Strom Thurmond asked FBI to investigate MLK.

[dazzleman]

This is hardly a surprise.  King was under constant surveillance by the Kennedy and Johnson justice departments. 

Strom Thurmond, as a governor or maybe a senator at the time, did not have the power to order surveillance.  The attorney general, acting on behalf of the president, could and did.

I disagree with StatesRights and think that King does deserve a national holiday.  He was human like all of us, with his imperfections, but he did great things.

I once tried, without a great deal of success, to spark a debate on King's legacy.  I think it has been to a large extent sanitized, and people are discouraged from really debating his methods of advancing black standing in society with other competitors like Malcolm X.

The early part of his career is the one most celebrated, and the best contribution that he made.  This included things like the Montgomery bus boycott, things that are not now controversial anymore.

The second part of his career, when he embraced the Great Society and the idea of government help as the answer to black economic backwardness, I find much more problematic.

In his later career, Malcolm X moved from the "white devil" rhetoric to more of a self-help philosophy for blacks, which I actually find much more beneficial than what King was advocating in his later years.

Forget the hookers, does anybody have an opinion on the King legacy that goes beyond the sanitized sap we read around Jan. 15th of every year?

[dazzleman]

I was hoping to hear from someone who made a little more sense.

[dazzleman]

Actually, he did own them, because he inherited them from his brother.  By the time of his presidency, however, they were not economically viable.  Washington did do his best to provide for them and not break up the families, which he regarded as a moral obligation to the slaves.

That sounds a lot closer to the truth than what StatesRights said.

This discussion has really veered off coure.  Does anybody besides LeftWingNutcase, or whatever his name is, care to debate the positives and negatives of the MLK positions on black advancement, as opposed to others like Malcolm X?

I stated my own opinion earlier, that MLK got seriously off the track when he signed on to the Great Society, and government income transfers, as the answer to black advancement in the 1960s.  Anybody disagree, or agree, and can you state the reason for your position?

[dazzleman]

Why the hell are you saying Malcom X was better than MLK? He was a violent black supremecist.

I'm not saying he was better than MLK.  But I am suggesting that maybe a portion of his philosophy was better than some of what MLK ended up with at the end.

Supposedly, Malcolm X abandoned the black supremacy stuff toward the end, and preached more of a doctrine of black self-help.  At the same time, MLK did a lot to remove the legal barriers to black advancement.

So I wonder if some combination of the best parts of their philosophies might have served blacks better than preaching dependency on government.

Dude, you need to learn to debate a little more politely.  You're a f'cking fireball.

[dazzleman]

Why the hell are you saying Malcom X was better than MLK? He was a violent black supremecist.

I'm not saying he was better than MLK.  But I am suggesting that maybe a portion of his philosophy was better than some of what MLK ended up with at the end.

Supposedly, Malcolm X abandoned the black supremacy stuff toward the end, and preached more of a doctrine of black self-help.  At the same time, MLK did a lot to remove the legal barriers to black advancement.

So I wonder if some combination of the best parts of their philosophies might have served blacks better than preaching dependency on government.

Dude, you need to learn to debate a little more politely.  You're a f'cking fireball.

Martin Luther King's got streets named after him all over and the day he was assassinated is remembered as a national holiday. But you don't see any street signs that say "Huey P. Newton Boulevard" and the day of Malcolm X's assassination certainly isn't a national holiday. Why is that?

Because these guys wanted more than desegregation and so-called equal rights. They wanted self-determination for their community and you can't put that on a street sign.  They realized thier community needed a class-based analysis as oposed to soley race.

They demonstrated that Emancipatory nonviolence works only in tandem with emancipatory violence, as has been shown by the violence on the side of the oppressed, sometimes extreme, in both the Indian independence movement and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Though we do have to give Dr. King some credit. Even he began, before he was murdered, to see himself that nonviolence wasn't enough and that Malcolm's cry - "by any means necessary" - was correct. And yet even these so-called civil rights that were awarded to the black community as a result of the nonviolent activism of the American Civil Rights Movement are bourgeois rights.

I don't understand the need for violence once equal rights are achieved.

King made a wise tactical decision in my opinion to go for non-violence.  But legal equal rights are only half the battle.  Economic empowerment and self-determination, to the level that other citizens have, is the next step, and that has been partially achieved, at best.

It's hard to have a rational discussion with you because of the communist and separatist dogma that you use.  I think the goal should be that blacks simply live like everybody else.