So tomorrow we will celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. There will be parades, news stories and everyone will get the day off. Oh yeah and I can’t forget some will celebrate their freedom to twerk:
SMH
Although the twerkers may not get it my son Kaydon gets it. All weekend long he has been trying to articulate as much as his five year old mind can the greatness of Dr. King and his achievements. Today he finally put it in the most concise and thought provoking way. He told me “Dr. King fought the rules.”
Yes. My five year old son gets it while many today still don’t get it. We have bleached and faded Dr. King’s powerful life and message. It has been reduced to holding hands and singing cumbayah but it’s much more than that. Think about it. This man had the FBI tapping his phone. You don’t tap the phone of a harmless national mascot for niceness. In my opinion Dr. King was public enemy #1 as he stood against the corruption and evil in America.
Most of us only know of his sound bite from the famous “I have a dream” speech. What most people don’t know is that I have a dream speech is really titled “A Canceled Check”. It was his appeal to the American government and America as a whole to make good on its promises. Dr. King went to Washington hoping for the American government to change it’s hypocritical ways. What many don’t know is that King was assasinated during a campaign for economic justice.
Yeah you don’t assassinate someone for telling everyone to hold hands and just be nice to each other. No. There was so much more to King and his message.
King not only campaigned for economic justice but he also opposed the war in vietnam and believed that these two things were linked. If as a nation we spend more on warfare and the military then the poor get shafted. In those days the poor were getting shafted by about 2 billion dollars a month. King understood that when a nation’s first priority is war everything else comes in second including the last and the least.
A lot of times you’ll see King compared to Malcolm X. It’s like King is the safe one and Malcolm is the dangerous negro. And although they had different religions and philosophies King wasn’t a pushover or an advocate of black self hate. There is a side of Dr. King that is not quoted very often in regards to black empowerment. See King didn’t just want everyone to be able to sit on the same bus and shop at the same stores and eat at the same restaurants. Part of his dream was for black people to own the buses and stores and restaurants. Part of his dream was that everyone in this nation no matter their ethnicity or class would be able to have access to this nation’s wealth not because they were entitled to it but because it was a part of God’s kingdom agenda.
See King’s dream went beyond civil rights. His vision was as big as heaven. He believed that what Jesus said about the poor and the downcast wasn’t just something to ignore as we read our Bibles. He believed that the hopes and desires of the Old Testament prophets was something that needed to happen right now. Dr. King believed that heaven’s laws needed to be made real on earth. Sounds a lot like another man I know who was killed and then made into a safe mascot for niceness. Hmmmm….
