MLK and class

Today offers an appropriate moment to reflect on Martin Luther King within the context of a class analysis, and TheRealNews.com provides just that. The interview with Anthony Monteiro of Temple University holds that King had grown beyond racial politics near the end of his life to embrace a much larger, penetrating critique of America as a capitalist / imperialist nation. In the second interview, Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report argues that the successes sowed by King and the civil rights movement were effectively subverted by the black upper class to their own narrow interests. Both interviews suggest that if still alive, King would not likely be celebrating Obama's inauguration today, but at the forefront of protest against many administration policies.