Martin Luther King, from Dallas to Memphis

By Gabriel Molina Franchossi

THE assassination of Afro-American leader Martin Luther King, April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee 45 years ago, is considered by many researchers as part of a sinister plot which included the assassinations of Malcolm X, John F. and Robert Kennedy. (1)

In the stormy decade of the 1960’s, the radicalization of those in favor of civil rights, peace and other popular causes had the United States in flames. Two months after MLK’s death, Senator Robert Kennedy was shot. The world had been shocked previously by the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy and that of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965.

King and Malcolm had challenged the racial segregation which replaced slavery in the United States, abolished by Lincoln during the Civil War. The country’s founding fathers had protected the enslavement of Blacks with a strict legal system of racial separation.

Blacks were crowded into impoverished ghettos and denied access to public facilities reserved for whites, such as transportation, bathrooms, commercial establishments and schools. They were destined to work in the most difficult, low-paying jobs. Afro-Americans’ very limited right to vote guaranteed the stability of the system.

An example of the racism faced by Blacks in southern states occurred on October 19, 1960, when Reverend King was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, for refusing to leave a department store where he was denied service. A few months earlier in Dekalb County, he had been convicted of a minor traffic offense and given a suspended sentence. The local judge ruled that his arrest in Atlanta provided just cause to revoke this suspension and sentence King to four months of hard labor.

The sentence aroused fear for the Reverend’s life, given what such a punishment meant for Blacks in Atlanta. King was brusquely awakened in his county jail cell, at 4:30 am. With his hands cuffed and legs restrained, he was transported over dark rural roads to a penitentiary deep within Georgia’s countryside. (2)

Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver received a request to revoke the sentence from John F. Kennedy, a Presidential candidate at the time. His response was that such a move would be politically disastrous in the South, just a month before the elections, asserting that it would mean the loss of at least three states. Robert Kennedy called the judge, who at first criticized the intervention, but the next day, after considering the younger Kennedy’s indignant reaction to the sentence, freed Dr. King.

Committed Black leaders took the lead in the movement against segregation, which employed a variety of resistance tactics, such as sit-ins in public White Only facilities and buses, as well as boycotts of stores and theaters. With new laws supported by the Kennedy’s in place, the struggle intensified. The federal government sent in the National Guard and Federal Marshals to protect King, James Meredith and other leaders when the civil rights movement’s peaceful activists were threatened and beaten by police in states where change was violently opposed.

King and Malcolm X, in particular, became targets, not only of racists but of the national military-industrial complex when the Black and trade union struggle began to radicalize and organize against the war in Vietnam, as was made evident by the 250,000 strong march in Washington where King gave his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech.

This process also had an effect on the Kennedy brothers, whose support for civil rights legislation distanced them from the powerful elite established within the CIA and FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, told Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins that two of the three enemies he most hated were Kennedy and King (3). Robert Kennedy considered Hoover a threat to democracy in the country.

Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was so intent on organizing interventions in Cuba and throughout the Third World that Kennedy decided to replace him.

The close surveillance of the four leaders – King, Malcolm X and the two Kennedy brothers – expanded to include persecution and threats which make Dulles and Hoover prime suspects in the four assassinations. They had a motive, the opportunity and the means.

 

(1) James W. Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable. Simon and Shuster, p. XVII

(2) Arthur Schlesinger. Robert Kennedy and his Times. Random House 1978, p. 233

(3) Ibid, p.280

April 10, 2013

 

Granma.cu

 

Bahamas Blog International

 

Obama's Nobel Prize: The stupidity of political bigotry

By Sir Ronald Sanders:


Barack Obama did not ask for the Nobel Peace Prize and he was probably the most shocked person to learn that it had been awarded to him.

He certainly made no secret of his surprise at the news. And, he was dignified and humble in publicly saying that he didn't feel that he deserved to be "in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honoured by this prize - men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace".

In selecting Obama, the Nobel Prize Committee said: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future". Few, except Obama's bitterest antagonists in the US Republican Party and right wing groups would deny that statement.

The Committee also justified awarding the Prize to Obama by saying it "attached special importance to Obama's vision of, and work for, a world without nuclear weapons". That, too, is true. Obama could not be any clearer on this issue.

I part company with the Committee in its prospective explanation that "as President (Obama) created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play". This latter assertion is left to be seen.

From a Caribbean standpoint, his desire for multilateral diplomacy - rather than the enforcement of a US position - is yet to be tested and will be judged on the readiness of his administration to include Caribbean governments directly in: addressing the economic development needs of the area through bilateral assistance and the mobilization of resources from the international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank; reviewing US policy on the deportation of criminals; reassessing and re-modeling the anti-drug trafficking programme in the area; and fashioning machinery that will allow Caribbean financial services to continue to compete in the global market place, particularly in relation to US businesses. On this, judgment of Obama's willingness to engage even the smallest of nations in multilateral decision-making has to be withheld.

But, whatever reservations may be harboured by non-Americans about the early award of the Peace Prize to Obama, two things cannot be denied. First, the Nobel Prize Committee is right in its assessment that Obama has captured the world's attention and given people of many nations cause to hope for a better future. And, second, he has been awarded the prize without seeking it.

In this regard, Barack Obama is far above reproach. His declaration that he did not feel he deserved to be in the company of the notable persons who preceded him also marked him as a special human being.

Every citizen of the United States of America should have rejoiced in the selection of one of their own for the Prize, especially coming after a period in which its government's policies and practices estranged the US from most of the rest of the world and created deep resentment of Americans as a nation. Americans of every stripe should have been delighted that their country had returned to a place of global honour.

And, it is worth saying that while the period before Obama was particularly awful under the administration of George W Bush, the previous Bill Clinton government was not without its flaws.

Any who would question my observation of the Clinton government should look at the number of routine air strikes in Afghanistan that killed many innocent people and spurred deep resentment.

For the Caribbean, the dislocation of banana farmers from their preferential market in the European Union was a direct result of the Clinton administration's decision to act in the World Trade Organization for US multinational companies that were banana plantation owners in Latin America as well as financial contributors to the Clinton presidential campaign. It was also under the Clinton administration that the US took a hawkish position in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that blacklisted several Caribbean jurisdictions over financial services. Many never recovered.

There is no doubt that no one person in US history has done more to improve global attitudes to the US than Barack Obama. The American people purged themselves when the majority of them elected him President for the content of his character above the colour of his skin, and for recognizing that he had a quality in his reasoning and his aspirations that was inspiring and believable.

But, instead of applauding Obama's appreciation by a prestigious body that has honoured human achievement and ambition for over a century, Republicans and right-wing groups in the United States denigrated it.

Fox News called the Nobel Prize "tainted" and one commentator wallowed in the gutter to ask if the Prize Committee was pursuing "a policy of affirmative action" - in other words Obama got the Prize because he is black. The ridiculousness of the last comment is evidenced by the people who have won the Peace Prize in modern times. For the most part, they are not white and at least three of them are black - Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King.

These same groups cheered, celebrated, and rejoiced when their own country lost its bid to host the 2016 Olympics simply because Obama joined the effort to convince the Olympic Committee to choose Chicago. How sick is that?

As a non-American, wary of the tendency for big powers to overlook the human value of small countries and their tendency to marginalise weak nations in pursuit of their own interests, I have to hope that, in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama so early in his Presidency, the objective of the Committee was to hold him to the values that he has espoused and encourage him to live up to them.

But, those Americans who maligned this unsought honour to one of their own should be ashamed of their deplorable behaviour. The awful spectacle to the world of their bigotry on this particular issue lost them respect and was nothing short of stupid.

caribbean360

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International