For years now, perhaps even decades, white America has engaged in a tradition reserved for the day we celebrate the legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in which they lie on his name and what he stood for to placate fragile white feelings. Every year, on the third Monday of January, the melanin-Jim-Crowed show off the boundlessness of their caucasity and take a man who was hated and opposed by the strong majority of white Americans until the day he was murdered by one of them and water him down to make him as palatable for white consumption as humanly possible. They isolate a single passage from a single MLK speech, completely remove the words “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” from the excerpt’s context and suddenly MLK goes from a pro-Black radical to a Caucasian-adaptable posthumous “Black friend” for the whites to invoke at will. Continue Reading
So, I scrapped my original speech and spent the entire first half of it reading excerpts from a bunch of Dr. King's speeches, but without telling anyone that I was doing so, leading the audience to think King's words were mine. And, whew, chile, it was AMAZING.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022
(SOURCE) https://newsone.com/4278010/nikole-hannah-jones-mlk-day-speech/