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- Not to be confused with Martin LutherMartin Luther King Jr.
Born Michael King Jr.
January 15, 1929
Atlanta, Georgia, United States of AmericaDied April 4, 1968 (aged 39)
Memphis, Tennessee, United States of AmericaCause of death Assassination via gunshot by the FBI Nationality New Afrikan
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was a Statesian Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the US civil rights movement from 1955 until the FBI assassinated him in 1968.[1]
King's legacy has been absorbed into the liberal capitalist establishment as a hero of nonviolence, yet his legacy as a critic of capitalism has been whitewashed by these capitalist powers.[2][3] As Lenin famously said:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
— Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution: Class Society and the State, 1917
While King may not have been a communist revolutionary, he was a coalition-builder with widespread appeal to the poor and downtrodden in the United States, which made him a natural ally to communists and socialists struggling for a more equitable society. The FBI even believed that he was a Marxist-Leninist with connections to CPUSA.[4]
Activism
Anti-Vietnam War
A year before his assassination, King denounced the Vietnam War in a speech at the Riverside Church in New York. Kwame Ture warned King that his anti-war views would endanger him.[1]
Poor people's campaign
In 1968, King came to Memphis to support a strike of sanitation workers. He was running for president with Benjamin Spock at the time of his death.[1]
Assassination
At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, a bullet hit King while he was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was declared dead an hour later. James Earl Ray was accused of the assassination and captured in Belgium two months later.[1]
In 1999, the jury of the wrongful death suit by the King family ruled unanimously that King was killed by a U.S. government conspiracy.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Jeremy Kuzmarov (2022-04-04). "Did J. Edgar Hoover Order the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr?" CovertAction Magazine. Archived from the original on 2024-02-29.
- ↑ "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: Yet Another Critic of Capitalism!" (2021-01-18).
- ↑ Andrew Wilkes (2022-01-13). "MLK ROOTED HIS ANTI-CAPITALISM IN HIS CHRISTIAN MINISTRY"
- ↑ “'King is a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it [Marxism], believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly' [...] King has been described within the CPUSA as a true, genuine Marxist-Leninist”
Federal Bureau of Investigation (1968). Martin Luther King, Jr: A Current Analysis: 'Formation of Southern Christian Leadership Conference' (p. 5). [PDF]