The photo below is of the Memphis garbage collector’s strike in April, 1968. Dr. King’s last speech was at a rally in support of their cause. He was murdered the next day.
The same epithets and paranoia they faced in 1968 are now used against Black Lives Matter. They are savage rioters, criminals and dangerous commies/socialists.
How fearful were folks that they needed tanks and bayonets to menace unarmed men walking single file? How scared are people now, that protests against police violence bring those same tanks and bayonets? And teaching about racism must be outlawed?
Dr. King’s words are more important now than they ever were.
Those who support banning CRT, depriving minorities the right to vote and the so-called “white replacement theory” are every bit as cowardly and evil as their forebears.
And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 4, 1968