It’s time once again for America’s annual sing-along of “We Shall Overcome,” in celebration of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. As even school children know, he famously had a dream. His dream was that over the long arc of history, America will someday achieve racial harmony – if Black people will stop being pushy about racial injustice.

Oh, wait – that’s the right-wing’s current whitewashed version of King’s dream, scrubbing out his condemnation of brutally-racist White leaders and institutions (which still repress Black progress and foment racial hatred). And far from meekly waiting on “the arc of history,” King rallied people to take immediate action, calling it “the fierce urgency of now.”

He sought “a grand alliance of Negro and White [to] eradicate social evils [that] oppress both White and Negro.” At the time of his assassination, he was actively forging that populist coalition to battle plutocratic wealth.

Indeed, King knew the history he sought to revive. The post-Civil War Populist Movement, he said, “began awakening the poor White masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that [both] were being fleeced by [Southern aristocrat interests].” That movement, he noted, intended to write a Black-White voting block “to build a great society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away.…”

But the unifying, democratic promise of Populism, King rightly explained, so terrified the aristocracy of wealth that its leaders made it “a crime for Negroes and Whites to come together as equals at any level.” Thus moneyed elites effectively killed the people’s Populist party in the 1890s – but not the people’s Populist spirit.

So rather than merely celebrating a birthday, let’s recommit to King’s real dream of a multi-racial, democratic Populism.  

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