America is a settler colonial state. It was created based
on the evil
triplets of racism, poverty and war, as the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. once said, and it is hard to
shake it off. On this 55th anniversary of Dr.
King’s assassination--right off the heels of
the 58th anniversary of the assassination of
Malcolm X—we need to lean in on the reasons
why he was murdered, and why the slave master
must prevent the oppressed from taking over
the Big House.
Martin was a threat to the status quo, to the systems of
oppression that have kept people down by race,
gender, class, and other classifications. J.
Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, most certainly
thought King was a threat. Hoover—who was
allegedly a Black
man passing for white, at least according to Black folks who say they are his
relatives—established COINTELPRO to monitor,
infiltrate and erase Black leadership and
Black organizations. Hoover’s goal was to “Prevent
the RISE OF A “MESSIAH” who could unify, and
electrify, the militant black nationalist
movement,” a person such as King or Malcolm.
Those men were annihilated. So, too were
others such as Fred Hampton, leader of the
Chicago Black Panther Party, and Medgar Evers
of the Mississippi NAACP. Many others were
imprisoned, and civil rights and Black Power
organizations were undermined and declawed.
Looking
at King, we must remember what he was doing
when he was assassinated. Dr. King was in
Memphis, standing with the striking Black
sanitation workers who were fighting for their
humanity, dignity, and a living wage. He was
even planning a Poor
People’s Campaign in
Washington.
And
let’s not forget that King was highly
unpopular when
he died. The civil rights leader was veering
away from the traditional civil rights
approach of fighting only against racism in
the South. After all, he called for a radical
redistribution of political and economic
power. And
he broke his silence and made a declaration
against the war in Vietnam, and called the
U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today.” Able to connect
the dots between the oppression at home and
the war abroad, the inability to fight poverty
at home when resources were being drained and
wasted on the military.
“We were taking the black young men who had been crippled
by our society and sending them eight thousand
miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast
Asia which they had not found in southwest
Georgia and East Harlem,” King
said. “And so we have been repeatedly
faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro
and white boys on TV screens as they kill
and die together for a nation that has been
unable to seat them together in the same
schools.” Many in the civil rights
establishment and polite society turned
their backs on MLK because civil rights
leaders were supposed to know their place
and not stray away from the script and into
the uncharted territory of international
relations and human rights. Forming
alliances around the world is dangerous
business. And King was, after all, a Nobel
Peace Prize recipient. And Malcolm was going
to file charges against the U.S. at the
United Nations, which would’ve been a sight
to see.
Troublemakers such as Dr. King—making good trouble and
waging nonviolent revolution—were upsetting to
the establishment. This is why the government
had to neutralize Black leaders such as
Martin. Because in a settler colonial state,
there are two things the settlers fear—Black
folks overthrowing the plantation state, and
Black folks joining forces with the poor White
folks. And they just can’t have that.
