The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV
This classic essay on MLK by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon is included in the disinformation anthology You Are STILL Being Lied To:
It’s become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”
The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life.…
Martin Luther King, Jr.: ‘Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam’
On the date on his birth, let’s focus on matters that make the U.S. holiday matter even more:
What Tony Bennett Said About 9/11 Martin Luther King Jr. Would Have Also
Jazz singer Tony Bennett, a WWII veteran and pacifist, speaking about 9/11 and American militarism on the Howard Stern Show comments, ”But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right. They flew the plane in, but we caused it … Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”
Martin Luther King Jr. would have agreed with Tony exposing US history leading to 9/11.
As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his world shaking sermon, “Beyond Vietnam — a Time to Break Silence”, recounted to us the history of the lies, from 1945 onward, used to trick Americans into supporting the Vietnam war, today he would be exposing the lies that have concealed secret arrangements for CIA covert crimes against humanity in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere in the world since 1953 — arrangements that always originate within a dominant…
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life Advice Column
Could history’s greatest minds help you with your mundane daily problems? Perhaps not.
From 1957 to 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned “Advice for the Living”, a feature for Ebony magazine in which he answered readers’ questions on everything from the atom bomb to capital punishment to dating and how to catch a nice young man. (Make sure you have the “radiating personality, a pleasant disposition, and that feminine charm
which every man admires.”)
King recommends playing gospel music rather than rock, as rock ‘n’ roll “so often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths”. He tells how to gain self confidence. His admirable strategy of love and passive resistance seems to function a bit strangely when put to use in situations such as when a friend hits you on the head with an iron pole.
Murder in Memphis: Classic Out There Podcasts on MLK
Hey guys, I hope you enjoy this little nugget from my archive of past podcasts. 
Out There Radio: Episode 28 – Murder in Memphis
This episode is the first of two dealing with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In this first part, we deal with the events leading up to the assassination, including FBI surveillance and harrassment of Dr. King. Included in this episode is Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, in its entirety, recorded on April 4, 1967 (one year to the day before he was murdered).
Out There Radio: Episode 29 – Murder in Memphis, pt. 2
This episode is the second of two dealing with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This episode features a short discussion about the Military Commissions Act of 2006, followed by the second part of our look at the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.
MLK On Being Maladjusted
On his blog, Juan Cole highlights a speech that Martin Luther King Jr. gave at Western Michigan University on December 18, 1963, in which he extolled the virtues of being a misfit. It rings truer than ever in 2010:
Modern psychology has a word…”maladjusted.” Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.
But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination.
I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry.
I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions…
I Have a Dream … To Go To War?
The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to end it must be ours. — Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking of Vietnam.
This week the Pentagon sank to a new low: claiming that Dr. King would “understand” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. King’s legacy is clear: he opposed war and other violence and condemned war as “an enemy of the poor.”
