Each year the Southern Christian Leadership Conference sponsors a Martin Luther King celebration in Kansas City, MO. This year (1996), Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geronimo ji jaga, Leonard Peltier and Sundiata Acoli were selected as Honorary Chairpersons. Mumia wrote the following statement to be shared at that event.
Mumia's Statement:
My thanks to the planners and presenters of this Families and Prisoners Workshop "Reaching Through the Walls" for naming me, Leonard Peltier, Sundiata Acoli and Geronimo ji jaga as Honorary Chairs of this event.
LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA!
Any celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s magnificence would not be complete without reference to the intrusive and relentless campaign waged against him by the U.S. government, through its agencies like the FBI, to dilute the influence, and destroy his effectiveness.
The government justified its unscrupulousness and unprincipled spying on Dr. King by claiming he was a "dupe" of "communists" for his activism, as if a black man in this racist nation needed "communists" to know that the system is twisted and bent on destroying him and his kind.
Using so-called "confidential sources" Hoover's FBI waged an ugly and brutal campaign of spying, mischief and disinformation against King and his closest associates. Personal hatreds and political efforts to protect white supremacy flowed from Washington to the Deep South, with the tacit okay of the White House. Phones were tapped, as were hotel rooms, and tapes were circulated to government officials and King's political opponents.
To show the scandalous nature of U.S. government actions against King, one file, dated May 9, 1966, details an interview King had with NBC's Hugh Downs in April on the role of the church on sexual matters. At the bottom of the page, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover scribbled, "This is positively nauseating coming from a degenerate like King." Is the role of government to determine the morality of preachers? Could the government be more hypocritical than such a charge coming from a man who, biographers tell us, secretly wore wigs and dresses, and used the moniker, "Mary"?
Is it the job of the FBI to call up a college and tell them *not* to award an honorary degree to Dr. King? The FBI did this on March 4, 1964; the school was Marquette University, in Milwaukee. They also did this to administrators of Springfield College, in Massachusetts on April 8, 1964 - telling them King's SCLC was "Communist affiliated."
These tidbits come from Dr. King's FBI file, and are more indicting of the government, and the various presidential administrations - than of King, who is more honored today, in death, than he was in life.
As you remember his life, remember it fully, for the life he lived was harried and dogged by the slimy snoops and snitches of the U.S. government. King was a political prisoner, even when not in prison, of the very same government that he fought, and died, to save.
Notes:
O'Reilly, K. (1994) "Black Americans: The FBI Files", New York: Carroll & Graf.
[posted April 1996]
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