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Stories tagged with “Martin Luther King”

Economy

While Touting Commitment To MLK’s Values, JP Morgan Chase Moves To Foreclose On 78 Year-Old Civil Rights Activist

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 7, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Last month, JP Morgan Chase — the largest bank in the United States — launched a project to digitize the documents of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, making them available on the internet. “It’s important for JPMorgan Chase to support Dr. King’s legacy because of the important values he committed his life to promoting, such as equality, equal opportunity, and quality education for all. People like Dr. Martin Luther King are what made America what it is today. The values he espoused are the values that JPMorgan Chase also tries to stand for around the world,” said JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

But at the same time, as Change.org has noted, the bank is on the verge of foreclosing on a 78 year-old former civil rights activist:

Helen Bailey is a 78-year-old grandmother who participated in the civil rights movement, worked as a childcare provider for autistic children, and was a community volunteer. She has paid her mortgage since 1999, but now she can’t keep up the payments. All she wants is to stay in her home until she dies, in the neighborhood where she feels safe and has lived for nearly quarter of a century. She could have refinanced with a company willing to let her live in the house for free until her death, but Chase Bank would not reduce her principal by $9,000. She’s been paying 7% interest, well above most rates, so Chase could have decided they had made enough. Instead, they have started foreclosure…While Chase tries to tie itself to the incredible legacy of Martin Luther King, who really did believe in communities, Chase tries to throw a grandmother who marched for civil rights out onto the street.

“JP Morgan Chase must practice what it preaches,” said Gary Flowers, Executive Director and CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, Inc. “On one hand, the bank cannot earnestly invoke the values of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., while devaluing the very principles for which he lived and died.”

This is not the only mortgage-related issue JP Morgan has brought upon itself recently. Last year, JP Morgan found itself in hot water for overcharging members of the military on their mortgages, eventually agreeing to a $56 million settlement. The bank even sold off the home of a military member on the very day that he returned from Iraq.

One former JP Morgan banker told Reuters, “I don’t say this lightly, but the consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose of the banking organization.” And evidently that exploitation extends to touting the bank’s commitment to civil rights with one hand while foreclosing on a former civil rights activist with the other.

NEWS FLASH

Martin Luther King III: Alabama’s Immigration Law Is Like ‘Jim Crow’ | Calling it “Jim Crow Revisited,” Martin Luther King III and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka lay out similarities between the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr. helped lead in Alabama and the draconian anti-immigrant law in the same state. “The passage of Alabama’s anti-immigrant legislation, HB 56, invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South,” they write. “And the police state it has created is equally cruel.” In the op-ed, King and Trumka call on President Obama to stop immigration programs that lead to racial profiling, “including collaboration between state and local law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.” After a New York Times editorial compared HB 56 and the civil rights movement, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) said earlier this week that it was an “insult” to compare the law and the movement. However, it’s more likely that Martin Luther King Jr.’s son is the more authoritative source on if the two struggles are similar.

Politics

Rep. Allen West: ‘Martin Luther King Jr. Would Not Have Backed’ The 99 Percent Movement

By Tanya Somanader on Oct 19, 2011 at 5:55 pm

At the dedication of the national Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial last Sunday, the Rev. Bernice King said her father Dr. King would support the 99 Percent Movement: “I hear my father saying what we are seeing now all across the streets of America and the world is a freedom explosion.” She reminded the nation that civil rights leader worked not just for racial justice, but for economic justice as well. “We should never adjust to the one percent controlling more than 40 percent of the wealth,” she said.

Florida Rep. Allen West (R), however, was “born and raised” in the same town that Dr. King grew up in. Therefore, he asserted as a fact today in a Newsmax interview that “Martin Luther King, Jr. would not back these types of protesters”:

WEST: I was born and raised in the same town that Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up in. Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have backed these type of protesters. First of all, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a focus, he had a message. He was divinely inspired. I don’t know what the inspiration is for these individuals.

Watch it:

Unfortunately for West, geographical proximity clearly did not provide West any insight into the man himself. Like the 99 percent movement, King consistently called for economic justice. He critiqued unregulated free marketism as a system that permits “necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.” He envisioned a “Poor People’s Campaign” in which a multiracial coalition would march through the capital to “demand that President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, health care, and decent homes.”

King was assassinated just weeks before the march on May 12, 1968. Rev. Ralph Abernathy carried his legacy to DC, stating, “We come with an appeal to open the doors of America to the almost 50 million Americans who have not been given a fair share of American’s wealth and opportunity, and we will stay until we get it.” This, incidentally, is what the 99 Percent Movement is about.

This, however, is also what West sees as “contradictory to the foundational principles and values that we have in the United States.” If West grew up anywhere near Dr. King and his legacy, he has now turned his back on him.

Politics

MLK’s Daughter: My Father Would Have Supported The 99 Percent Movement

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Oct 17, 2011 at 9:40 am

Speaking at the dedication ceremony for a new monument to her father, the Rev. Bernice King said Martin Luther King Jr. would have been heartened by the Occupy Wall Street protests and larger 99 Percent Movement. “I hear my father saying what we are seeing now all across the streets of America and the world is a freedom explosion,” she said, adding that we should move beyond or conception of King’s work as just about “racial justice” to include “economic justice”:

“We are being pulled from the familiar place and comfort place of “I have a dream” to focus on another aspect of Dr. King’s life. Perhaps, the postponement [of the original dedication] was a divine interuption to remind us of the King that moved us beyond the dream of racial justice to action and work of economic justice.

Perhaps, God wanted to remind us that when our father was taken from us, he was in the midst of starting a poor people’s campaign where he was galvanizing poor people from all walks of life to converge on this nation’s capital and stay here and occupy this place until there was change in the economic system and a better distribution of wealth. [...]

In fact, we told us we must become maladjusted to certain social ills. We should never adjust to the one percent controlling more than 40 percent of the wealth.”

Watch it:

She added that we should “never adjust” to record-high unemployment, people lacking health care because they can’t afford it, “a judicial system that allows to take a life when guilt is yet in question,” and other miscarriages of justice. But she called on protesters to conduct themselves on a “higher order” in the quest for justice.

Climate Progress

Soul Force: Tar Sands Protest Echoes King’s Civil Rights March

By Joe Romm on Aug 30, 2011 at 10:00 am

Andy Burt being arrested at Keystone XL tar sands pipeline protest in DC August 21.

By Aylie Baker, Andy Burt, and Fran Ludwig

The ride to Anacostia Precinct is a short one, not more than ten minutes.

Thirteen women rode in the police wagon. No one had been arrested before — and yet — with our hands cuffed behind our backs and our bodies slick with sweat in the 90-degree heat, we were not afraid. There were only smiles on our faces.

Sirens blared as we left the White House gates and drove southeast over the Anacostia River. To get to Anacostia precinct  — it turns out — you have to follow signs toward Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Though he died before the first Earth Day, King would have been proud to see the scores of protestors lining up in front of the White House last week. He would have recognized something in the faces of the clergy, doctors, seniors and college students. Their call for equality and justice echoed that of the people who joined him on the streets of Montgomery.

Sunday we gathered for the Tar Sands Action — a 2-week protest that may be the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of the climate movement. We were protesting the construction of a massive oil pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

In simple terms, the Keystone XL Pipeline is a 1,700 mile fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet. NASA climatologist James Hansen has stated that if we fully exploit the tar sands, it’s “essentially game over” for the climate. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could rise far beyond 550 parts per million (ppm). Currently we’re near 395 ppm. Modern human civilization developed during a narrow range around 280 ppm.

The proposed pipeline runs through tribal lands, national water sources, and fertile farmland. Getting at the tar sands means cutting down a tract of Boreal forest the size the United Kingdom, which, like Brazil’s rainforest, helps to cancel out CO2 emissions that cause global warming.

And it’s marginalized people that King fought for who are most affected by climate change.

Read more

Alyssa

‘True Blood’ Open Thread: Malcom v. Martin

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 29, 2011 at 1:36 pm

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of True Blood, “Burning Down the House.”

If True Blood had no pretensions to political meaningfulness, it might be possible to enjoy it as a dopey, campy soap opera, to ignore some of the larger plausibility gaps (like the fact that Sookie just never got around to figuring out her faerie abilities since the writers appear to have forgotten about them) in favor of the pretty people. The problem is that Alan Ball appears to have some ambitions for the show. True Blood was, at one point, a decent little metaphor for gay rights and broader sexual liberation. But by shifting it into a riff on the African-American Civil Rights movement, the show’s gotten disastrous in a way that ought to cast doubt on the accepted narrative that Ball is an important and clear-thinking artist.

It’s one thing to do a story featuring several black characters, to have good intentions about it, and to handle it badly out of a lack of ability or sensibility. It’s entirely another to badly misappropriate the Civil Rights movement in the service of a shallow metaphor. If I thought last week’s episode of True Blood, in which two literally Magical Negroes worked together to bring peace to a white family, I might even be more offended by the crassness of the conversation between Bill and Nan this week after the massacre at the tolerance festival. “Remember the civil rights movement. Sweeping social change inevitably accompanied by violence and the appearance of chaos, yadda yadda,” Nan declares. “That’s the spin we’ll give it.” But Bill isn’t having any of it. “We are going after the Necromancer and we are taking her out,” he shoots back, pulling a weak white man’s ghost of Malcolm. “By any means necessary.”

There is a really important story, or stories, to be told about the way that movements have learned from each other, and the ways that the gay civil rights movement has failed to learn from the black civil rights movement — and the ways it couldn’t have replicated that movement. A story that was more tightly focused on Nan Flanagan and her efforts to build vampire narratives, networks, and allies, might be a way to explore that dynamic, which is an important one for American politics. Even a narrower focus on the witch-vampire storyline that took a broader look at anti-vampire sentiment and splits within the vampire community might be a powerful way to explore the tension in civil rights movements between separatists and assimilationists, to illustrate the broad-based roots of events like Jason and Jessica’s failed tryst, which leaves her walking away declaring, “I am not going to glamour you just because you don’t want to feel guilty. What about my guilt? Who’s going to make me forget? Fucking humans. I’m going to go find someone to eat.”

There is a way to make this metaphor work. This is not a function of vampires being tapped out as a topic. It’s a function of carelessness and lack of imagination, of blood and guts and sex trying to stand in for racial and sexual sensitivity. And it’s something that the folks involved ought to be embarrassed about.

Justice

Allen West Whitewashes MLK’s Legacy Into Conserative ‘Individual Responsibility’ Message

By Tanya Somanader and Ian Millhiser on Aug 26, 2011 at 5:25 pm

The historic national monument honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was unveiled this week in Washington. Reflecting on the history that led up to this occasion, GOP freshman Rep. Allen West (FL) — the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus — offered his thoughts on the seminal civil rights leader’s legacy to the National Journal. When asked whether King has “informed decisions in your career or personal life,” West painted Dr. King as if he were a conservative icon:

Dr. King’s message is and always shall be relevant. It is about individual responsibility and accountability to seek the highest good in your life … as a nation seeks its highest good. America can only be as great as the sum of its parts, all parts.

I think that, if Dr. King were to come back and see what has become of the black community, he would be appalled: The exorbitantly high unemployment rate, the second- and third-generation welfare families, the rampant decimation of the inner-city black communities, the incarceration rate of young black men, and the breakdown of the black family would all bring a tear to his eye.

Indeed, King might weep at the current, socio-economic decimation of American black communities. But it is not for failing to follow what West offers as King’s conservative message, one of “individual responsibility and accountability.” Indeed, King’s own words, inscribed in the memorial, rebuke the idea of individualism –”We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” — for one an undeniably progressive view of an ideal world — “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies; education and culture for their minds; and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”

These progressive values are not merely enshrined in his words but explicitly espoused, pursued, and defended in every action he took, up to his very last:

  • King Died Supporting A Public Sector Union’s Strike: In King’s final sermon, he called upon the people of Memphis to join together in support of the Memphis sanitation worker’s AFSCME-led strike. “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” King preached. “when we have our march, you need to be there. If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school — be there.”
  • King Compared Poverty To “Cannibalism” And Called For It’s “Direct And Immediate Abolition”: King believed that poverty “is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization.” He called for America to abolish poverty by guaranteeing “white and Negro alike” a minimum income.
  • King Called War Funding A “Demonic Sucking Tube” Undermining Poverty Programs: King opposed the Vietnam war in no small part because it diverted precious resources away from anti-poverty programs. “A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. . . . Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”
  • King Said Poverty Made Him “Question The Capitalistic Economy”: King called for a radical restructuring of America’s economic system. “And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. . . . You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?’”

As Princeton University Prof. Cornel West noted today, King dedicated his life to fighting four catastrophes he identified: Militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty. By twisting his legacy into one that somehow justifies policies that make these catastrophes worse, West and his colleagues risk trampling on the very message West seeks to commemorate:

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

Politics

MLK Jr. Memorial Statue Completed Using Unpaid Chinese Laborers

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Aug 26, 2011 at 11:30 am

Chinese sculpter Lei Yixin working on the MLK Memorial

The opening ceremony for the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial has been postponed as Hurricane Irene closes in on the East Coast, but when it does open, the monument will do so under a different cloud as some point out that the way it was constructed violates some of the core principles for which King fought and died. While often overshadowed by his civil rights legacy, King was an outspoken defender of labor rights and was supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee when he was assassinated. But his memorial was built, in part, using free labor imported from China.

The foundation behind the memorial, which deserves tremendous praise for successfully pulling off the monumental project, controversially selected Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin — known for his bust of Mao Zedong — to be the lead sculptor on the project. Couldn’t the foundation have “chosen a black American, let alone an American,” critics ask?

More egregiously, despite promises from the organization to use local unionized labor for the project, the sculpture was completed using workers imported from China working for nothing but “national pride.” Last September, the foundation promised in a statement:

“[We] will employ skilled craft workers from the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (BAC) to work with Master Lei Yixin, Sculptor of Record, to complete the assembly and installation,”

They eventually reneged on that vow, despite a plethora of unemployed skilled stonemasons in U.S. “Why do they need to come over to do the work when there are so many people here who can do it?” Scott Garvin, president of the Washington area union asked the Washington Post’s Michael Ruane. “It’s kind of a thumb in the eye,” he added. The local BAC chapter’s “membership has dropped in the past three years from 2,000 to 850 because of a decline in building projects.”

The fact that the Chinese workers were not being paid was only discovered when the BAC sent an investigator to determine if they were being exploited. While they were given room and board and hoped to be paid upon returning to China, using free labor to construct Kings monument seems to fly in the face of what he stood for. “It is a crime for people who live in this rich nation to receive starvation wages,” King told the Memphis workers.

The foundation has largely avoided commenting on the issue. And Harry Johnson, CEO of the MLK memorial foundation, “said there has been NO scandal, no drama in building” of the monument.

When confronted by the union over this fact, the foundation seemed to cynically use King’s principles as a shield, saying, “We strongly believe that we should not exclude anyone from working on this project simply because of their religious beliefs, social background or country of origin.”

A request for comment from the foundation was not immediately returned.

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