In solidarity with Black Lives Matter

The deep indignation felt by the Black Lives Matter movement is conditioned by acts of impunity carried out by law enforcement, private citizens, and other institutions. In our current era, the disproportionate number of people of color in prison and, the disproportionate shootings of African Americans by white police officers evokes lynchings of yesteryear. There has been very little to no accounting, so acts of impunity continue.

Breaking the chains of systemic racism can be accomplished if there are consequences for these modern acts of impunity. The historic lack of consequences has bred our current order. Getting a public review of the circumstances of Dr. King’s assassination would serve to break the long history of impunity. If we don’t revisit Dr. King’s death, then our nation may very well continue to be mired in enmity.

Justice for Dr. King would be a significant step toward rectifying past wrongs. Some in the Pacific Green Party of Oregon support efforts to re-open an investigation into Dr. King’s murder as a necessary tactic in a strategy to end systemic racism.

Dr. King’s assassination, and the other 1960’s assassinations, have left an invisible scar on the American psyche. A just accounting of the crime can heal our national wound because it will involve truth, justice and hopefully some form of national reconciliation.

In the case of King Family civil suit against the United States government, it was found by a preponderance of evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was complicit in the murder / assassination fo Dr. King; his death was an undercover lynching, the murder being pinned on a patsy, James Earl Ray. We reference the account by William Pepper in The Plot to Kill Dr. King, The Truth Behind the assassination.

The civil case demonstrated that the King assassination was a conspiracy of federal and local law enforcement that deprived Dr. King of his civil right to live and exercise his First Amendment Rights to lead the country; more deeply, his murder was a statement recognizable to African-Americans; it was another lynching in a long line of them, but the assassination of Dr. King is the most brazen of all lynchings of all time because it struck not just at Dr. King, a man, but at the ideas he espoused, and the vision for which he stood.

The assassination of Dr. King, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a few years earlier and only months later, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, shocked the nation into a stupor that is sustained by official fraud and media complicity in concealing the truth.

The 1960’s assassinations are grounded in an attitude of impunity that stems from the earliest days of America. The country started with an Indian War, which cleared the way for the arrival of the first group of enslaved Africans in 1619. Europeans were undaunted about clearing the way for a slave society.

From the beginning of American life, a slave owner had the absolute sovereign freedom to do what he liked with a slave. Of course the goal was profit, but a recalcitrant freedom loving slave would be killed, in an act of impunity, with the goal of quelling any other dissenters from challenging the order. The colonial state aided and abetted private slave holders. Modern day police brutality, borne of an attitude of impunity, stems from slave holders having unchecked power over others.

The nation’s silence in the face of the 1960’s assassinations, and the lack of a true investigation, meant there would be no justice; the lack of accountability would embolden a further sense of impunity, such is the nature of injustice.

Only through a full disclosure of governmental malfeasance can we break the systemic acts of impunity that are at the core of systemic racism. Systemic racism, as a chain of acts of impunity, can be broken with the truth about how the United States came to be, and why there is such cruelty against people of color.

The assassination of Dr. King was presciently anticipated by Dr. King himself as he was fully aware of the consequences of calling for an end to the Vietnam War, denouncing it as a racist war, a stance Muhammad Ali heroically took in his denunciation of the American War in Vietnam.

Most significantly, Dr. King elevated achieving economic equity as a necessary step toward social justice, and so he called for equitable distribution of resources. This message was gaining traction with more people; his spreading message, tinged with Socialism, reaching into mainstream society posed a greater threat than ever before.

Justice for Dr. King will require peeling back the lies of deception and placing blame where it is due; on actual people in the power structure who have not been prosecuted; as a result there has been no accountability, just as countless earlier lynchings in the American South continued with impunity well into the 1960’s, the cruel deed continues today in the form of police brutality and mass incarceration of people of color.

Some in the Pacific Green Party are inspired by Dr. King’s message and the goals he had for society. We demand justice and an accounting from the government for Dr. King’s assassination; we see this as a first step for undoing systemic racism. We need to return in spirit to 1968, and demand justice and not let up till it’s done. By this tact, we can reclaim historic possibilities denied by Dr. King’s untimely death.

We the people of the Green Party invite African Americans and all people of color and others who feel the call, to make our party your political home; join us in support of Dr. King’s call for economic equity; let us mobilize the movement to accomplish what Dr. King envisioned for America.