The jury also ruled that governmental agencies at the federal, state and local levels conspired in the assassination… The corporate media has yet to cover the story, and our government has yet to apologize!

“Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. took action because he was sincere, in sharp contrast to the all-too-common passive citizen. As Che Guevara wrote, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

Any account of King inevitably fails to capture his sheer heroism; yet his popular conception is far more diluted than Americans realize. America only remembers the Montgomery bus boycott, his letter from Birmingham Jail, his Nobel Peace Prize, the “I Have a Dream” speech (trivialized to the point that only his roaring conclusion is remembered) and in the end his tragic death.

Few know the FBI wiretapped King by methods similar to those used against Soviet agents and tried pressuring him to resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called him “The most notorious liar in the country.”

In 1999 Loyd Jowers was convicted for involvement in King’s murder, but more importantly the jury also ruled that governmental agencies at the federal, state and local levels conspired in the assassination as well. The corporate media has yet to cover the story, and our government has yet to apologize!

The prosecutor argued, “It is in my view a failure of democracy and this Republic that it has not been able to bring this [case] forward [to the American people]” and unless we raise an outcry, “The media will keep the truth from them forever.” This case study clearly shows that our “representative” democracy doesn’t represent “We the People.”

Our nation’s capital, naturally, pays lip service to King. Lyndon Johnson, who slandered him as a “hypocrite preacher,” declared a day of mourning for King’s funeral, as he hid at Camp David to discuss Vietnam.

Reagan grudgingly signed the bill creating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Yet he eagerly increased military spending by 40 percent between ‘81 and ’85, though King declared, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

Following Civil Rights legislation, King fought on. Political freedoms are only formal without economic power. Again, history proves separate is inherently unequal, capitalist society irreconcilably divided into the working and capitalist classes.

King understood “We are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

King’s “Poor People’s Campaign” was to march on D.C. demanding approval of an “Economic Bill of Rights,” including full employment and guaranteed incomes. He warned, “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”

Accordingly, he criticized private property, “There are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons--who hold both sacrosanct… A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life.” And, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

In his most critical speech, “Beyond Vietnam- a Time to Break Silence,” King invokes all but the name of socialism in his condemnation, “I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

Governmental doublespeak persuaded King, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today- my own government.”

The government is so violent because it maintains “the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” Therefore, King stated that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady,” namely predatory capitalism.

King continued, “We must rapidly begin... the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

Like King stated, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Therefore, we must be activists. We must raise class-consciousness so “a true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money… only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.’”

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