MIM Notes No. 202      January 15, 2000

On MLK Day, Reassert the struggle for Black nation liberation

On January 17, which the Amerikan government has proclaimed "Martin 
Luther King, Jr. Day," we find it fitting to reassert that the Black 
nation in the united $tates can only win complete emancipation by 
throwing off the reactionary rule of Amerikan imperialism.

The Amerikan imperialists and their liberal intellectual lackeys use the 
image of Martin Luther King to keep Black people's struggles off of the 
streets and in the courts, where the imperialists are slowly repealing 
the victories won by the militant Black Power movement. These 
reactionaries also use Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to extend the "carrot" 
of integrating Black people more fully into their system which lives off 
the plunder of the peoples in the Third World. They glorify the benefits 
which some Blacks have received from this evil system, while ignoring the 
problems which continue to plague the Black masses: Poverty, 
unemployment, disenfranchisement, discrimination, a growing number of 
prisoners (largely young men), and so on.

In contrast, the Maoist Internationalist Movement promotes work in the 
radical, anti-imperialist spirit of Malcolm X, and we look to the 
revolutionary Black Panther Party as a model. We educate about and 
agitate against oppression of the Black nation -- whether in the form of 
prisons, police brutality, poverty, or any other manifestation of Blacks 
being barred from determining their own destiny as a nation.

While Martin Luther King left demonstrators open to police and Klan 
beatings, Malcolm X and many militant youth asserted the Black nation's 
right to defend themselves. These Black radicals took responsibility for 
defending King's protesters from white reactionary attack. They also came 
to recognize the limits of King's reformism and took up revolutionary 
nationalism, calling for self-determination for Black people "by any 
means necessary." The hundreds of ghetto rebellions in the last half of 
the 1960s alone showed that the reforms of the civil rights movement had 
not reached the Black masses, and that they had broken with reformist 
mis-leaders.

The Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and early 1970s cherished the 
spirit of Malcolm X's forthright defense of Black people's right to live 
free of imperialist terror. The BPP went further, studying Mao Zedong and 
building a Maoist vanguard within u.$. borders. MIM recently named Huey 
Newton as North Amerikan of the century for leading a revolutionary 
organization of unprecedented ddiscipline and accomplishment

In closing, we include here a portion of a statement released by the 
Black Panther Party in memory of Martin Luther King:

"We believe that those who mourn the death of Martin Luther King, but do 
nothing to eliminate the white racism and oppression that has 
characterized America for the past three hundred years are merely mocking 
him and the Black community. We will judge men not by their words but by 
their deeds, not by their sentiments, but by their programs. America must 
stop mourning Dr. King and must begin satisfying the needs and desires of 
its Black community."(1)

Note: 1. The Black Panthers Speak, Philip Foner, ed., JB Lippincott: 
1970. Those "needs and desires," as outlined in the rest of the 
statement, included withdrawal of all existing police forces from Black 
communities, reparations, and Black control of schools and courts.