Barack Obama. Do we represent or embody the values and principles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? One is sworn in tomorrow as a Black president of the United States; the other died fighting against the injustices of the United States in 1968. Let’s listen to Martin Luther King in 1967 at the Riverside Church as he delivered his speech: A Time to Break Silence.
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s hot roadside, but that would be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed, so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will so look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profit out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say: ‘This is not just.’ It will look at our alliances with the landed gentry of Latin America, and say, ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.'”
Now Barack Obama, who is raining missiles and bombs down in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and Yemen; who has instigated behind the scenes the overthrowing of governments in Libya and now Syria, do he represent or embody the principles of a Martin Luther King who had said that this system, this political-economic system, which produces injustice, which produces harm, militarism, and imperialism around the world, must be radically changed and altered? Does Barack Obama truly embody those principles? That is a question that we put up for the Black political class to answer. From in prison nation, this is Chairman Shaka Zulu.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
