollywood” video in which he bragged of fondling women first surfaced in The Washington Post.
    “I remember being in Wisconsin and your own people were booing you,” Trump told him, according to former West Wing communications aide Cliff Sims. “You were out there dying like a dog, Paul. Like a dog! And what’d I do? I saved your a–.”

  18. 18.

    Cthulhu

    January 22, 2019 at 1:36 am

    Yeah, because if MLK had a concealed pistol, he could have totally taken out James Earl Ray and his rifle.

  19. 19.

    justawriter

    January 22, 2019 at 2:16 am

    @Cthulhu: At the rate we are going, if cheeto-face wins in 2020, the official story in 2023 will be JER was a disaffected black panther who killed MLK for supporting father Trump against racists who were forcing him to rent to black people. Then again, given the history of the last two years, I probably underestimated how awful the next five years could be.

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