Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Philosophy of Resistance


















4 April, 2008

Martin Luther King: A Philosophy of Resistance

AIDA CALVIAC MORA

The official version blames fugitive James Earl Ray for the assassination on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

"A man can't ride your back unless it is bent," was one of his most famous sayings.

Perhaps it was true. Although masked hands behind the scapegoat could have taken Martin Luther King’s life for "other sins."

When the "American dream" was for blacks in the United States one more of the segregationist Jim Crow laws, a Baptist preacher dared to imagine a day when there would truly be equality among people in his country.

"I have a dream," exclaimed King several times in his speech in Washington in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial before more than 200,000 gathered to demand their civil rights; Afro-Americans who the laws and "good southern customs" tried to cheat out of their dignity.

At that time, and almost a century after slavery was abolished, discrimination "adorned" the great majority of the public facades, legitimized by perpetual signs saying "white’s only" or "blacks prohibited." King, who became the national leader of the civil rights movement, gave these excluded people a peaceful but energetic philosophy of protest, a strategy of resistance that his killers couldn’t forgive.

Forty years after his death, the Afro-American community is torn by postponed and broken desires; and segregation, hidden behind euphemisms, takes the most subtle path to be imposed. Nonetheless, social justice still winks at the minorities so they don’t stop dreaming.

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