Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., What Would You Say?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., What Would You Say?

By Cornel West
Via - YouTube
March 21, 2016

You don’t play with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and you don’t play
with his people.

By his people, I mean people of good conscience, fundamentally
good people committed to peace and truth and justice, especially
the Black tradition that produced it.

All of the blood, sweat and tears that went into producing a
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., generated a brother of such high
decency and dignity that you don’t use his prophetic fire for
a moment of presidential pageantry without understanding the
challenge he represents to all of those in power, regardless of
what color they are.

The righteous indignation of a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
becomes a moment of political calculation.

And that makes my blood boil. Why?

Because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died…he died…for the
three crimes against humanity that he was wrestling with.

Jim Crow, traumatizing, terrorizing, stigmatizing Black people.
Lynching, not just ‘segregation’ as the press likes to talk about.

Second, carpet bombing in Vietnam killing innocent people,
especially innocent children, those are war crimes that Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was willing to die for.

And thirdly, was poverty of all colors, he said it is a crime against
humanity for the richest nation in the world to have so many of it’s
precious children of all colors living in poverty and especially on the
chocolate side of the nation, and on Indian reservations and brown
barrios and yellow slices and black ghettos — we call them hoods
now, but ghettos then.

So I said to myself ain’t nothing wrong with putting your hand on
the bible, even though the bible’s talking about justice, Jesus is
talking about the least of these, but when you put it on Martin’s
bible, I said this is personal for me, because this is the tradition
that I come out of.

Brother Martin Luther King, Jr., what would you do
about the new Jim Crow?

What would say about the Prison Industrial Complex?

What would you say about the invisibility of so many of our
prisoners, so many of our incarcerated, especially when 62%
of them are there for soft drugs and not one executive of a
Wall Street bank has gone to jail?

Not one.

Not one wire-tapper, not one torturer under the
Bush Administration.

Then what would he say about the drones on the precious brothers,
and sisters, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Somalia, in Yemen,
in Pakistan, and in Syria?

These are war crimes, just like the war crimes in Vietnam.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., what would you say?

- Cornel West

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