Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said

Feministing Films: “I Am Not Your Negro”

Both the work and persona of James Baldwin, the great African American writer and thinker, are familiar to those who concern themselves with questions of relation—of blackness to whiteness—and racism in America. But the imaginary built around and within Baldwin’s work—the images that compelled him, the repetitions, indications, and emotions that consumed him—are, for me, not most present in his earlier, perhaps better known works, but in his later essays, like “The Devil Finds Work” (1976) (a book that takes on the racial politics of American movies) and “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” (1981) (on the serial murders of black boys in Atlanta from 1979 to 1981). These were essays steeped not only in histories, theories, and fact, but ...

By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 9 years ago

#ReclaimMLK

We’ll be taking the day off from regular posting in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Dr. King’s legacy is often sanitized and neutralized on this day into an apolitical “Day of Service” — as Danielle C. Belton writes at The Root, “a generic mishmash of good feelings that contorts King’s social-justice legacy into a blissful Hallmark card of post-racial nothingness.” But the #BlackLivesMatter and Ferguson Action movement is calling for us to #ReclaimMLK today with a national day of resistance to injustice that honors King’s “radical, principled, and uncompromising” vision.

The co-founders of #BlackLivesMatter write,

“[W]hat we have learned from Dr. King’s words and our current practice is that when a movement full of leaders from the ...

We’ll be taking the day off from regular posting in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Dr. King’s legacy is often sanitized and neutralized on this day into an apolitical “Day of Service” — as ...

By Lori Adelman • @ladelman • 10 years ago

Barack Obama to address nation from the Lincoln Memorial fifty years after King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech

When I first heard that Barack Obama would address the nation today, on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in the same spot on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Dr King addressed 250,000 people gathered there so many years ago, at the exact same time (2:45pmEST), I had mixed feelings.

This isn’t the first time the President has invoked King’s legacy: he used a restored Bible which once belonged to King during his inauguration ceremonies, drawing sharp criticism from Cornel West (“You don’t play with Martin Luther King, Jr. and you don’t play with his people”).

And in many ways, the comparison is apt. Many would say that Obama represents a manifestation of King’s ...

Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said

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