THE REST OF THE NEWs
by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

REFLECTION OF DR. KING

I am not one of a number of persons and commentators
who come merely to hypocritically give salutations to
Dr. King, when in their own times, they betray his
entire history of activism. In fact, the political
establishment present us with a Martin Luther King,
who never really existed. A saint, instead of an
activist, a dream instead of a man, and a pacifist,
instead of a man who would fight back if you
personally tested him.

The King we are being presented is the corporate King,
the creature of the white government who used this
pacifist myth to beat down the Black freedom movement
of the 1960's with blood, and of which he was one of
the major casualties, along with Malolm X, the other
major leader of that period. We are fed this garbage
every year at this time, which totally circumvents
logic and perverts history about Martin Luther King
jr. and the civil rights movement itself.

It is done to really remove him from his people, and
put him in the hands of the White political
establishment, and in that respect that is what has
been done. They also want to give us a man they claim
who was a sheer pacifist, and could not support the
liberation movements which existed all during the
revolutionary 1960's. That also was false since we
know that Dr. King was opposed to the Vietnam war and
reached a pointed where he began to criticize the
political institutions of the capitalist government
and economy itself. That is why they killed him.

By no stretch of the imagination are we free in 2001.
We have over one million Black prison inmates in the
US prison system, each year 500-1,000 Black and poor
persons are killed by the police in this country; over
three million homeless persons walk or sleep on our
streets; millions are locked out of the capitalist
economy and into poverty of the worst sort, and we
have just seen in the past election the revival of
some of the worst Southern racist impediments to block
our right to vote in the last Presidential election.

Along with the rise of a news super-poor, a new Black
middle class surfaced in the wake of Dr. King's
sacrifice, but even that is being crushed by the most
reactionary elements of the Republican party. We have
serious challenges, but very little leadership, what
we do have like Sharpton, Farrakhan, Jessie Jackson
and others are flawed, weak, and compromised by money
and privilege. To them, organizing is about
frightening the political establishment and major
corporations to give money to their organizations, in
other words, a shakedown.

King was a good man, and even those his politics of
moderation were superceded by the Black Power movement
of the last 60's, it could be said he was no crook.
What we have go to do now is build a mass
revolutionary movement, led by the poor (not
preachers, politicians, or academics) which can
totally dismantle the political, social and economic
system of the United States. In other words, a Black
revolution as the first stage of a social revolution.
That's what on the agenda. Let's get to it.