Forum Post: Martin Luther King's Niece says MLK would not have supported OWS
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 7, 2011, 2:29 p.m. EST by nikka
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/67747.html
Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece says the Rev. Jesse Jackson should stop comparing the Occupy Wall Street protests to the civil rights movement, arguing that her uncle would not have condoned the movement.
“I believe that Rev. Jackson is doing a disservice,” Alveda King said on Fox News Monday morning. “My uncle, the whole [civil rights] movement, was founded in prayer, in crying out to God in a peaceful movement. And this [Occupy] movement is not peaceful.”
Jesse was there. This woman was not.
OWS was NOT conceived as a violent movement.
Civil disobedience is not violence. Civil rights protests were born in civil disobedience. If they'd obeyed the law, we'd still have the very laws they were protesting.
"The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" was the official name of the 1963 march on Washington where MLK delivered his landmark "I have a dream" speech. That march was a culmination of years of peaceful protest marches that were violently set upon by police and authorities. Tens of thousands of unjustified arrests of Americans publicly asserting their free speech rights.
The #Occcupy movement today is about jobs and economic justice. No different from the Civil Rights Movement.
As a secular white American who participated in some of the Civil Rights marches as well as many of the anti war marches that Martin Luther King was advocating joining when he was murdered I see little to no difference between what King espoused and aspired to and what economic justice marchers are demanding today.
Alveda King is a right-wing predator who does everything she can to misrepresent the legacy of Martin Luther King and co-opt that legacy to polluted disingenuous right-wing ends.
Predator?
Okay.
If you look up the word "predator" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Jesse Jackson next to it. Jesse never met a cause he didn't want to exploit.
Technically, he's an activist blackmailer. I know of a particular instance where he went to Toyota Motors headquarters in the US and demanded more African-Americans be hired after some dust-up in the news. What has one got to do with the other? He's no better than a bully (and in case no one has noticed the other thing about high-profile, egotistical loudmouths... they're all womanizers).
That is why we call out to the protesters and the 'leaders' to extricate and disavow from the haters. That's not to say that it didn't start out peaceful before the hate machine infiltrated/
Saying Jackson “needs to revisit his 20th-century history,” King said Monday the civil rights movement was founded on prayer, peace, nonviolence and order, whereas the Occupiers began their protests out of “frustration.”
“They wanted something that would give them solutions, something that would make things better, and what they’re doing now, Rev. Jackson knows that this is not the model that my uncle and my father, Rev. A.D. King, upheld,” she said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/67747.html#ixzz1d394mZeF