Dr. King, in his last years, was more radical than everyone around him. He dragged the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to campaign in Chicago, where his lieutenants did not want to go. He got pelted with rocks in Chicago and admonished his staff that white Americans had never intended to integrate their schools and neighborhoods. He added pointedly that white Americans “literally sought to annihilate the Indian.”
– Gary Dorrien, author of Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, in ’10 Historians on What People Still Don’t Know About Martin Luther King Jr.’, Time magazine, 2018, reprinted in the Columbus African American News Journal, January 2022 (reproduced below).
[W]hat most people don’t know is that, in Dr. King’s understanding, the foundations of racism, as a theory and practice, began with the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples and its aftermath. […] In Dr. King’s last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1968), he reminded his readers that there was a reason why white folks did not embrace equality with Black folks and eliminate their antiblackness: “In dealing with the ambivalence of white America, we must not overlook another form of racism that was relentlessly pursued on American shores: the physical extermination of the American Indian.”
– Kyle T. Mays, ‘Martin Luther King Jr. and the Native Question’, in ‘An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States’ (Beacon Press: Boston, 2021), pp. 83-86 (reproduced below)
