Occupy and the Radical King

I highly commend to you this Democracy Now special, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in His Own Words. This is the radical Dr. King that the power structure wants us to forget about, but is very relevant to our situation today with terrible injustice and our government fighting wars in the Middle East and elsewhere and threatening another war with Iran. I hope very much you can take the time to watch or listen to King’s speaking powerfully about the economic injustice in this country and our addiction to war and the need for us to challenge the structural injustice and militarism with radical nonviolent direct action. Please share it with others as well. It is almost like King is calling on us to join the Occupy movement in 2012.

In addition, the PBS series, Have You Heard from Johannesburg airs this month on PBS and is excellent about the world wide movement which brought down the apartheid system in South Africa.  There is much we can learn from this movement for our work today.

I also encourage all of you to join the Occupy movement in the nationwide action this Friday, January 20th. Here in San Francisco, California, where I live, Occupy Wall Street West will seek to nonviolently shutting down the financial district in downtown San Francisco, and I invite people in this area to join me there.

And if you would like to explore the Radical King in more depth, I invite you to a workshop on the “Radical King” I am co-leading at Ben Lomond Quaker Center next weekend from January 20-22, 2012.

David Hartsough is a past National Council member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He is a co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce and serves as founding director of Peaceworkers.