http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/28/1380977/-Dear-White-America-Please-Stop-Talking-About-Martin-Luther-King-Jr-and-the-Baltimore-Riots?detail=email
Freddie Gray was killed by Baltimore's police. Baltimore's ghetto youthocracy responded with protests and an exhalation of random street violence. The killing of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man who was a victim of racial profiling and harassment by police, is the proximate cause of Baltimore's "riot".
The deeper and more substantive causes of Baltimore's violent spasm (and Ferguson and other sites as well) are long simmering grievances and righteous anger at an American police establishment that is racist towards black Americans, and a society where its supposed "meritocracy" is broken by the colorline and class inequality.
The United States may have a black man who happens to be President; racial equality, justice, and the radically democratic transformative possibilities that Obama symbolized seven years ago have not been translated into substantive improvements in the life chances for people of color more generally, or the black and brown poor in particular.
There is a ritual that accompanies these moments of protest by black Americans, and the wholly predictable urban unrest that follows the repeated killings of unarmed black people by police.
The high priests of public opinion take to the TV, radio, and Internet and summon the memory of Brother Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to condemn black folks who are "rioting", for the latter are violating the sacred covenant of "non-violence" that King, as one of America's greatest leaders and martyrs, supposedly died for.
The man and woman on the street participates in this act of American civil religion as well. They mutter some basic understanding of Dr. King's dream, spittle accompanying a phrase about the Civil Rights Movement, as they shake their heads in consternation at the violent protests in Baltimore and elsewhere.
The high priests of public opinion on the dais, and those who sit in the pews of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement as civil religion, are engaged in futile acts of conjuring. They are trying to channel a weak and flattened memory of a man, one that has been reduced to selling fast food in January and February, made into an onerous statue at Washington's mall, and reduced to a paragraph that is ripped from a towering speech.
The impotent summoning of Dr. King in a time of crisis (with its righteous, justifiable, protest and rage against police thuggery, and a cruel State that cares more about protecting property and its out of control racist police, than in justice for black and brown Americans and the poor) is enabled by a flat and weak understanding of the Black Freedom Struggle and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s role in it.
The Civil Rights Movement contained multiple elements with often conflicting interests and strategies for success. Non-violence was not an empty phrase: it existed and found power in relation to those who wanted a more robust, direct, and if necessary, armed response to white supremacy and anti-black hatred. The Civil Rights Movement was able to use the media in the context of the Cold War, and white elites' anxieties about perception management abroad in an era of Jim and Jane Crow, to win its incremental gains.
King elaborated on the relationship of urban disorder to the struggle for full human rights and dignity for black American in his "The Other America" speech where he stated that:
I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.
And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
i see that 47 years ago after the death of Dr. King we rioted and created destruction all over, i was home from Vietnam 5 months i had a job after work i participated but in all truth it was not about Dr. kings murder it was about me participating in a mob mentality that i think was more about getting stuff for free than protesting the loss,.
there were no songs or chants just a bunch of smash and grabber's all out for themselves. while we had no control economically of what has befallen us we also had no restraint or pride i think that is what gets passed down through the ages that is on each of us before the next ones come each one needs to teach one and stop the vicious circle of further depriving ourselves to many business we patronized in neighborhoods some are still burned out storefronts allowing those in power and ability to rebuild the option not to revitalize reasoning that they know the situation won't change so the likelihood of repetition of destruction is very high and here we are.
