The Cincinnati Beacon
Dr. King, Rev. Wright, Patriotism and COINTELPRO
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Posted by Justin Jeffre
Race and anti-Americanism have been hot topics in the news because of Rev. Wright’s comments. We should remember Dr. King also made similar critical comments about the American empire. J. Edgar Hoover considered Dr. King a Communist and public enemy #1. In fact, King was under constant surveillance and was targeted by our governments COINTELPRO program.
Hillary Clinton and many so called pundits have called Rev. Wrights comments “hate speech” while remaining silent about McCain’s “agents of intolerance”. Wright has been called a hate monger, a racist and anti-American, but Dr. King made very similar statements about America’s history and foreign policy.
King said, “It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.” He said, “America was founded on genocide and a nation that is founded on genocide is destructive.” He said, “The vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.” When similar words were spoken by Rev. Wright he was denounced as a racist and called divisive.
Today an overwhelming majority of Americans think of King as a great American with an almost saint like status. Yet while King was alive he was hated by many Americans. In the south King was seen as a Communist, an outside agitator, a rabble-rouser and a divisive trouble maker.
King even began to upset people within the civil rights movement when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam. He believed our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. He gave speeches against the Vietnam war and said it was merely a symptom of our country’s great illness.
King fearlessly spoke truth to power. He dared to say, “The greatest purveyor of violence today is my own government.” If King were alive today many conservatives would surely put King in the “hate America first club.” Though the corporate media celebrates King’s life every year, they exclude the last two years of his life.
Too many Americans today think that patriotism is blind obedience to the government. Too some flag waiving and putting bumper stickers on their cars that say “support our troops” makes them feel like they are really supporting our country, but those are just empty gestures. Frederick Douglas gave us a much better definition of patriotism. Douglas said “it is a lover of one’s country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.” By this standard, King was certainly our nation’s greatest Patriot.
FBI director and extreme right winger, J. Edgar Hoover, considered King and his Poor People’s Campaign a major threat to the country. Hoover despised King because he believed he was a Communist and Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave Hoover the green light to put King under constant surveillance. (Most Americans don’t know the FBI even went so far with their psychological warfare against King as to send him a note encouraging him to commit suicide and threatening him with releasing information about his infidelity.)
I was in Memphis at the Media Reform Conference last year when Amy Goodman interviewed several people who were in Memphis at the time of the assassination. Rev. Jessie Jackson was with King at the time of his assassination and doesn’t believe that James Earl Ray could’ve acted alone. Jackson also spoke at the Media Reform Conference in Memphis last year and this is an excerpt from Amy Goodman’s interview with him.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: James Earl Ray was a pawn in the bigger game. He perhaps pulled the trigger, but he didn’t have the money, the motivation nor the transportation to get from here to London on the way to Rhodesia at that time. He had great assistance. To get from downtown Memphis, an alias, out of the city, out of the country, he had lots of support. Our government had been convinced Dr. King was the enemy of the state. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, had said as much, that Dr. King, if you’re going to arrest a hundred men in emergency, that he would be one of them. He called Dr. King a damn liar, when he said that Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, the two Jews and black who were killed, that the FBI was not working hard to find the killers. Hoover said he was a damn liar. He saw Dr. King as an enemy. He was a fierce right-winger. He tried to embarrass him. He tried to hurt him. The Johnson forces, who were all with him—it’s a march for public accommodations—they felt defensive about him being against the war. So he had enemies in high places. And yet, somehow it was painful for him, but he would not retreat.
According to the Huffington Post, Rev. Jackson says it was a government backed plot:
“I have always believed that the government was part of a conspiracy, either directly or indirectly, to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” he wrote in the forward to James Earl Ray’s autobiography Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young believes the government was responsible for King’s death, as well. “I’ve always thought the FBI might be involved in some way,” he said. “You have to remember this was a time when the politics of assassination was acceptable in this country. It was during the period just before Allende’s murder (the US backed coup in Chile on 9/11, 1973). I think it’s naïve to assume these institutions were not capable of doing the same thing at home or to say each of these deaths (King and the two Kennedys) was an isolated incident by ‘a single assassin.’ It was government policy.”
And Jackson’s not alone because King’s own family doesn’t believe that James Earl Ray killed King. After Ray’s death they put out this statement. “America will never have the benefit of Mr. Ray’s trial, which would have produced new revelations about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as establish the facts concerning Mr. Ray’s innocence,”
After all it just doesn’t make sense that James Earl Ray would just leave the gun and other evidence behind that was easily traceable to him. And we also know a special army sniper unit was there in Memphis tracking King’s every move. Here Goodman interviews a retired black policeman that was strangely pulled off of King’s security detail that day.
JERRY WILLIAMS: My name is Jerry Williams. I’m a retired Memphis policeman. During the time of Dr. King’s assassination, I was working the homicide bureau in the Memphis Police Department. And on two previous occasions when Dr. King would come to Memphis, I was assigned to head his security team. But the last time he came, there were no black officers assigned for that security.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
JERRY WILLIAMS: Well, I really don’t know. I just know that I reported to work on the morning of Dr. King’s assassination, and I was told by my inspector that we would not be on the assignment. So I commenced to do my regular duties as a homicide officer in the office, and later on, around 5:00 in the afternoon, we heard that Dr. King was assassinated. When we got the information in the office, Inspector Zachary said that we have to get down to the Lorraine Motel, that Dr. King had been assassinated. And I remember getting my hat and coat, and when I got to the door, the inspector said, “No, I’m going to have to have at least two officers to stay in the office, because we’re going to be getting calls from all over the country,” which we did.
In fact, not only was King targeted, but COINTELPRO was a government operation that was used to disrupt civil rights organizations. Fred Hampton was even assassinated while he was sleeping in his bed. Another leader from a black power group called the Invaders had negotiated with King hours before the assassination and was near the scene. He remembers COINTELPRO in Memphis.
Charles Cabbage: By the time I left from the hotel and got to my home, you know, my mother come running out of the house, you know, I mean, crying and everything. And she said, “Dr. King got shot.” Well, see, her reaction was one of tears and sadness and sorrow. Mine was, how long is it going to get them to get here, because, you know, the way that I could see that COINTELPRO was operating here inside of Memphis itself, now that I have done a little research and looked back, was that they wanted to create as much disruption as they could. And they did a pretty good job of it.
According to Jackson the FBI had been trying to disrupt their march.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: The week before, when he had marched, the FBI had put in some instigators, as it were, to disrupt the march to prove he no longer had leadership, he couldn’t control his demonstration. That was a setup. We finally knew that those guys were setups to disrupt the march.
We were talking about how to keep marching, because we were on our way to Washington to maybe engage in civil disobedience, demanding a job, an income, for every American. He had pulled together blacks and Appalachian whites and Jews and Native Americans and Latinos on the idea that there should be a floor beneath which no American would fall. We were on our way to Washington.
Many people can’t understand why the US government would have had any interest in silencing or killing a man of peace, especially such a great American like Dr. King. What most Americans don’t know is that during King’s last years of his life he had become a very powerful critic of American imperialism, the Vietnam War and he was building a Poor People’s Campaign that would fundamentally challenge the economic system of the nation.
In fact, one of King’s most powerful and virtually forgotten anti-war speeches about ”Vietnam and beyond” was delivered April 4th 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated. The speech was written by King’s close friend and neighbor Dr. Vincent Harding. Harding believes there’s a connection between the assassination and King’s critique of the war and the government.
DR. VINCENT HARDING: I have long felt, and I continue to feel, that it is impossible to understand Martin’s assassination by only understanding a white segregationist man who killed Martin by himself. I am deeply convinced that Martin’s two actions—one, of trying to organize the poor to challenge this government in Washington, D.C. in the Poor People’s Campaign; and Martin’s determination not just to speak out against the Vietnam, but to speak out against the entire imperialist and militarist direction of the country—all of that has to be understood when we try to understand Martin’s assassination. So, yes, I see a connection.
Harding recalls the building of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. He says there were poor whites from Appalachia, Native Americans from various parts of the country, Chicanos, Mexicanos from the Southwest primarily and there were blacks from both North and South. “And I was just struck by the way in which I saw, I felt in the faces of so many of the people there the question of “Are we really ready to go this far to bring a major challenge across these lines into the face of the nation itself?’”
Harding says King always understood that race and class were intricately involved in the life of this country. He also understood that the issues of poverty were issues that affected not only black people, but all kinds of other people, including white people. “And he knew that if there were to be, as he hoped there would be, an opportunity for the building of this country into its best possible development, then somehow the issue of poverty had to be addressed, and because he was a person of both words and actions, he knew that poverty could not really be addressed unless the poor themselves took action to challenge a country that would not take action on their behalf.”
According to Harding, King was saying in the last years of his life that America had to deal with what he called triple evils: the evil of racism, the evil of materialism and the evils of militarism. And he saw those three very much connected to each other. And by organizing the poor across racial lines, he was addressing those evils in a way that had to be done by somebody. And he was probably the only person in a position who could have called those groups of people together and said, “Let us make a common ground to create a new America.” King worked among the poor and was calling upon the country to look and see the condition of the poor in order that we might see the possibilities of a new America.
Dr. King understood that his life was in danger, the FBI had been trying to discredit him and the note encouraging him to commit suicide shows how far Hoover’s FBI was willing to go.
According to Harding, King thought about the risk to himself in these terms: “he was at great risk of damaging his own soul and spirit if he did not speak out against what he knew was terrible. King was, in the deepest part of his being, a pastor, caring for those who were beaten up, caring for those who were in need, and, in the great traditional ways of the Christian faith, caring for the most outcast and those who were considered poor and needy. King was always attuned to that. Had he not spoken on behalf of what the war was doing to those people in this country and overseas, he would not have been able to live with himself.”
In King’s last speech it seems clear that he knew his fate was to be a martyr for justice and the soul of our country. He was assassinated less than 24 hours after he spoke these words.
And they were telling me—now, it doesn’t matter now. It really doesn’t matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us. The pilot said over the public address system, “We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked and to be sure that nothing would be wrong on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully, and we’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night.”
And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
Dr. King was a true patriot because he gave his life to heal the soul of our nation. His “I have a dream” speech was really a critique of our nation’s broken promises. From there his critiques became even more pointed about America’s inverted priorities. He showed us all that individuals can create a new America through nonviolent civil disobedience. Rev. Wright is certainly not as eloquent as Dr. King (who is?), but Wright is right to rebuke our nation’s history of racism and militarism. Those who deny these basic truths show us how far we still have to go to realize King’s dream and vision for a new America.
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