MLK Day in SF : Clear Channel, Police, and Republicans Lead The March

Thousands marched in the streets of San Francisco to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday. The march started with Gavin Newsom, Cecil Williams and a smattering of center right politicians surrounded by banners advertising Clear Channel stations. Behind the celebrities came a contingent of SF police officers followed by minority children dressed in police uniforms. Behind these groups came middle and high school kids and in the very back were a group opposing the war in Iraq and a group opposing the racist death penalty. Commercialism came first and Martin Luther King’s own views were pushed to the back of the bus.

"It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.
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Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
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[A]fter passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

http://www.fair.org/media-beat/950104.html