The Martin Luther King Thread

"What is that goddamned ****** preacher doing to me?" - LBJ

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/16/what-the-santa-clausification-of-martin-luther-king-jr-leaves-out/

Kennedy aides finally scheduled King's private audience with the President early on a weekend morning. Then, having secured King's acceptance, they sandwiched him between an even earlier presidential meeting with Roy Wilkins and a later one with all the major civil rights leaders ... Only then did Kenneth O'Donnell notify King that he was expected to stay on for the larger meeting, which White House press officials presented publicly as the major story ... Taking the best he could get, King kept his White House appointment on Saturday, June 22.

While Roy Wilkins met first with President Kennedy, [Asst. Atty. Gen] Burke Marshall gathered privately with King and several SCLC aides ... Marshall took King aside for one of those urgently confidential government discussions ... King could no longer defer the threat of Communist infiltration in the SCLC, Marshall warned. Specifically, he must sever relations with Stanley Levison, who was a Communist functionary, and with Jack O'Dell, whom Levison had "planted" ... King's first reaction was to shrug in amused disbelief ... When he tried to tell Marshall that there must be some mistake, some confusion perhaps between an outright Communist and a person who had sympathized with Marxist tenets, Marshall contradicted him. This was not paranoid mush, he said, but hard intelligence from the very pinnacle of the U.S. government. Levison ... was "a paid agent of the Soviet Communist apparatus" ... When King asked to see proof, the point Marshall stressed was that neither he nor King was in a position to second-guess the highest U.S. national security experts, and even if they were ... the controlling fact was that President Kennedy was about to "put his whole political life on the line" with the civil rights bill, and the President simply could not make himself vulnerable to charges of Communist association.

Seeing from King's face that he was not convinced, Marshall was obliged to deliver him straightaway to Robert Kennedy for another round on the same subject. The initiative for these confrontations had come from the Attorney General, who had called J. Edgar Hoover the previous Monday to arrange a special FBI briefing on just how dramatic and explicit he could make the new warning to King ... Hoover was only too happy to comply ... For once, Kennedy was pushing Hoover about the threat of domestic subversion instead of vice versa. Now the Attorney General found it worth paying tribute to Hoover in order to gain a measure of control over King. Here was a man who was boring in on the White House, threatening to deform or destroy its domestic political base, and yet he held no public office, displayed no personal ambitions that could be traded on, succeeded by methods such as going to jail, and thrived on the very upheavals that most unsettled the Administration... With King talking of a demonstration that might turn the capital into a giant Birmingham, Robert Kennedy ... would gain a bargaining hold if King admitted his movement was poisoned.

But King shrugged off Robert Kennedy too. He kept asking for proof, saying that these terrible spy terms did not ring true of the men he had known so well ... Everybody he knew in the movement had been called a Communist for years, himself included. People across the South were calling even Robert Kennedy a Communist ... Kennedy insisted that this was different ... Levison's true nature was even more fiendish than he was being allowed to tell King, and ... evidence came from the highest and most sophisticated machinery of American espionage ... To King, however, these state secrets only fed the spiral of disbelief. The higher Kennedy reached for authority, the less his descriptions sounded like the Levinson whom King knew. The more Kennedy evoked the omniscience of the government's central brain, the more that brain sounded like an ordinary segregationist....

When King walked into the Oval Office, President Kennedy asked him to take a private stroll outdoors in the Rose Garden. When they were alone he said, "I assume you know you're under very close surveillance." King said little in reply.... The President's manner employed the most potent combination of power and intimacy to warn that King could have no secrets....

The President put a hand on his shoulder and almost whispered that he had to "get rid of" Levison and O'Dell. "They're Communists," Kennedy said. When King replied that he was not sure what that meant, as Hoover considered a great many people Communists, President Kennedy came back instantly with specifics ... Stanley Levison's position was too highly classified for him to give details, but the President could say that Levison was O'Dell's "handler" ... These were the hard facts, said Kennedy. O'Dell was fully engaged in conspiracy as the "number five Communist in the United States."

"I don't know how he's got time to do all that," [King] managed to reply. "He's got two jobs with me...." Kennedy stressed the international implications of the threat by declaring that both Levison and O'Dell were "agents of a foreign power...." [King] said he would need to see proof before he could believe such things of these men.

President Kennedy took another tack. "You've read about Profumo in the papers?" he asked... the British Secretary of State for War had given his name to a sensational scandal by first denying, then admitting, that he had carried on an extramarital affair with a gorgeous lady of the night ... who was simultaneously romancing a Soviet diplomat ... The ongoing revelations obsessed President Kennedy to the point that he had ordered all State Department cables on the Profumo case sent to him at full length, without summary.... Kennedy warned King that sudden explosions from the underworld of sex and spying could ruin public men.... Truth was only part of the equation.... King must not let his personal esteem for Levison blind him to the enormous stakes he was playing for.... "If they shoot you down, they'll shoot us down, too," Kennedy told King. "So we're asking you to be careful...."

King said he still would like to see some proof ... Rather than extend further appeals to King's trust, [Kennedy] broke off the discussion and led the way back inside from the Rose Garden.

O'Dell is still with us - 93yo, living in Vancouver.

:)

Hoover's dead, cardiac event. RFK and JFK both died by assassination. Only one of them has a day. History: occasionally just.

I love the juxtaposition going on in that. All four big time American dudes from the history DLH excerpts above are dead. One died alone and unloved by anyone, from a heart attack, the rest of the US sigh of relief, etc. the building named after him is falling apart.

Three were assassinated. Two were Kennedys. One was president, the other would have been.

The last one was black, from Alabama.

i think abt this story a lot cuz it is so weirdly like a fairy tale -- the three encounters, each at a deeper level of the maze, the talisman of "show me it's true" met each time with "we can't show you, that's how true it is" until it's met in the garden at the center with "don't you understand -- it doesn't matter if it's true." the hero leaves a hero, having stood up under all the power there is, but he is still troubled by what he heard in the garden: truth is only part of the equation. if they shoot you down, they'll shoot us down too.

anyway the above is from vol 1 of taylor branch's MLK trilogy, which is as major as caro's johnson (lol) if a lot denser; every1 should read it. happy american pride day.

Thanking u dlh (and the others here who've apparently mentioned it over the years) for introducing me to The King Years. Started reading volume one this weekend and that is pretty much all I did this weekend. It's clearly an important historical text but it also seems like a pretty crucial guidebook for navigating the landscape of today.

glad! yeah among other things it is an excellent ~movement history~, v focused on tactics and responses and day-by-day events and a cast of hundreds whose synthesized interviews (check the endnotes, these are practically an oral history) are where the narrative voice is coming from. completely immersive but yes u feel the tether the whole time.

vol2 doubles as a malcolm x bio (+ history of NOI) and is my favorite, also of course feat.s the always-welcome character LBJ in strong supporting role. vol3 is fucking wrenching, if not the best book i've read about the late 60s then the richest.

also find it kinda uh, historiographically revelatory, that it is always at the same time a great-man history (my post above: big men talking in rooms) and a social history, one that's rly focused on collective action and the contexts that create movement (and on individuals whose names you don't already know). would admire this combination in any book but it's particularly apropos in this one, reinforces its themes, etc.. honestly the trilogy it reminds me of is trotsky's history of the revolution.

Need to ready Taylor Branch's bio.

― lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 16, 2012 6:38 PM

I've fixed this.

couldn't remember if it confirmed Gore Vidal's anecdote concerning JFK and RFK calling Bayard Rustin "Martin Luther Queen" w/a snigger

nor can i but it contains the one where MLK is watching JFK's funeral after months of being dicked around for an unmaterialized civil rights bill he does not now expect from LBJ, and sends hoover, thru the bugs, into orgasmic rage w a single remark as jackie kneels by the coffin

it's 50 years since the Beyond Vietnam speech

It was an acute and devastating threnody, which King read in a methodical cadence. He never broke from his script to preach that night—he scaled back his usual range of articulation to sound, Jones said, like “he was speaking a dissertation.” By the time he had gotten through the above section, he had exhausted any hope of finding a credible reason for the U.S. to maintain its involvement in the conflict. And this was nine months before the Tet offensive, a year before the massacre at My Lai. King was not backing into a widely sponsored position.

But ultimately he had his sights beyond the current war. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” he said. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” King warned of a time of endless war, when the U.S. would be trapped in one overseas entanglement after another while the gap at home between the rich and poor grew ever larger.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/martin-luther-king-jr-s-searing-antiwar-speech-fifty-years-later

@FBI
Today, on the anniversary of his assassination, the FBI honors the life, work, & commitment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to justice.

lol

Honoring him in death as they did in life. God bless them.

any good new articles on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? usually there is all kinds of stuff even the pop culture sites run things like the comic book they did or some episode of a tv shows that talks about him, or other cultural retrospective, etc.

i just went to the NY Times and there's no story King or the march, there are two things on Trump and there is a "If We Had Cellphone Alerts in 1968: War. Assassinations. Protests. What would 1968 have looked like in news alerts?"

anybody see anything good today? i dont want to read about neo nazis again for godsake

or Aziz Ansari, who cares about this dude

good stuff here

http://www.thekingcenter.org/about-mrs-king

In Trump Remarks, Black Churches See a Nation Backsliding
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

On the day before Martin Luther King’s Birthday, churchgoers said Mr. Trump’s denigration of immigrants was one more turn toward an uglier past in America.

this is the one story on the NY Times front page right now that mentions Dr. King and it's about Donald Trump

Great piece by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/15/remembering-martin-luther-kings-radical-class-politics/

And another great piece she wrote back in Jan 2016:

https://socialistworker.org/2016/08/15/when-king-came-up-against-chicago-racism

That painting by the Haitian artist is great (probably already on your FB wall, so I won't post it).

Not new, but I posted this passage from one of the volumes of Taylor Branch's biography of MLK (very much worth reading) on my FB last year:

King, in the lolling drone of closing announcements, was reminding his audience of major SCLC events ahead ... when one of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King's left cheek. He staggered backward and spun half around.

The entire crowd observed in silent, addled awe. Some people thought King had been introducing the man as one of the white dignitaries so conspicuously welcome at Birmingham's first fully integrated convention. Others thought the attack might be a staged demonstration from the nonviolence workshops. But now the man was hitting King again, this time on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in the back. Shrieks and gasps went up from the crowd, which, as one delegate wrote, "surged for a moment as one person" toward the stage. People recalled feeling physically jolted by the force of the violence - from both the attack on King and the flash of hatred through the auditorium.

The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows, expecting, as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck powerfully. After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands. It was the look on his face that many would not forget. Septima Clark, who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers and would not have been shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted leader, marveled instead at King's transcendent calm. King dropped his hands "like a newborn baby," she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts.

It was the response of his quickest instincts.

All I can say is that it takes enormous mental discipline over a long time to develop an "instinct" like that.

Psychiatric nursing 101 is all it takes.

i wrote about US empire’s most reliable ideological ally, The Washington Post editorial board, publishing the most saccharin and ahistorical Martin Luther King tributes in recent memory—which is saying a lot, given the crowded field. https://t.co/hEq6Obpash

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) January 17, 2018

thanks for those articles, tarfumes and kingfish

Halberstam on MLK Jr. in August 1967 (Harper’s): “Possible nationalization of certain industries, a guaranteed annual income…" pic.twitter.com/u6LccDojHq

— noah kulwin (@nkulw) January 25, 2018

Given Branch's broad scope beyond the life of King specifically, I was jarred by America in the King Years ending very abruptly with King's assassination. Thankfully, I managed almost by accident to track down A Nation on Fire by Clay Risen, which is focused entirely upon national reaction in the week following the assassination and details many of the ways in which white America's reaction to the riots led us to where we are today. Highly recommended.

hadn't seen any discussion of this yet:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/arts/king-fbi-tapes-david-garrow.html

i haven't read any of garrow's books and he seems to be fairly well-regarded, but i read his piece and thought the evidence for the accusation that's making headlines seemed pretty weak

tape archive release in 2027

Remember that right-wing dickshits are forever running this shit under people's noses for, like, being generally peace-loving and nonviolent and supporting equality and shit. As if it's going to convince you to start beating people up and hating people who are different from you.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/06/historical-hackery-and-the-legacy-of-martin-luther-king

this isn't really about martin luther king jr. himself but the holiday. every time the holiday comes around, in my conservative (racist) western state, at my largely conservative (racist) workplaces, staffed largely by white people, there is always this awkward (racist) tendency to tip-toe around it or, like, not acknowledge the reason for the holiday / pretend it doesn't exist. today in a staff meeting my supervisor said, pretty much verbatim, "i absolutely love martin luther king jr., he is one of my biggest heroes and i could talk about him for a long time." it was SO CRINGE. these people have tons of sanctimonious boilerplate around the fascist holidays, why is it so hard to celebrate someone who stood for equality? obviously i know the answer but, god, if i were a supervisor i would rehearse something ffs.

I don’t know, but if it’s insincere I wouldn’t want to hear any mealy mouth boilerplate about how he stood for peace and love and colorblindness.

yeah, I'm looking forward to the annual bullshit CEO email about how "most importantly, he stood for peace" at which point I destroy my work laptop

course, this is the same CEO that said during the riot "while I know you will continue to delivery high quality work to your clients, make sure to take a few minutes off if you need it" while the shit aws still ongoing

ughhhh

yes, i agree re: the less preachy bs from management about a holiday the better.

I can't recommend Taylor Branch's biography of King highly enough. It restores to view all the deep and daily complexities of the problems faced by the civil rights movement, so it is possible to understand King's place in it. The bland bromides that get repeated every January have reduced that vast tumultuous history to the size of a pea.

Seconded. All three volumes are amazing and eye-opening. My one and only criticism is that, for a biography which is in a way about the entire civil rights movement as it is about King himself, it's very frustrating that the third volume ends abruptly with his assassination without going into any of the immediate fallout (about which I would highly recommend Clay Risen's A Nation on Fire, which is entirely focused on the reactions to the assassination in the days and weeks and months following).

And of course I posted pretty much exactly that two years ago upthread. Bears repeating, though.

Thirded, though I admit my attention wandered during the lengthy sections regarding the internal schisms within the Nation of Islam, though I understand it was necessary background to the Malcom X chapters in the second volume.

And of course I posted pretty much exactly that two years ago upthread. Bears repeating, though.

Kinda blows my mind that he would only be in his 90s now, I don’t know why.

Great revive

I heard today that he hid his cigarette smoking from his children

it was just nice to hear something simple and human about a figure that's almost become godlike here in the U.S.

relatable too