A Different Way of Teaching about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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1. Duane E Swacker says:

   January 16, 2017 at 1:38 pm

   How about a radically different way: Actually read his speeches, writings and transcripts of interviews.

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   • GregB says:

     January 16, 2017 at 1:53 pm

     I’m with you on this one, Duane. I had to bail on this around the 8:00 mark. This is not how I would want my children to learn about Martin Luther King, Jr. Been spending this morning going through passages of Taylor Branch’s three volume history and finding speeches and news clips relating to them on YouTube (what a wonderful resource). More my style.

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     • Duane E Swacker says:

       January 16, 2017 at 2:03 pm

       I listened to all of the presentation and it is okay for the time and format constraints. And it touches on taking MLK back from the sanitized “whitey” caricature of him.

       For me the best way to do so is to actually read and/or listen to his actual words not some media mediated version.

       I used to send out a copy the transcript of his Riverside Speech every year on the day after MLK (we were off on it) and invariably I got in trouble for sending out “inflamatory emails” as it doesn’t jibe with the whitey sanitized version the school wanted to portray of MLK. Just made me add all the more of his writings the next year. But then I’m a prick like that.

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     • Harlan Underhill says:

       January 16, 2017 at 5:45 pm

       This podcast tells the truth historically, that after the death of Lincoln, the Southern Democrat dominated congress and Whitehouse cheated the freed slave population out of its promise of 40 acres and a mule.

       Non-violent resistance to Jim Crow segregation proved viable, but passive resistance techniques will not work to correct economic inequities. Only violence can do that, and the podcast’s recognition is correct that King’s turn to radical communism was where he fundamentally parted company with the American society of his time and our own.

       It was the tragic flaw in his character driven by a sense of justice. We have inherited that tragic dilemma in our own day: that reparations truly owed in 1860 can only now be delivered by theft by the government of wealth from those who legitimately earned it. Add to that the deliberate destruction of the black family by Democrat policy to create a base of economically dependent voters, and you get bad intentioned evil piled on apparently well intentioned, but equal evil by Democrats to create the situation we are currently in.

       We used to think the schools could fix it. I still do, but there is no longer political support for that solution because the public school teaching cadres have adopted the same, tragic suicidal path of socialist, revolutionary radicalization that fatally tempted Dr. King. It is the weakness in Christian faith. Protest will not bring justice, because there is no obviously discriminatory law to passively disobey to get it changed. One can’t succeed with a sit down strike for more taxes.

       Tragedy is not the end of life, but it is manifestly unfair and unjust to require only the black community to rise to nobility of spirit. But that, in my perception, is where we are at the present moment.

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2. Laura H. Chapman says:

   January 16, 2017 at 1:59 pm

   Interesting critique of NEA’s teaching materials on MLK as too narroly focussed on the I have A Dream Speech. That is the overarching theme in this presentation.

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3. Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

   January 16, 2017 at 3:34 pm

   Same thing happening today. Whatever happened to MLK Dream? Answer: Corporations and politicians are in cahoots.

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   • Harlan Underhill says:

     January 16, 2017 at 5:56 pm

     The sterilized white conception of King’s “dream” is that it only extended to equality before the law based on the content of one’s character. That was acceptable because it was unthreatening and just. It still is. Reparations are just too, but threatening because it means shelling out wealth. The rest of society won’t pay because at this point in time, it doesn’t think it owes anything more. The Civil War and the Civil Rights bill cancelled all debts. Anything beyond is voluntary charity. The moral disorganization of the black community is contrasted with the Hispanic, the Chinese, the Indian, the Japanese, and the Korean, and other communities, and white society says, nothing more owed. The remedy? At present unknown.

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