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In reply to the discussion: Dr. Cornel West Takes Issue With President Barack Obama Taking Oath With Martin Luther King Jr.'s Bi [View all]deutsey
(20,166 posts)in the first paragraph this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/mlk/legacy/legacy.htm
There are many references to it out there in the Intertubes.
Here's a link to a speech Coretta Scott King gave three weeks after MLK's assassination. In it, she quotes notes found on her husband's body ("10 Commandments on Vietnam" . Not sure this would've been in his sermon about America and hell, but it was obviously on his mind as he was working on that last sermon.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/corettascottkingvietnamcommandments.htm
Here's an excerpt of her remarks from April 1968:
My husband always saw the problem of racism and poverty here at home and militarism abroad as two sides of the same coin. In fact, it is even very clear that our policy at home is to try to solve social problems through military means just as we have done abroad.
The interrelatedness of domestic and foreign affairs is no longer questioned. The bombs we drop on the people of Vietnam continue to explode at home with all of their devastating potential. And so I would invite you to join us in Washington in our effort to enable the poor people of this nation to enjoy a fair share of America's blessing.
There is no reason why a nation as rich as ours should be blighted by poverty, disease, and illiteracy. It is plain that we don't care about our poor people except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.
Our Congress passes laws which subsidize corporation farms, oil companies, airlines, and houses for suburbia. But when they turn their attention to the poor, they suddenly become concerned about balancing the budget and cut back on the funds for Head Start, Medicare, and mental health appropriations.
The most tragic of these cuts is the welfare section to the Social Security amendment, which freezes federal funds for millions of needy children, who are desperately poor but who do not receive public assistance. It forces mothers to leave their children and accept work or training, leaving their children to grow up in the streets as tomorrow's social problems. This law must be repealed, and I encourage you to join welfare mothers on May 12th, Mother's Day and call upon Congress to establish a guaranteed annual income, instead of these racist and archaic measures, these measures which dehumanize God's children and create more social problems than they solve.