Long live John Africa. On first read of the materials related to the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police]/Fox News’s attack on the Oakland School District’s website, “Urban Dreams’, containing teacher created lesson plans on social justice issues, I’m a bit bemused by references to Martin Luther King that completely ignore, or more accurately, whitewash Martin’s real relationship with the law during his life. When we examine these facts, we learned that Martin Luther King can’t be compared to the false imagery of King. Especially, we ignore how he really lived his life under the relentless surveillance of the Feds, I’m talking about the FBI, and under the threat of violence from local and state police and judges.
Martin was accosted by cops as he tried to enter a courtroom in Montgomery on September 3, 1958 he was arrested and charged with loitering and Martin told reporters, “The cops tried to break my arm. They grabbed my collar and tried to choke me, and when they got me to a cell, they kicked me in.” Again, he faced a false charge of trying to enter a courtroom in Montgomery. Later, he was stopped by the police simply because he was driving with a white couple in a borrowed car. When he was stopped for driving while Black, don’t you know, he was given a traffic ticket because the plates had expired and he had a Georgia license. He paid a fine for the license, and several months later, the ticket was used to send him up to state prison for four months. The political intervention of the Kennedys cut his time for an appeal and release.
Meanwhile, the nation’s top law enforcement agency, the FBI, subjected King to total surveillance by bugging his phone calls and tapping his hotel rooms. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI founder, called him, “A notorious liar,” indeed the most notorious liar in America, who had one of the lowest characters in the country. This was because the FBI, as the nation’s political police and its sex police, was determined to destroy King as a freedom fighter for Black freedom. They sent him letters urging him to commit suicide.
The children of Oakland should know these things about Martin Luther King and the police. If they had read We Want Freedom, my book, they’d know these things. They should know that police forces, state and federal, were like the Ku Klux Klan, among his greatest opponents and deadliest enemies because of his work for Black freedom. Let the kids of Oakland and Alameda County learn these lessons, for that is the truth. From In prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
