MLK in Newcastle
by hakmao, 4 April 2008
From an article by Brian Ward in the Georgia Historical Quarterly of 1995–A King in Newcastle: Martin Luther King, Jr and British Race Relations, 1967-1968–an account of a visit by Martin Luther King to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne to receive an honorary Doctorate in Civil Law in November 1967, the only such award given him by a British university:
What was truly remarkable about the occasion, however, was the fact that King had troubled to make the trip at all. To fly from Atlanta to London, to travel overnight the 274 miles to Newcastle, returning the same day to London and then the States, in all spending barely twenty-four exhausting hours in England and a mere six hours in Newcastle–this amounted to an amazing gesture to receive the latest in a succession of honorary doctorates from a university in northeastern England, the exact whereabouts of which apparently eluded the SCLC.
That King should have come was even more startling given the specifics of what he had on his mind and his schedule at the time. He had just been in jail and was not particularly well when he was released on November 4.
…..
As the cry of Black Power became louder […] King and other advocates of non-violent direct action were left groping for a viable strategy by which to challenge persistent prejudice and the continued operation of its functional expression, discrimination, in both the South and the North.
King’s response to this new challenge was increasingly to interpret black oppression in terms of an intersecting pattern of racial and class oppression. Although he consistently resisted the specific terminology of Marxism, and could never countenance its essential atheism, King moved toward an analysis of the black predicament which saw it ever more clearly in terms of a global struggle of the oppressed against the triple, mutually reinforcing evils of imperialism, poverty and racism.
The antidote to these interlocking triple evils, King believed, was some form of peaceful social democratic revolution. He called for an interracial alliance of all the working men and women of America, all the marginalized and disadvantaged, in a Poor People’s Campaign to “bring the social change movements through from their early and now inadequate protest phase to a stage of massive, active, non-violent resistance to the evils of the modern system … Let us not therefore think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into all the existing values of American society”.
See also Jim Denham.
