Was MLK moving towards Democratic Socialism?

[45nut]

I have been listening to Beck speak honorably talking about MLK and while reading some posts on The Blaze the other day a comment was said about MLK moving towards democratic socialism towards the later end of his life. I decided to look into it a bit and found this. I was born in 62 and really don't remember a lot of political stuff.

As he told journalist David Halberstam in early 1968, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

King also began to talk about the need for socialism. In a speech delivered to his staff in 1966, he said, “You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

article here

article here

Or, in King’s own words, from a 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council quoted in Jackson’s book, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

THROUGHOUT THE 1960s, King spoke as a social democratic as well as a civil rights leader. But only in the latter case was his message heeded or remembered. Despite the fact that the peroration of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is ritually replayed every year in January, when his birthday rolls around, few Americans today recall that the occasion for that speech was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (emphasis added). With Rustin as principal organizer, the march called for a “massive Federal Public Works program to provide jobs for all the unemployed,” and spoke of the “twin evils of discrimination and economic deprivation.” King welcomed Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of “war on poverty” the following year, but thought it did not go nearly far enough. How far was far enough? In October 1964 he called for a “gigantic Marshall Plan” for the poor. Two months later, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, he declared that America had much to learn from Scandinavian “democratic socialism.”

I'm not trying to stir the pot, but it looks like people are doing a little historical revision on ol MLK.

What say you?

[flyingtiger85]

45 Nut,here's something I didn't know.Most blacks were Republicans before 1964.Maybe there trying to say that about him to push thire agenda.


Why Martin Luther King Was Republican

by Frances Rice

08/16/2006




107
Comments


It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr​. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman's issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

[45Auto]

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a socialist? Not only would I agree that he was a democratic socialist I would go so far as to state that he was on the path of righteousness.

Dr. King knew that as long as Black America was subjected to economic exploitation freedom was but a hollow dream. Dr. King also was aware that as long as anyone was the subject of exploitation, no one was truly free. Now, as we all sit at the table of brotherhood, there won’t be as much bread for us to share with our brothers. We have to do things like give billions in subsidies to big oil. But at least I can say now that big oil and our other masters are not racists, economic exploitation is now for every working American. “Our” representatives are in their employ.

Above, there is an interesting Democratic bash written as a selective history lesson by Frances Rice. As Joe Stalin knew, you can mislead more effectively by selectively telling the truth than you can with a total lie, it's all in what you leave out and what you stretch. But let’s get real, this is 2011, folks. If General Nathan Bedford Forest was alive today he would not find much to his liking in either the Democrat party nor the G.O.P.

Unlike 1960, today, the majority of White Southerners tend to be Republicans and the majority of Black Americans are Democrats. It’s the great party flip-flop. But, what-the-heck, we all love Abe Lincoln, right? All of us except for the likes of Gen. N.B. Forest, that is.

[Jim K]

First, I think you have to have a definition of "democratic socialism"; not what you or I mean by it but what MLK meant by it. I have no doubt that he wanted a bigger piece of the pie for his people, but if he thought countries that have "democratic socialism" have no racism, he was wrong.

Jim