From my reading of Dr. King and from what i know and have heard from others, who know his work deeply and well, this amazing human being and stalwart force for civil rights was NOT a man to be spoken FOR , but one who spoke TO generations.
Some speak for him and say that they are sure that Dr. King would be for stringent gun control. I believe that these glossers-over of Dr. King’s radical legacy are mistaken, and I assert that as a gun carrier, Dr. King very much appreciated the power to self-defend. Martin Luther King, Jr., at times, had armed guards. He was very familiar with the Deacons of Defense , the Black militia, who forced back the KKK from committing atrocities by responding with counter force of their own. Indeed our federal Government did not initially protect civil rights workers until the Deacons of Defense had become effective deterrents to the mayhem inflicted by the Klan.
I saw an essay on the reverend doctor activist and anti-segregationist say “from Strength to Love”. Love is strength and vice versa. It takes a strong person, one who can wield force, to be gentle as a choice. A weak and defenseless person is a walking victim, and has little or no choice.
We need to read all the sermons and the Reverend Doctor’s essays as well, because Dr. King made it clear that non-violence was his preferred strategy but not the only acceptable one for engaging this nation in the necessary social change needed to bring about social justice, and an end to not only our nation’s errors of apartheid, but its entrenched bigotry as well.
Many of us believe that as Martin and El Hajj Malik El Shabazz became closer, in socio-politics, that both Black men who were first and foremost Americans were assassinated because of the nature of the power they presented to elicit change in our USA’s state of disrepair insofar as human and civil rights.
I believe that first and foremost, Dr. King would have been against the pervasive violence intrinsic NOT to guns, but to drugs and crime. I think that Rev. King would have been appalled and sickened by the dehumanization and exploitive thuggery of the gangster sub-culture, which white rich Madison Avenue advertising and marketing appendages to the record industry promoted for substantial billions in profit. But glorified gangsta culture is a prime violence-eliciting force which has co-opted positive rap and hip hop and been a destructive, materialistic, character-destroying , brutal, misogynistic force wherever it takes root and makes profiteers on human misery and the new slavery of an addiction-dependent economy.
Dr. King understood that guns protect from violence , crime and attacks , and do not shoot themselves but are shot by human beings who have one of four agendas: to provide food, to enjoy for sport, to protect from violence, or to commit violence and crime.
This strong and loving man would have been have grieved that Black on Black violence has superseded white apartheid and bigotry. he would have been angered , IMO, to see that enslavery for profit has trickled down from the plutocratic USA culture of social darwinism and formed an alternative economy of working poor people , many of them Black, that disrespects and invalidates vulnerable and wounded people, too many of them at risk children .
I believe that Dr. King would have recommended that neighborhoods utilize guns for protection from this innocents-exploitive alternative economy built upon forcibly enslaving the needy to drugs or pornography or human sex trafficking for profit , and that he would have considered massive gangsta-ism with its pimping and pushing, degradation of women and children and the elderly, and corruption of boys, the basic goodness of boys, an abomination.
I think he would be preaching that strength in action and not sentimental speeches might take back these crime ridden neighborhoods from criminals and thugs with guns AND love.
A Spark of Incandescence 