English: Iglesia del Pueblo Reflection.
Birth of a Movement: Doctor Kings Legacy in the Latinx community.
Empire wants us divided, working in silos, unbeknownst to one another, toward a common goal, knowing that together we are an unstoppable force.
To many of our folks in the Latinx community both in the USA and in Latin America, we know very little about Doctor King outside of his Dream speech, so his cause might seem like one that focused on African Americans civil rights, but if we dig deeper into who he was, what he stood for and who he stood behind, then you can gain a new perspective on Doctor King, as the internationalist he was and how he extended solidarity with our people.
Today I want to share with you a little about his commitment to the Farmworker movement and the role that the broader vision of the fusion movement ultimately contributed to Doctor King’s assassination. Although they never met in person, it is known that Dr. King and Caesar Chavez were both leaders in the Civil Rights Movement and worked together towards the same goal of equal rights for marginalized communities. They both advocated for non-violent protests and had a strong belief in the power of collective action.
During Chavez’s 25 day hunger strike he received this message from Doctor King and had it read to him as he was too weak:
I AM DEEPLY MOVED BY YOUR COURAGE IN FASTING AS YOUR
PERSONAL SACRIFICE FOR JUSTICE THROUGH NONVIOLENCE
YOUR PAST AND PRESENT COMMITMENT iS ELOQUENT
TESTIMONY TO THE CONSTRUCTIVE POWER OF NONVIOLENT
ACTION AND THE DESTRUCTIVE IMPOTENCE OF VIOLENT REPRISAL.
WE COMMEND YOU FOR YOUR BRAVERY, SALUTE YOU FOR YOUR
INDEFATIGABLE WORK AGAINST POVERTY AND INJUSTICE,
AND PRAY FOR YOUR HEALTH AND YOUR CONTiNUING SERVICE AS
ONE OF THE OUTSTANDING MEN OF AMERICA•
THE PLIGHT OF YOUR PEOPLE AND OURS IS SO GRAVE THAT WE ALL DESPERATELY
NEED THE INSPIRING EXAMPLE AND EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
YOU HAVE GIVEN.
MARTIN LUTHER KING
In another telegram King wrote “Our separate struggles are really one — a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity,” as well as “You and your fellow workers have demonstrated your commitment to righting grievous wrongs forced upon exploited people. We are together with you in spirit and in determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized.”
Prior to his death, Doctor King was approached by the Poor Peoples Campaign, asking to bring attention to the plight of poor people across lines of division, Black, White, Latinx, farmworkers and sanitation workers, people boycotting and hunger striking and marching and taking punches…
Later on, Doctor King prophetically announced, on the night before his assassination, that he had seen the promised land and was no longer afraid of anything. Even death.
I want point out that prior to this time, Doctor King had made a lot of waves for his anti war stance during his Beyond Vietnam Speech in which he famously said:
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… But they asked, and rightly so, ‘what about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
It is important to me to point out that he was at the point before the Poor Peoples Campaign came knocking, feeling depressed and left out of the movement (to the point that we now know the FBI even taunted him with letters encouraging suicide) After organizing around the poor peoples campaign he declared that those poor people across the lines of division, with nothing to lose, could in fact change everything and be an unsettling force for liberation. I remember seeing a movie of his last year of organizing and in it, he was celebrating his last birthday with the campaign, he looked so happy blowing his candles.
I want to give us a thought: that maybe when he said he saw the promise land, he did not mean that he had a vision of a future or of christian heaven, but rather he meant, that beautiful year before he died, organizing a fusion movement with people across all lines of division while taking stock of the relationships and lasting legacies they were setting up and his place in the movement once he marked himself an internationalist, a socialist… that maybe he saw what I see when I see us in the movement as his dream realized, the promised land of finding that beloved community he talked about is us, we are the beloved community, we are heaven on earth here and now.
