Strangechord

A few days ago I read “The Martin Luther King You Don’t See On TV”, written by the founder of FAIR in 1995. The piece discusses King’s crusades in the last few years of his life, after the civil rights victories. We usually don’t hear of these final activist campaigns because they condemn poverty and prejudice against the poor, the U.S. economic structure, and war - all subjects the mainstream media has never been very comfortable criticizing.

I heard one of Dr. King’s final speeches this morning on KBOO community radio: “Where do we go from here?” from August 16, 1967, one year before his death. The speech is radical and visionary and as relevant today as ever.

There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, Who owns the oil? You begin to ask the question, Who owns the iron ore? You begin to ask the question, Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water? These are questions that must be asked.