MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism

April 4th is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. My guess is that few Americans know that King was killed in Memphis, fewer still know why he was in Memphis in the first place, and even fewer than that know anything about him other than that he "had a dream." At least Google has been working on adjustments to the search engine so that neo-nazi propaganda about King doesn't block out truthful content in searches. So there's that.

As for what King was doing in Memphis in the days leading up to his death, I urge everyone to read Wendi C. Thomas' spectacular piece in the March 30, 2018 New York Times called "How Memphis Gave Up on Dr. King's Dream." Thomas is the editor and publisher of MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism, a tremendous resource for understanding the intense opposition King faced when fighting for living wages in Memphis, and how that opposition has in some disturbing ways gotten worse 50 years later.

The MLK50 reporting team are a dedicated group of activists who plan to make sure that King's call for living wages and economic justice does not get lost in what will almost certainly be a mainstream media effort to whitewash King's legacy. Just watch, on April 4th we will hear about King the dreamer and be treated to mindless drivel about him. What we won't hear or see are rigorous accounts of the extent to which the problems Dr. King called out in 1968 exist in worse form today in large part because we failed to heed his warnings about where the country was headed. (Thankfully, there will be three documentaries airing this month that present a more complete view of King.)

In the last four-plus years of King's life, years that are almost completely ignored in mainstream discussions of him, he developed a keen understanding of the connections between American style capitalism, racism, and militarism. Wendi Thomas quotes King in 1967 as saying that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice, "cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power." Fifty years later we HAVE had a radical redistribution of political and economic power, but unfortunately the redistribution has gone from bottom to top instead of vice versa. In January Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! interviewed scholars and activists who shed light on the radicalism of King's latter years. 

What MLK50: Justice Through Journalism is doing with a mostly Memphis focus should be done by ethical journalists in all cities. We need better data about the state of inequality in our local communities and states, and better reporting on it. It should not have to be private think tanks collecting the data, and it should not have to be small circulation print media or obscure websites reporting it. How about this: for at least the month of April, the mainstream media should give as much attention to economic justice issues that impact literally all of us as they do to the president's moronic tweets.