MLK: Saving the Soul of America

 MLK: Saving the Soul of America

JANUARY 16, 2023 BY MAURICE ISSERMAN

 

 

 

On Martin Luther King Day, leftists remember that his heart was with democratic socialists, mainstream writers talk about his dream and today’s realities, and rightwingers contort themselves to claim something of his legacy. Even if you;re a person who knows nothing about King, you’ve probably heard about his “I have a dream” speech and may even have read it or listened to it in school. Chances are that you’re less familiar with another speech, the one that, as Maurice Isserman asserts, “changed the conversation,” about the war in Vietnam and in doing so helped change the mind of an entire country. Delivered from the pulpit at the Riverside Church in Manhattan a year before he was assassinated, this sermon helped turn the tide of public opinion. As we honor King’s life, let’s remember the power of moral witness. Below is Isserman’s column from the Democratic Left series on events that changed our national conversation.–Eds.

Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered an impassioned speech at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. In eloquence and power, it matched the one he gave at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Unlike that earlier (and better remembered) effort, his topic was not civil rights but the war in Vietnam, an ever-escalating conflict that had killed nearly 20,000 American servicemen since 1963, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, North and South, military and civilian.

https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/mlk-saving-the-soul-of-america/

 

With video. 

We thank Democratic Left for this post and link.

About Maurice Isserman

Maurice Isserman, a founding member of DSA, a member of North Star, and is the author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, and the foreword to the 50th Anniversary edition of The Other America.

 

Sanders Wins Indiana - and the Political Debate

Bernie Sanders Wins Indiana – and the Political Debate

https://ourfuture.org/20160504/207226 

Robert Borosage

 

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Campaign for America's Future

Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist insurgent, won Indiana convincingly Tuesday night – 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent – over Hillary Clinton, the establishment moderate. This is a remarkable victory, a statement of the extent and scope of the Sanders surge.
Indiana is a Wonder bread state – Midwestern, centrist, largely white, religious. It gave us the blond and bland Evan Bayh, the former New Democrat governor and senator who thought Barack Obama was too liberal. Its current senators – Democrat Joe Donnelly and Republican Dan Coats – are centrists. Sanders has been already been counted out in the mainstream media. But young voters, liberals flooded into the polling booths and swept Sanders to victory. Picking up a net of five delegates, Sanders may not be winning his struggle against the delegate math, as the mainstream media keeps reminding us, but he is winning the political debate.
Sanders’ victory was completely overshadowed by Trump’s romp on the Republican side, which led Ted Cruz to “suspend” his campaign at the end of a sonorous, cliché-ridden, insufferably pompous concession speech. In both parties, insurgents took Indiana, and the party establishments lost. Suddenly the presumptive nominee of his party, Trump couldn’t rise to the occasion, but managed to say nice things about Cruz and his family while vowing to “go after Hillary.”