As you are one of the few people in this thread who is the least bit interested in the legacy of King, I thought I'd bring to your attention a new text: A CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR, YOUNG PEOPLE, and THE MOVEMENT. It just arrived in my office today. Since I've not read it I won't try to evaluate it. (I leave the judging of works one hasn't read to fakers like Assdurratin. LOL). However, I would point out that the author, Dr. Rufus Burrow, Jr., is one of the top King scholars of our time. So, I'd probably give him the benefit of the doubt. You may find it in some library if you'd like to look it over and decide for yourself whether it's worth purchasing. Since I get these books free from fellow scholars I often don't have to buy them. A CHILD WILL LEAD THEM does look interesting. However, Rufus Burrow's magnum opus, the philosophical and theological work which established his reputation as a King scholar, is the marvelous work, GOD AND HUMAN DIGNITY: THE PERSONALISM, THEOLOGY AND ETHICS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. If your funds are limited and you have to choose, choose GOD AND HUMAN DIGNITY.
-Savant
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You can read Burrows for yourself. It now seems to be commonly understood by King scholars that King was (like most Social Gospel theologians) a Christian socialist. At the very least a social democrat. He was way past liberalism, and rejected conservatism almost out of hand--probably because the staunchest opposition to the Black movement and justice for the poor came from the Right. Liberalism (at least in the State) simply proved to be too weak-kneed and unreliable. What's stupid is not the idea that King was a socialist (since he reveals his socialist convictions numerous times from his student days to the time of Memphis), but rather the idiotic assumption that he was a Republican when he EXPLICITLY rejected BOTH parties, claiming the main--or at least most MILITANT --opposition within the State to the Black freedom Movement came from an alliance of reactionary Dixiecrat segregationists in the South and reactionary (usually racist) right wing Republicans in the North. What's remarkable is that people INSIST that he was a Republican even though he explicitly rejects that, but deny that he was a democratic socialist despite his own stated support for democratic socialism.
-Savant
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Interestingly enough, Nkrumah was MORE explicit in his rejection of capitalism than was Dr. King. MOre OPEN about his SOCIALISM, and clearly more Marxist leaning (King rejected Marxism partly because he rejected materialism). How did you work your way through NEOCOLONIALISM or CLASS STRUGGLE IN AFRICA without noticing Nkrumah's Marxism? I think you're about the first person I've met who supposedly READ Nkrumah and missed that. With King, there's an agreement with Marx on this, and a disagreement on that--but overall a rejection of Marxist materialism (which is clearly accepted by Nkrumah in CONSCIENCISM) in favor of the philosophical idealism of Personalism. I understand that you don't grasp subtleties, but at least the OBVIOUS should not escape you.
-Savant
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Supposedly, America is a "democracu " or "republic ", not a Fascist state. American police need to learn how to be civilized public servants and not fascistic gestapos.
-Savant
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Dr. King voiced his socialist convictions on a number of occasions. He thinks of socialism as a "more fully developed democracy." It is mnopoly capitalism which involves theft or, as King put, taking necessities from the mases to give luxury to the classes. Read GOING DOWN JERICHO ROAD by Michael Honey. Also, look at FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE. King mentions his socialist convictions in letters to friends and to Coretta Scott, one of which appears in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. And in the course of several volumes of the King Papers those socialist convictions of King are mentioned a number of times. A number of King scholars are quite aware of this. King actually believed that a democratic socialism (which he sometimes calls "commonwealth ) would express Christian ideas of brotherhood and the equality of all in he eyes of God.
-Savant
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Yes, and as I pointed out in an essay I sent to you, Harrisson, Attai, Ekdesiladki and others, King has much sympathy for that kind of SOCIALISM. And he saw socialism as perhaps an expression of Christian ethics. He certainly saw monopoly capitalism as antithetical to Christian ethics.
-Savant
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Christiaity and SOCIAL Justice: Kingian insight "I wish today, that Christians would stop talking so much about religion, and start doing something about it, and we would have a better world. But the problem is that church has SANCTIONED every evil in the world. Whether it's racism, or whether it's the evils of monopoly capitalism, or whether it's militarism. And this is why these things CONTINUE to exist today." Martin Luther KIng, Jr., Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, January 7, 1968 Quoted on p. 173 of GOING DOWN JERICHO ROAD: THE MEMPHIS STRIKE, MARTIN LUTHER KING'S LAST CAMPAIGN
-Savant
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In fact, there were even Marxist critics of the USSR who argued that the Soviet elite even practiced more or less the same kind of exploitation---expropriation of surplus value--as did the capitalists of the West. Polish workers, with their wry humor, often perceived this correctly: "In the West they have the exploitation of man by man. Here in Poland it is just the reverse."
-Savant
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