Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Slavoj Žižek. "The Audacity of Rhetoric." in: In These Times. Vol. 32, No. 9, p. 15, September 2008. (English).

In January, when the United States remembered the tragic death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an urban history professor at the University of Buffalo named Henry Louis Taylor Jr., bitterly remarked: “All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don’t know what that dream was.”

Taylor was referring to an erasure of historical memory after King’s 1963 march on Washington, after he was cheered as “the moral leader of our nation.”

In the years before his death, King changed his focus to poverty and militarism because he thought that addressing these issues — not solely racial brotherhood — was crucial to making equality real. And he paid the price for this change, becoming more and more of a pariah...

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. versus the System that Produces Poverty:

“We are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

"In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent."

“There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will."