Why Our Rulers Killed MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X and Fred Hampton:
Remember This As We Commemorate the 1963 March on Washington
August 25, 2013
There are a lot of radio/t.v. commemorations of the famous March on Washington held 50 years ago this August 28. These commemorations give us (and especially the younger generation born long after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death) a "safe" (for the ruling class) understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and MLK, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" vision.
Despite the fact that we have streets named after MLK, Jr. and postage stamps honoring him, I believe that if he were alive today that Obama would have him assassinated, just as "governmental agencies" (as determined by a jury verdict; also reported here that "After the verdict, Pepper [the King family's lawyer] said, 'Today, a jury of 12 men and women ruled that there was a conspiracy that involved Loyd Jowers, a local man, as well as other unknown conspirators associated with the Memphis police department, the state of Tennessee and the federal government.'") did in 1968.
The ruling class assassinated King (read the details here) because he led the Civil Rights Movement to oppose the Vietnam war as well as Jim Crow, and because he rejected his initial racial analysis and adopted a class analysis. The latter fact is less well known than the former. Here are some King quotations that tell the story.
In an Ebony Magazine article in 1966, King defended nonviolence with these words:
"In violent warfare, one must be prepared to face ruthlessly the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. [He refers to the U.S. government killing millions in Vietnam] ...Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of white Western materialism were at stake."
King clearly saw the conflict in racial terms: a minority of blacks against a majority of whites. Although King also knew--and explained carefully in his 1965 Selma, Alabama, speech (that you can read and listen to here) that the racist Jim Crow laws were for the purpose of oppressing not only blacks but the poor whites as well.
Fast forward to February 4, 1968, when King gave a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church a month before he was assassinated, in which he said:
"I always try to do a little converting when I'm in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens all enjoyed coming around to the cell to talk about the race problem...And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, now, 'You know what? You ought to be marching with us. You're just as poor as Negroes.' And I said, 'You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor. Because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.' Now that's a fact. That the poor white has been put into this position--where through blindness and prejudice, he is forced to support his oppressors, and the only thing he has going for him is the false sense that he is superior because his skin is white." [These quotations are from the book, "Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World" HarperSanFrancisco, 1986]
Clearly King was now preaching that class, not racial, conflict is the story; he even was referring to whites as "those brothers." This is a 180 degree change from perceiving ordinary whites as a "well-armed, wealthy majority" defending "white Western materialism."
King had to die, just as Malcolm X had to die (new evidence has emerged that the NYPD and FBI conspired to kill him) after he returned from Egypt where he learned that Islam was not about race, had his epiphany, and started appealing to whites as well as blacks to fight against racial discrimination. I was in the audience when Malcolm X addressed an assembly of almost all white students at Dartmouth College and received a standing ovation, just months before he was killed. Watch here and read here about the government's role in killing Malcolm X.
Today, the insights learned by these two charismatic leaders--that the oppressed are the vast majority regardless of race, and the oppressors are a small minority that can be defeated--continue to threaten the power of the ruling class. So much so that the ruling class has launched a propaganda campaign to make people forget these class insights and revert back to racialist thinking. The ruling class strategy is, as always, divide and conquer the working class by creating resentment and hostility between different races and ethnic groups.
Thus Big Money promotes "White Privilege" rhetoric (as leftist "political correctness") designed to make it seem that ordinary white people benefit from the oppression of blacks. It uses Affirmative Action to foment white resentment of blacks. And whenever the opportunity arises, it uses leftist "political correctness" to ascribe racist motives to ordinary white people when their motives are not racist. One example of this is labeling whites who want job hiring and school admission requirements to be the same for all races* as "racists" even though this view is exactly what MLK, Jr. called for in his I Have a Dream speech when he famously said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Another example is claiming that the Zimmerman jurors acquitted because of racism and not reasonable doubt of guilt.
We need to recall, teach the younger generation, and never forget the insights that King and Malcolm X died for.
The government murdered Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton, because he was uniting black and white and Hispanic have-nots against the rich
“At 4: 30 a.m. on December 4, 1969, six years after the arrest of Thomas Arthur Vallee, Sergeant Daniel Groth commanded the police team that broke into the Chicago apartment of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The heavily armed officers shot both men to death.[ 154] In 1983 the Black Panther survivors of the raid and the families of Hampton and Clark were awarded $ 1.85 million in a lawsuit against federal, state, and Chicago officials and officers including Daniel Groth.[ 155] Groth acknowledged under oath that his team of officers had carried out the assault on Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at the specific request of the FBI.[ 156]
"Northeastern Illinois University professor Dan Stern researched Daniel Groth’s background. He discovered that Groth had taken several lengthy “training leaves” from the Chicago Police Department to Washington, D.C., where Stern and other researchers believed Groth “underwent specialized counterintelligence training under the auspices of both the FBI and the CIA.”[ 157]
"According to Stern, “Groth never had a normal [Chicago] police assignment, but was deployed all along in a counterintelligence capacity,” with an early focus on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.[ 158]
"From his research Stern concluded that “the CIA and the Chicago police were very tight,” and that while technically a member of the Chicago police, Daniel Groth probably worked under cover for the CIA.[ 159] When a journalist confronted Groth and asked him point-blank, “Are you CIA?” Groth just shrugged it off.[ 160]”
— JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass
“In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party, notably led by the charismatic Fred Hampton, began to form alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latinx group the Young Lords Organization and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots. Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar America to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition.”
“On December 4, 1969, the Chicago police, under the direction of Illinois State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, raided Fred Hampton's apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street with a warrant to search for weapons. Twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton and 18-year-old Party member Mark Clark were killed in the raid. Though authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on police, ballistic reports revealed police fired 99 shots, against one from the Panthers. Later investigations suggest that the FBI, the Cook County State's Attorney's office, and the Chicago police conspired to murder Fred Hampton. No police officer was charged in the shooting, but 13 years later, survivors of Hampton and Clark were paid nearly $2 million by the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government in settlement of a civil rights suit stemming from the shootings.”
“In 1969, two young black men were killed in Chicago. Members of the Black Panther Party, they were murdered by the police as they slept.
“Fred Hampton had proved to be a prolific organizer in the southside of Chicago. His skills were not just relegated to the black community, however. Through a long and arduous process, he had succeeded in building a “Rainbow Coalition” of working class blacks, latinos, and whites.
“Black Panther Bobby Lee recalls his work with the white members of the “Young Patriots”:
"First of all, the Patriots’ leader William “Preacherman” Fesperman was one of the best human beings I have ever met. He was originally from North Carolina before he moved to Chicago. However, many of the Panthers left the group when we built alliances. Some didn’t like the Patriots, some just didn’t like white people in general. They were heavy into nationalism. To tell the truth, it was a necessary purging, except for these niggers took themselves out of the organization. The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle. Preacherman would have stopped a bullet for me, and nearly tried. Once, I was in a meeting up in Uptown, and I decided to leave by myself. I immediately determined that the police were following me. I made the mistake of leaving alone. The cop called out “You know what to do,” and I put my hands up against the wall. Preacherman came outside and saw what was going on, and in the cold of winter brought the men, women and the children outside. The cops put me in the car and they totally surrounded it, demanding my release. The cop called someone and they must have told him to let me go. I’ll never forget looking at all those brave motherfuckers standing in the light of the police car, but staring in the face of death. Looking back, was there enough basis for unity? Hell, yeah! When I went to Uptown Chicago, I saw some of the worst slums imaginable. Horrible slums, and poor white people lived there. However, two organizations prepared the way for the Rainbow Coalition, without them there wouldn’t have been a chance of forming one. Rising Up Angry (rua) and join Community Union. The uptown neighborhood was prime recruiting zone for white supremacists. Most of the cats who were in the Patriots also had at least one family member in the Klan. Cats like Mike James and Jewnbug, and Tappis worked hard to fight that mentality. Mike James and rua drove a wedge in that bullshit, that white supremacist bullshit, their groundwork was just amazing, out of this world. When did I first meet the Young Patriots? It was at the Church of the Three Crosses. There was a meeting, and it was the one recorded in the movie American Revolution II. After the crowd left, the Patriots were still there. We asked the Minister if he could let us have his office. We asked the Patriots if they could work with the Panthers and they said yes. I didn’t even tell Fred for the first three weeks of meeting with these cats. It wasn’t easy to build an alliance. I advised them on how to set up “serve the people” programs—free breakfasts, people’s health clinics, all that. I had to run with those cats, break bread with them, hang out at the pool hall. I had to lay down on their couch, in their neighborhood. Then I had to invite them into mine. That was how the Rainbow Coalition was built, real slow."
“The coalition built by Fred Hampton brought leather clad Black Panthers together with white working class youth that dressed in jean jackets and Confederate Flags. Alliances were built along class lines, with a common enemy: the political and economic elite of Chicago.”
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*If the corporate/government elite who promote Affirmative Action (Richard Nixon initiated it) truly wanted to end discrimination against racial minorities, who are disproportionately working class, and do it in a way that would have promoted solidarity between the different races, then they would have ended the use of job hiring and school admission requirements whose only real purpose is to discriminate against working class individuals. The SAT test does this, so it should not be used. Furthermore, working class schools are notoriously worse than the private elementary and secondary schools that wealthy people send their children to. Working class schools are standardized test-prep centers designed to teach working class children that they are not deserving of good jobs and respect (the standardized tests are "norm referenced," which means that the failure rate is determined in advance by the test designers, not by how well students have learned their lessons.) In contrast, the private schools for children of the wealthy don't use the standardized tests, and teach their students that they deserve and can expect "leadership" jobs and respect when they grow up. The same corporate elite that endorses Affirmative Action also leads the way in making working class schools worse and worse. Why? Because both things serve the same purpose: maintaining class inequality.