Today is Martin Luther King Jr. day, a Federal holiday since 1986. It is mostly a celebratory holiday, but this is also a fighting occasion. It is a time to rededicate ourselves to organizing to end racism, inequality, poverty, and war. People tend to focus on King's campaign against segregation and institutionalized racial inequality, which has succeeded in many places, but he also fought for workers' rights, ending poverty, and ending the Vietnam War. There are still many problems, mixing race, class, and imperialism, such as the treatment of a group of black high school students in Jena, Louisiana, nooses hung in North Carolina government workplaces, the disproportionate poverty of minorities, the suspension rate of black students in Durham Public Schools, the racial makeup of the prison population, disenfranchisement of blacks and other minorities, the overthrow of the elected Haitian government and continued occupation, the imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and threats of war, possibly with nuclear weapons, against Iran.
Monday, January 21, 2008
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