The "Dreamy" King

https://mlk50.com/solution-to-poverty-is-simple-more-money-de83002ce3f6

MLK50: Justice Through Journalism’s Wendi Thomas has constantly been on the money over issues we are facing today in Memphis, and how they correlate with issues from 50 years ago. In an entry Thomas posted on April 3^rd, one particular idea she wrote about resonated with me.

Thomas references a King speech from 1967, “The Three Evils of Society,” and shows how King made the declaration that, “The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor — both black and white, here and abroad”. While this idea in itself is still a very powerful sentiment today because it is still largely very true, it is her later remark that carries the real impact.

This is not the King we see big companies celebrating. Big companies prefer to remember the King who advocated for peace, and presented a united force – a community image. This is the image that big companies choose to endorse, instead of the real thing that King was fighting for, because ultimately it would hurt their business given many of them still “thrive on the exploitation of the poor.” Because the biggest corporations choose to endorse this rhetoric, so does the rest of the community to avoid the conflict of having to call out these major corporations.

This rhetoric has so much importance, and carries so much weight, because it is largely the reason that Memphis has remained stagnated over the past 50 years. For the community to be able to improve itself, the large corporations need to start recognising and understand the damage that they are doing to the community in order to keep their profits high. Perhaps instead of backing the “dreamy” image of King that many choose to remember, they should endorse the “real” King.

Unfortunately, profits seem to mean more to these companies than the people they employ, or the community they supposedly benefit by being there. Less and less of the time we see the profits of these companies being pumped back into the community, which, again, is half of the problem we see in Memphis.

It’s simple: stop endorsing the wishy washy King that is so prevalent in society, and instead, commit to helping to solve the problems which King identified in Memphis in the 1960’s, and the problems which we still see in Memphis today.