Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #mlkday2020

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"... emerging from his room and holding his hands and with some sort of purple ribbon around his shoulders at about 3:30 p.m. ..."
@threadreaderapp unroll this homage to the American treasure and one of my inspirations:

Read 3 tweets
Martin Luther King Jr. was a revolutionary socialist and anti-imperialist who correctly described the US gov't as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world."

MLK was relentlessly demonized. The FBI spied, blackmailed, and plotted to “neutralize” him
thegrayzone.com/2017/01/17/fbi…
Martin Luther King Jr was arrested 30 (THIRTY!) times and was a main target of the FBI's murderous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO)

The FBI threatened MLK nonstop, recording his phone calls, spying on him, even trying to force him to kill himself
thegrayzone.com/2017/01/17/fbi…
A jury determined in a civil suit in a Tennessee court in 1999 that the US government was complicit in the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. (just like how the FBI murdered Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton)

#MLKDay #MLKDay2020
nytimes.com/1999/12/09/us/…
Read 3 tweets
As our state-sponsored celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. commences, let’s not forget some important facts about this great man:

1) He was against the Vietnam War during a time when many Americans were not. Decades later, this view against the war has developed into...
mainstream narrative, but in the 1960s, those who spoke out & marched against it (students, activists) & refused to serve (Muhammad Ali) were beaten, hosed down, killed & jailed. He would undoubtedly be railing against the US imperialist state and its perpetual war machine today.
2) He condemned issues like poverty, inequality, and racism as *systemic* ills, not merely individual shortcomings. To this day, such broad analyses (those touching on capitalism and white supremacy) are rejected and disregarded by most as “fringe” or “too radical.” In this way..
Read 14 tweets
Here is a speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave when he was only a junior in high school in 1944. He spoke, even then, of the "strange paradox" of slavery "in a nation founded on the principles that all men are created free and equal." #MLKDay2020 kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/do… Newspaper photo of Martin L...
And here is Dr. King's last speech, in Memphis on April 3, 1968: "It's all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and His children who can't eat three square meals a day." kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/do…
Only 24 years passed between King's first public speech and his last.
Read 3 tweets
On this #MLKDay, it’s worth remembering what #MLK had to say about guns: #VirginiaRally swap.stanford.edu/20141218230026…
A thread 👇🏾
After the bombings, many of the officers of my church and other trusted friends urged me to hire a bodyguard and armed watchmen for my house. When my father came to town, he concurred with both of these suggestions.
I tried to tell them that I had no fears now and consequently needed no weapons for protection. This they would not hear. They insisted that I protect the house and family, even if I didn't want to protect myself.
Read 8 tweets
On this #mlkday, millions of Democrats are deciding whether to vote for a White progressive or a White moderate in the Democratic primaries. Americans love to impose their ideas onto King as opposed to listening and learning from King's ideas and changing accordingly. 1/
And so, I thought we'd remember what King actually wrote about the White moderate in his letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963. “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. . . 2/
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice. . . 3/
Read 7 tweets

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