MLK’s Murder Still Terrifies America
For more than 55 years there has been a media blackout supported by government disinformation to hide the truth. And few people, in the public’s massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the official explanation of King’s death, choosing instead to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of a man capable of leading a mass movement for transformative change in the United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial as ongoing racial discrimination, poverty and police violence garner the headlines….
Because MLK, in his Riverside Church speech, spoke clearly to what he identified there as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government” and continued to relentlessly confront the government on its criminal war against Vietnam, he was universally condemned by the mass media and the government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.
Today Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, but his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 – people are encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave). Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or nonviolently resisting the warfare state that is the United States. Government sponsored service is cultural neoliberalism at its finest.
The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past 34 years. Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, delivering meals to the elderly, etc., activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s message. After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on. But service without truth is slavery. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people into thinking that they are observing the essence of MLK’s message while they are following a message of misdirection….
[I]n 1999, a Memphis jury, after a 30-day trial with over 70 witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK…. In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see complete transcript and Douglass) brought by the King family, the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included government agencies. The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it – including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King – as delusional….
Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty-eight years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects.
They will not be resolved until this nation decides to confront the truth of why and by whom he was killed. Too much evidence exists that It was the government – which honors Dr. King with a national holiday – that killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted MLK Day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know. But it is what we need to know in order to resurrect his spirit in us, so we can carry on his mission and emulate his witness. The time is now.
