Pranav Jani, Organizer:
“We need to talk about radicals like Malcom X, but we also should know enough about Dr. King to not counterpose them to each other, because that itself is the work of the establishment: ‘We’ll give you a soft and watered down, white-washed King in opposition to the bloodthirsty Malcom X.’”
“Right now, this is the 50th anniversary of the late 60s. This is 1968. These are the radical 60s that the establishment sees as the bad 60s. These are the 60s after the passing of civil rights legislation. In the north, there were urban riots. Martin Luther King himself said, ‘Now I can sit at the counter, but I can’t buy a cup of coffee.’ There were these uprisings around housing and unemployment and healthcare. These are uprisings throughout cities, and they’re seen by the establishment as the bad 60s.”
“We need to bring in and celebrate those parts of the struggle for black liberation that are not celebrated. But when we do that, we also need to dig deep and find out why Martin Luther King was against the Vietnam War and came out against imperialism and militarism, not just racism, but actually link those together.”