Here lately, the Black History month initiatives have been dissipating across the nation.

As a clue of how racist the United States of America really is, all we have to do is tune in to the conversations that have been taking place about President Obama since he was elected President in late 2008 –and a lot of the ones that happened during the time he was on the campaign trail. They (some white folks) would like to blame the Great Racial Divide on President Obama, but it’s not the President who has been cutting them asunder because of the color of their skin, even though he has questioned the content of their character. As well he should.

In this particular season of white supremacy in America, the questions have been all about what Dr. King stood for when he was a young Black southern preacher. We have heard it all, too.

He stood for civil rights, meaning gay rights, Black people rights, the rights of whites to remain racist, dog rights, cat rights, the right to do drugs and drink alcohol, the right to engage in anti-social behaviors as an American citizen … any old right we feel like pinning on him and calling him “multicultural.” Take special note that he was a southern Black Baptist preacher in the 1950s and 1960s … there wasn’t any way in hell that he would have been “for” the rights of gays, he was old school and more old school than many of us old-schoolers are now.

Let’s get it straight right now: The year he was assassinated was 1968, April 4 to be exact — shortly after 6 pm just as he was preparing to go to dinner, so they tell us.

Dr. King was murdered during a time when Blacks had no real rights in America (and they still barely do). The Civil Rights Act of the 1860s had not done the job and Affirmative Action was all about white women’s rights. But Black men had to work and take care of their families, which leads us to make brief mention of the highly acclaimed television show “Good Times.”

When Dr. King went on what was to be his last march and protest, The Poor People’s Campaign, the vast majority of the Sanitation Workers he went to speak to, were Black men. Though they served well, they were not paid well and they had no workers’ rights or proper worker’s benefits in Tennessee. If he was “for” anything at the time of his death, it was the rights of poverty-wage workers to be represented by the Unions.

Let’s read the newspapers for another clue…

The Advocate: The 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner was standing on the balcony of his hotel here, where he had come to lead protests in behalf of the city’s 1,300 striking garbage workers, most of them Negroes, when he was shot.

Let’s hear him speak for yet another clue:

One thing we can be certain of: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was for the rights of the working poor people to have a LIVING WAGE, to earn a decent and respectable living. And it just so happened he came close enough to making a demand for reparations while he was at it.

This is a huge theft and usurpation of Dr. King’s legacy for every kind of “right” except what he was really speaking about and what he advocated for. I was just a child when he was murdered, but when I was growing up even white people knew Dr. King’s main thrust was ALL about Black people, or at least 95-percent of it was.

We were, by default of our Blackness, shut off from any chance of advancing in society; and at the time, white folks didn’t have to sue in court to GET a welfare check for being poor. For them, it was a natural part of their transition off the plantations and losing their jobs at overseers. For us, poverty and welfare became a matter of “laziness.”

Poor Blacks had to get a lawyer to sue in court for even so much as the right to be treated equally to poor whites. And at the time, the wages were so low that many of the WORKING BLACK FAMILIES needed welfare, not just the single Black women. They had never required a white man to leave home and abandon his family in order to keep his own from starving to death.

Many of us say integration was the worst thing that ever happened to us, but the truth is that if integration had never happened, we would never have known what we were trying to EQUALIZE. At that time, Black people had very little access to anything that would have bettered our position in this country, even after nearly 400 years of building this nation without a worker’s pay, let alone proper compensation.

They called him “radical” in the end, and they are still calling the demand to be treated EQUALLY in a white privilege world “radical” to this very day.

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