Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?: rekindling the revolutionary Kings 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 doesnt 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 Peoples 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. Kings 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 Kings 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 was fighting for civil and for voting rights, and the second phase for economic justice, and all of the things he fought for are under threat today. 50 years since Kings 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.
Produced by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash
please notify us if you plan to broadcast this program - knash@igc.org
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