Martin Luther King, Jr.'s REAL Racially UNIFYING Legacy Is Why the Ruling Class Killed Him

Do you know what MLK, Jr. said in his 1965 Selma, Alabama speech? No? It's because the ruling class censors MLK, Jr.'s KEY message that UNIFIES white and non-white have-nots.

Jan 15, 2024

MLK, Jr., in his 1965 Selma, Alabama speech (which you can both read and listen to here) carefully explained that the Southern upper class (the “Bourbon” class) used the racist Jim Crow laws to oppress not only blacks but the poor whites as well. Here are some of King’s words in that speech:

"Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.
"To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century."

In spite of King’s efforts to educate the have-nots of the United States about the KEY fact that racial discrimination against non-whites HARMS, not benefits, the white have-nots as well (if you don’t understand this, then read my explanation of it here), that vital message has been censored by the ruling class so effectively that very few people understand this fact today.

The censorship of King’s message takes the form of making intellectuals in the United States fearful that if they express the UNIFYING (of white and non-white have-nots) message of King, then they will suffer a bad fate. That bad fate might be having their career as a writer or academic with good media coverage come to a fast end, or losing promotion in their field. Or the bad fate might even be—if they ever gained a sufficiently large audience the way King did—being assassinated as King was! This is why there is not a single American intellectual or writer today with a substantial audience—not a single one!!—who explains the key fact that MLK, Jr. (and, by the way, Frederick Douglass before him) articulated so clearly. Read more about this censorship here.

Yes, the government orchestrated the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as I discuss in some detail here. Here is an extract from the Wikipedia entry about the civil trial that determined that the King assassination was carried out by Memphis police and federal agents:

Coretta Scott King v. Loyd Jowers
In 1997, King's son Dexter met with Ray and asked him, "I just want to ask you, for the record, um, did you kill my father?" Ray replied, "No. No I didn't," and King told Ray that he, along with the King family, believed him. The King family urged that Ray be granted a new trial.^[67]^[68]^[69] In 1999, the family filed a civil case against Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators for the wrongful death of King. The case, Coretta Scott King, et al. vs. Loyd Jowers et al., Case No. 97242, was tried in the circuit court of Shelby County, Tennessee from November 15 to December 8, 1999.^[^{citation needed}^]

Attorney William Francis Pepper, representing the King family, presented evidence from 70 witnesses and 4,000 pages of transcripts. Pepper alleges in his book An Act of State (2003) that the evidence implicated the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Army, the Memphis Police Department, and organized crime in the murder.^[70] The suit alleged government involvement; however, no government officials or agencies were named or made party to the suit, so there was no defense or evidence presented or refuted by the government.^[3] The jury of six blacks and six whites decided that King had been the victim of a conspiracy involving the Memphis police and federal agencies, finding Jowers and unknown co-defendants civilly liable and awarding the family $100.^[71]

The NewYork Times has an article about this civil trial (behind a paywall now). (Read more about the assassination here and in this book.)

Another reason our rulers killed King is because he opposed the Vietnam war as well as Jim Crow, and adopted a CLASS, not racial, analysis

The ruling class assassinated King because he led the Civil Rights Movement to oppose the Vietnam war as well as Jim Crow, and because he rejected his initial racial analysis and adopted a class analysis. The latter fact is less well known than the former. Here are some King quotations that tell the story.

In an Ebony Magazine article in 1966, King defended nonviolence with these words:

"In violent warfare, one must be prepared to face ruthlessly the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. [He refers to the U.S. government killing millions in Vietnam] ...Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of white Western materialism were at stake."

King clearly saw the conflict in racial terms: a minority of blacks against a majority of whites. But the year before, in 1965, in his Selma, Alabama, speech (read it and listen to it here), King explained how Jim Crow was used by the upper class in the South to oppress not only blacks but the poor whites too. This insight was the basis for King developing in subsequent years a more explicitly class, rather than race, analysis of, and strategy for ending, systemic racial discrimination.

Fast forward to February 4, 1968, when King gave a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church a month before he was assassinated, in which he said:

"I always try to do a little converting when I'm in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens all enjoyed coming around to the cell to talk about the race problem...And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, now, 'You know what? You ought to be marching with us. You're just as poor as Negroes.' And I said, 'You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor. Because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.' Now that's a fact. That the poor white has been put into this position--where through blindness and prejudice, he is forced to support his oppressors, and the only thing he has going for him is the false sense that he is superior because his skin is white." [These quotations are from the book, Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, HarperSanFrancisco, 1986]

Clearly King was now preaching that class, not racial, conflict is the story; he even was referring to whites as "those brothers." This is a 180 degree change from perceiving ordinary whites as a "well-armed, wealthy majority" defending "white Western materialism."

King had to die.

First FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent an anonymous blackmail letter (shown below) to King implicitly urging him to commit suicide. Wikipedia says of this letter (based on the source “Gage, Beverly (November 11, 2014). ‘What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals’. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved June 25, 2017”:

The FBI–King suicide letter or blackmail package was an anonymous 1964 letter and package by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) meant to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr.^[1] The letter was part of the FBI's COINTELPRO operation against King. Although it is referred to as the "suicide letter" as King interpreted that to be its intent, the letter does not specifically call for King to kill himself.