Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes
The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Trumpet of Conscience. Harper & Row, 1968, p. 59.
Outside the convention, there were demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The Police of Chicago under the direction of Mayor Daily tried to break up the demonstrations and created what the Kener investigation called a “police riot.” The techniques the Chicago police used were those similar to those of dictatorships and many of the delegates could see what was really going on outside via TV sets in their hotel rooms.
Lincoln had instituted the first draft in American History and it was terribly resented by many Americans. The draft laws allowed the wealthy and upper middle class to avoid service by paying a $300 fee of hiring a substitute just like in the Vietnam War the upper classes could get College Draft deferments. The mob led mostly by poor Irish, began by protesting the draft; then they attacked the mansions and houses of the wealthy; and then they went after Blacks. The Irish poor feared large numbers of Negroes coming out of slavery and competing for their jobs and lowering the prevailing wages. Blacks were beaten and lynched and 5,000 almost half of the then Negro population were driven to Brooklyn, New Jersey and the New York suburbs. It was the worst riot in United States History.
This general perception led the Founding Fathers to place profound restrictions on the allowable role of the military in national law enforcement—a condition that exists to this day.
Commenting on student demonstrations protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee:
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo silently marched every week asking what had happened to the children—the disappeared—who were kidnapped and murdered in the Argentine Dirty War. The President warned the crowd that their protests might attract the death squads again.
He had just spent 15 months in Italy and did not admire Italian symphonic abilities. The English Chartists wanted to organize demonstrations and protests but had little experience and know how.
Louis Napoleon had seized control of France and had very little popular support amongst the aristocracy and middle class. However, the Socialists leading the uprisings frightened them more than Louis Napoleon as the Socialists had the support of the peasants who resented the abuses of the aristocracy and many of the middle class. This was true class warfare and not at all what was possible in the United States when American conservatives would claim “class warfare” when there was a move for more progressive taxation. In Europe, class warfare really meant death and destruction, so for many who knew the history, the claim of “class warfare” was frightening and a large part of the “Red Scare” in the United States.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of early civil rights activist Martin Luther King Sr.
