MLK niece says King 'would not have condoned' the OWS movement
In the process of debunking the ridiculous comparison between OWS and the civil rights movement, Alveda King issues a cease and desist order to Jesse Jackson.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece says the Rev. Jesse Jackson should stop comparing the Occupy Wall Street protests to the civil rights movement, arguing that her uncle would not have condoned the movement.
"I believe that Rev. Jackson is doing a disservice," Alveda King said on Fox News Monday morning. "My uncle, the whole [civil rights] movement, was founded in prayer, in crying out to God in a peaceful movement. And this [Occupy] movement is not peaceful."
King, the director of Priests for Life African American Outreach, said she believes ACORN - which was fined earlier this year for organizing an illegal voter-registration program - to be "somewhere in the mix" with the Occupy movement and that her uncle "certainly could not have condoned voter fraud."
Saying Jackson "needs to revisit his 20th-century history," King said Monday the civil rights movement was founded on prayer, peace, nonviolence and order, whereas the Occupiers began their protests out of "frustration."
"They wanted something that would give them solutions, something that would make things better, and what they're doing now, Rev. Jackson knows that this is not the model that my uncle and my father, Rev. A.D. King, upheld," she said.
King spent most of his adult life fending off accusations that he was a communist. His serious biographers all agree that he wasn't -- although he was not above using the communist party and individual communists to fashion his coalition. But he was no raging free market warrior either.
King was a familiar kind of capitalist in the 1950's and 60's among the clergy; a social democrat who favored the idea that government should give capitalism a human face by creating opportunities and transfer wealth to the poor. One of King's last big ideas he was promoting was a guaranteed national income as an alternative to much of the welfare state.
His was definitely not an "eat the rich" philosophy as King also talked up striving to succeed as part of his message to young blacks. Anyone who attended Catholic schools back then is very familiar with King's brand of social advocacy -- more government spending on the poor, better schools, and an end to discrimination so black workers could climb the ladder.
Not his fault that the nightmare of dependency, the travesty of government schools, and the appalling mess of affirmative action was the result.