Portside

History books have called my father an activist, a community organizer, a freedom fighter, among other things. But they don’t use a phrase that my dad has used to describe himself: a war general.

Robinson was a fierce competitor, an outstanding athlete and a deeply religious man. The aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over is that he was also a radical with a long involvement with the civil rights movement.

Our new organization, Third Act, is mobilizing the generation with the most political and economic influence to fight for a working climate and a working democracy.

To celebrate Martin Luther King day we are reposting article first published in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of MLK on the 4th of April 1968. The article re-publishes Dr King’s speech at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964

His sense of purpose and vision for his life is unobscured and unencumbered. This is a man on a mission, the grandest and most noble of missions: to save a country and his countrymen from themselves, to insist that morality ought to dictate policy.

I have worked to expand voting rights since I was a student organizer in college. But I am, at the center of my being, a preacher. And the Scriptures that I have been called to preach remind me that in times like these, we have no right to despair.

The dominant and distorted scholarship framed Reconstruction as an illegitimate enterprise that failed to sustain multiracial democracy. For much of the 20th century, this bogus history was used to justify denying Black people full citizenship.

The fact that Black Americans are still fighting the same battles against voter suppression, inequality and the right to have a dream almost 54 years after his death is the most accurate measure of what this nation thinks about Martin Luther King.