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Meth, ppreciate the thoughts. Two points come to mind. It's very easy for me to reject the stale, static rendering of MLK as the post-racial, liberal. It is much more difficult to convincingly insist that we shouldn't bracket King's radicalism.What are your thoughts today, on the thirtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day?
I've been building with folks who, while acknowledging that King was quite radical on questions of racial and economic justice, are prone to locate that radicalism in the last two years of King's life. They point to his time in Chicago, his eloquent denouncement of the Vietnam War at Riverside Church, and solidarity with striking Memphis sanitation workers as examples of a post-'66 transformation.
But people are way more complicated. Sure his time in the Mississippi Delta during the summer of '66 was pivotal in shaping his thinking around poverty and economic inequality. But if you peep some of the archival doc's via. The King Center archive (http://www.thekingcenter.org/), he's talking about housing discrimination in Detroit and, in 1963, challenging the churches and synagogues of Chicago to use its power to deal with racial inequality. How, then, to make sense of changes in political and economic thought that clearly defy the neat binaries of peaceful, liberal king vs. radical king?
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