Black History Month

One issue that concerns me is the alleged distortion of the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Part of the problem is that Dr. King was assassinated at a time in which he had not put away assets to support his family at the time of his death. He did not even have a life insurance policy. Harry Belafonte bought one for the family, and this was the only money the family had to live on. One result of this situation is that the King family became super litigious. For example, when the newspaper USA Today printed the text of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the King family sued the paper for copyright infringement.

One of the results of this litigiousness is that King's writings are less well known than they otherwise might be, and thus what he stood for is more easily distorted and misrepresented.
 
Here's an article about the distortion of King's memory:

The Truth About Martin Luther King Jr. Chrysler's Tone-Deaf Super Bowl Ad Conveniently Omits

Contrary to the caricature offered by this commercial, Dr. King was a democratic socialist who was keenly aware of the harm done to society and individuals by greed and consumerism. In fact, the quote used during Sunday's Super Bowl commercial was taken from the very same sermon in which King warned the audience about the way advertisers manipulate feelings of groupthink, loneliness, and a need for conformity masquerading as individuality:
Click to expand...
 
One of the people I've been reading lately has been William Jelani Cobb, a professor of journalism at Columbia, who writes a regular column for the New Yorker magazine as Jelani Cobb.

He has a column about New York City's review of its statuary after the violence in many Southern cities prompted them to remove the statues of various Confederate leaders. A commission appointed by the Mayor found four statues to be objectionable or problematic.

One of these was a statue of the gynecologist J. Marion Sims.

J. Marion Sims was a pioneering gynecologist in the nineteenth century who performed medical experiments on enslaved black women in the South without anesthesia
Click to expand...

During the 19th century a number of Southern doctors would perform surgeries on black women that could not be performed on white women because they were deemed too dangerous. Black women in effect served as lab rats or guinea pigs for white people.

New York City’s Controversial Monuments Will Remain, but Their Meaning Will Be More Complicated

See also:

An Antebellum Hero, but to Whom?
 
Just eight percent of American high school seniors can identify the cause of the Civil War; less than a third (32 percent) know which amendment abolished slavery in the U.S.; and fewer than half (46 percent) know that the "Middle Passage" refers to the harrowing voyage across the Atlantic undertaken by Africans kidnapped for the slave trade. These are only a few of the more unnerving findings from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, which concludes that in classrooms across the country, the subject of slavery is as mistaught as it is misunderstood.
Click to expand...

You Won't Believe What American High Schools Are Teaching Their Students About Slavery
 
Joe said:
One of the people I've been reading lately has been William Jelani Cobb, a professor of journalism at Columbia, who writes a regular column for the New Yorker magazine as Jelani Cobb.

He has a column about New York City's review of its statuary after the violence in many Southern cities prompted them to remove the statues of various Confederate leaders. A commission appointed by the Mayor found four statues to be objectionable or problematic.

One of these was a statue of the gynecologist J. Marion Sims.



During the 19th century a number of Southern doctors would perform surgeries on black women that could not be performed on white women because they were deemed too dangerous. Black women in effect served as lab rats or guinea pigs for white people.

New York City’s Controversial Monuments Will Remain, but Their Meaning Will Be More Complicated

See also:

An Antebellum Hero, but to Whom?
Click to expand...
I just recently learned about this shameful aspect of our history, from an article in The Root.

Our history has been "white washed" in ways about which I am only gradually becoming aware.
 
William Jelani Cobb has a very informative essay about Rosa Parks in his book (The Devil & Dave Chappelle & Other Essays [2007]).

First, he points out that Rosa Parks was not the first person to disobey the segregation in transportation laws. During one twelve-month period in the 1940s the city of Birmingham witnessed eighty-eight cases of blacks who refused to obey the segregation laws on public transportation. And just prior to the incident involving Parks two other young women defied these laws (Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith), but the NAACP rejected them as plaintiffs because they thought the women would be regarded as unsympathetic. (Colvin, for example, was pregnant and unmarried.)

Nor was the 1955 incident the first time Parks had defied the segregation laws. The same bus driver who had thrown her off the bus in 1955 had thrown her off the bus some twelve years earlier.


The 1955 incident came at a fortuitous time. The NAACP was on the verge of suing over bus segregation; also, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Reverend T.J. Jemison were working with the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to organize a bus boycott. And this was all on the heels of the
Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education striking down segregation in education.

Dr. Cobb notes:

Southern bus drivers carried guns and routinely dealt out extreme violence. (During WWII, one black soldier who would not comply with Jim Crow seating was bludgeoned with a rifle butt and had his eyes gouged out.) Rosa Parks was literally risking her life for the community.
Click to expand...

(Dr. Cobb was a history professor at Spelman College before he moved on to the School of Journalism at Columbia. He is very knowledgable and a great resource during Black History Month.)
 
And R.I.P. to so many brilliant, amazing, courageous, inspiring individuals.... :rose: I'm crying watching/typing this....

 
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A few words about King's family. Dr. King was murdered on April 4, 1968. About a year after that A. D. King, Martin's younger brother ,drowned. In 1974 Martin's mother was shot to death while in the Ebenezer Baptist Church sanctuary.

King's four children split bitterly over the issue of whether to sell the King Center for Nonviolence to the National Park Service. Martin's son, Martin III, and his brother Dexter filed lawsuits against each other, and Martin III changed the locks on the center to keep his brother out.

Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's wife, died in February 2006. Harry Belafonte was first invited to give the eulogy for Coretta then his invitation was rescinded after George W. Bush decided to attend the funeral. It was apparently felt that Belafonte was too harsh a critic of Bush for both to attend.
 

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