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The San Diego Nine Walk in the Footsteps of Martin Luther King

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The San Diego Nine picked the perfect week for a hunger strike.  They may not have known it, but the ghosts of Memphis were haunting the Mission Valley Hilton.  What’s the connection? Last week was the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was murdered in Memphis where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers.  As I noted in my column for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in January, the real MLK is frequently neglected in favor of a distorted picture of a vanilla saint who just wanted us all to get along.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, King was a provocateur who wanted to disturb us about America’s hypocritical racial inequality AND its shameful class divide.  King died fighting for the rights of poor workers of color because he thought nothing was a better example of what he wanted the Poor People’s Campaign to be than the sanitation workers’ strike.  Their fight was a call not just for legal civil rights for black people, but a cry for economic justice for all.

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