MLK getting arrested
By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 9 years ago

#ReclaimMLK

MLK getting arrested

(Image via)

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 margins gets underway, it makes the connections between social ills, it rejects the compromise and respectability politics of the past, and it opens up new political space for radical visions of what this nation can truly become.”

Find a direct action in your area. And take time today to read some of King’s words beyond his “I Have a Dream” speech.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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