On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Erik Wallenberg talks to Jeanne Theoharis about her new book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South, in which Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice.

Jeanne Theoharis is the author or co-author of thirteen books on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the US. Her biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, won a 2014 NAACP Image Award & the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.

Order a signed copy directly from Pilsen Community Books.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.

Image by Unseen Histories.

Eight Places You Need to Visit and Understand Chicago’s Black Freedom Struggle  

Go to Montgomery, Alabama today and markers to the civil rights movement dot the city landscape: Dr. King’s house, the place where Rosa Parks was arrested, homes of other activists like E.D. Nixon and Georgia Gilmore, the site where the 1960 Freedom Riders were attacked. But come to Chicago and the markers to the city’s civil rights movement are few and far between–despite an incredibly robust freedom movement and a level of segregation that Dr King termed one of the “most segregated” in the nation in 1963.  

In Marquette Park, there is a beautiful artist-designed memorial where civil rights marchers were assaulted by white mobs in the summer of 1966 but no mention of city officials’ long-standing attempts to keep the city segregated. The National Park Service has given landmark status to the Chicago church where teenager Emmett Till’s casket, lynched in Mississippi, was opened for the world to see. But the site of 17-year-old Chicago teenager Jerome Huey’s lynching that occurred in the city in 1966, the 1963 school boycott, and the slum apartment the Kings lived in remain unmarked.    

This Southernification of King and the civil rights movement is a more comfortable tale. It erases the systemic, longstanding segregation and racial inequality endemic in Northern cities and marginalizes the robust, years-long movement in Chicago that Martin Luther King supported and then helped expand with the SCLC in 1965—movements that were ignored, dismissed, or demonized by most white Chicagoans, city leaders, and the federal government at the time. To tell that Northern story, to mark those places and reckon with that history, uncovers a more necessary if unsettling truth about this country.   

Too often Northern racism and segregation are, as they were sixty years ago, dismissed as not systemic, a product of people’s preferences to live in communities that are not integrated. But even a glimpse of the history shows how city leaders, school officials, real estate interests, and outright violent racists colluded to maintain segregation and inequality in cities like Chicago.  

Mayor Richard J. Daley’s home, ​​3536 South Lowe Avenue in Bridgeport. Elected mayor in 1955 and serving until he died in 1976, Daley would persistently deny the city’s segregation and, as persistently, work to maintain it, including in his own all-white neighborhood of Bridgeport.  The mayor backed the building of massive housing projects to contain Black people including the segregated, seventeen-story Stateway Gardens and twenty-eight-story, 30-block-long Robert Taylor Homes projects. Stunned by the intensity of segregation, Martin Luther King called them “cement reservations”: Coretta, “upright concentration camps.”  

The construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway was slated to go through Bridgeport but Daley changed the route so the expressway swerved into the Black southside community, destroying a vibrant section of Black Chicago. When two Black students attempted to rent a Bridgeport apartment, Daley let his neighbors run them out. When school desegregation activists marched on his house and his neighbors through bottles and rocks, he had the marchers arrested not his neighbors and defended his neighbors as “fine, hardworking people.”   

Willis Wagon Protest at 73rd Street and Lowe Ave. School segregation wasn’t a happenstance either. School superintendent Benjamin Willis who served from 1956-1966, alongside school officials throughout the city, actively worked to keep the schools segregated. When the numbers of Black students increased, instead of letting Black students into predominantly-white schools with open seats, Willis bought trailers (which activists then named “Willis wagons”) to install at Black schools. The city also put many Black schools on double session days–one group of kids in the morning, another group in the afternoon. Black parents organized furiously. When meetings and marches had little effect, Black mother Rosie Simpson launched a protest of wagons being installed at 73rd street and Lowe Ave, laying down to block the construction. The protests there and at other sites and arrests went on for months. Comedian Dick Gregory was arrested; King went to the jail to show his support for Gregory and the other demonstrators.  

October 22, 1963 “Freedom Day” school boycott: Board of Education, 1 North Dearborn Street. Growing tired of the city’s intransigence, activists including Simpson organized a school boycott. King met with them to encourage their action. Part of the rationale behind the boycott was the school system received money for each student’s attendance, so it would hurt their operating budget and underline the gravity of the situation. On October 22, a stunning 225,000 students—50 percent of the city’s total school enrollment (with numbers rivaling the March on Washington two months earlier)—stayed out of school to protest the lack of school desegregation and an end to the Willis wagons. Ten thousand students and parents picketed City Hall and the Board of Education, carrying signs reading “Willis Must Go” and “No More Little Black Sambo Read in Class.”  

City Hall, 121 North La Salle Street. In July 1965, Chicago parents with the CCCO  filed a complaint with the US Office of Education that the Chicago Board of Education had violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—which gave the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) the power to withhold federal funds if school districts continued to segregate. Chicago stood to lose over $30 million. The federal government requested a host of information: racial head counts of students and teachers, per-pupil expenditures in schools, average class size, student-teacher ratios, and the method of assigning teachers. But Willis and the Board of Education did not comply.  And HEW learned Willis intended to use the federal money to aid middle-class white districts and procure more trailers.   

As a result, on October 1, HEW withheld those $32 million in federal funds, finding Chicago schools in “probable non-compliance.” King telegrammed President Johnson praising the decision and enforcing the Civil Rights Act against Northern school systems. But the Chicago Tribune, alongside most white Chicagoans, found the decision “outrageous” and slammed “federal interference.”  Furious, Mayor Daley got on a plane to confront President Johnson directly. Johnson capitulated and less than a week after it had withheld funds, HEW released the $32 million to Chicago.  

The Chicago Freedom Movement in concert with SCLC doubled down in their protests over the next year. On July 10, 1966, over 35,000 Chicagoans braved the 98-degree heat for a rally and march to City Hall to publicize their demands. When they arrived, King taped the fourteen-point list of the movement’s demands to the door. Their demands laid out a detailed blueprint for addressing the city’s inequities, including enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act against Chicago’s segregated schools; a civilian complaint review board to monitor the Chicago Police Department; a bargaining union for welfare recipients and ceasing of home investigations; a $2 state minimum wage; increased garbage collection and building inspections; and federal supervision of loans by banks and savings institutions. 

1550 South Hamlin Avenue. The SCLC had joined the years-long Chicago Freedom Movement to build out a campaign against the city’s segregation, expanding the campaign in July 1965. In January 1966, to further escalate, the Kings moved into a $90-a-month North Lawndale tenement on Hamlin. When the landlord found out the Kings were moving in, he hastily fixed some of the building’s most glaring code violations. Still, the heat and refrigerator didn’t work. The food sold in nearby stores was often of poor quality and rats were plentiful. Working-class Black Chicagoans paid more for rent and living expenses and got smaller, more decrepit units with many more code violations than their white working-class counterparts.  

1811 West Adams Street. The next month, on February 3, 1966, Andre Adams, a baby two days shy of his first birthday, was chewed to death by a rat. The infant was also severely malnourished, weighing only 5 pounds, 8 ounces when he died. Westside parents rose up in anger. These inhumane conditions—starvation, rats, buildings without heat—were “why we’re here fighting in the slums of Chicago,” said King, who called Adams’ death “as much of a civil rights tragedy as the murder of [Viola] Liuzzo” after the Selma march. Black parents had highlighted the rats and the health problems they had brought for years but were continually ignored by the city.  

1321 South Homan Avenue. Scores of buildings in the westside and southside ghettos had numerous building code violations. One night, five families with 15 children came to visit the Kings to tell them about the uninhabitable conditions in their building–no heat in the dead of winter, rats in their apartments, and in some cases no running water. King went over to their building and was disgusted to see the conditions of the building, including a baby wrapped in newspaper to keep warm. Three weeks after Adam’s death, to expose “how bad the slum conditions were,” the SCLC with the tenants decided to engage in a rent strike where the family’s pooled their rent in a trusteeship through SCLC and the money was used to fix the furnace and the building’s electrical system. City leaders and the national press were outraged. The landlord took King and the SCLC to court. The judge ordered the trusteeship ended but didn’t find King guilty of a criminal charge–putting the building in receivership and ordering the landlord to fix the 23 code violations within the next month. 

Jerome Huey lynching–25th Place and Laramie Avenue, Cicero. On May 25, 1966, 17-year-old Black teenager Jerome Huey set out for a job interview at a freight-loading company in Cicero. While waiting at the bus stop after the interview, he was attacked by four white men and beaten with a baseball bat so badly that his eyes came out of his skull. Huey died in the hospital two days later–a lynching in plain sight. One of the driving reasons the Chicago Freedom Movement began holding open-housing marches that summer into Chicago’s sundown neighborhoods like Marquette Park, Gage Park, and Cicero (where Black people worked but couldn’t live), was to break the fear and the city’s complicity in this segregation and racist violence.  

But 59 years later, the site where Jerome Huey was lynched is completely unmarked. While most Chicagoans and indeed many Americans know the story of Emmett Till, Jerome Huey’s horrific death has been erased. “The North is not the promised land,” Coretta Scott King underlined.  So the lack of historical markers in Chicago (and New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Detroit) has significant consequences, not just for understanding the city’s past but for reckoning with the persistence of this inequality and where we must go from here.   

Making this history visible for Chicagoans and visitors alike to encounter on a daily basis would expose how racial inequality persists, the mechanisms that keep it in place, and how we might begin to change this reality. It would demonstrate that segregation is a national problem, not one that can be dismissed as a regional aberration. Chicago’s role in upholding racism and the heroic people who fought for a different way must not remain hidden in plain sight.

Find these sites on a map.

A shorter version of this piece first appeared in The Chicago Tribune.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeanne Theoharis - Erik Wallenberg.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jim Kavanagh.

The 24-year-old community journalist is among the country’s most prominent victims of official “red-tagging,” the dangerous and sometimes lethal practice of wrongfully accusing journalists, activists and other perceived critics of the government and security forces of association with the banned communist National People’s Army. Her case is emblematic of the previous Rodrigo Duterte administration’s targeting of independent journalists, a campaign of threats, pressure, and lawfare that crushed media outlets and engendered a culture of self-censorship that has persisted in the year since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won the presidency in May 2022.

“The prosecution has no legal basis for the case,” Cumpio’s lawyer, Ruben Palomino told the Committee to Protect Journalists after the April hearing – attended by CPJ representatives – was postponed because the prosecution failed to show up.

“The case is pure harassment,” said Palomino, listing alleged irregularities in the initial 2020 police raid on Cumpio’s house and subsequent inconsistent and seemingly unreliable witness testimony.

 ‘Better environment from hell’

Journalists, editors, and activists who spoke with CPJ representatives when they visited the Philippines in April all noted a discernible change in tone toward the press under Marcos Jr., who so far has demurred from the overt antagonism toward the media seen and felt under his populist, tough-talking predecessor.

That shift has been apparent in renewed media access to the peripatetic president’s official plane, a palpable decline in online trolling of reporters and media, and a stoppage of direct presidential criticism of the press, the same sources say.

The change, the same sources say, comes as Marcos Jr. bids to rehabilitate his family’s name and image tarnished by his father’s dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s while courting better diplomatic relations with the U.S., European Union, and Japan – a geopolitical tilt away from the Duterte government’s lean towards authoritarian China.

But that change in form, the journalists, editors and activists say, has not yet been accompanied by substantive actions to undo the damage wrought to press freedom under the Duterte administration or advance legal reforms to prevent a renewed government assault against independent journalists and media groups.

The ongoing court cases against independent news outlet Rappler and its Nobel-winning co-founder Maria Ressa are high-profile cases in point. In January, the Philippine Court of Tax Appeals acquitted Ressa – CPJ’s 2018 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award winner – and Rappler of four out of seven tax evasion charges.

Ressa still awaits a ruling from the Supreme Court on her appeal against a previous conviction of cyber libel, which could see her jailed for nearly seven years.

Rappler editors acknowledged a discernible easing of the repression in the transition from Duterte to Marcos Jr., who “is not attacking the media” like Duterte. That, they told CPJ, has included “significantly diminished troll noise” against Rappler and its reporters, which spiked during the Duterte era.

“Generally it’s a better environment from hell,” said executive editor Gloria Glenda. “We operate not in fear, but there is always this anxiety that this isn’t going to last,” she added, particularly if news coverage becomes more critical of the Marcos Jr. administration.

A spokesman for the office of Marcos Jr., who won power on May 9 in a landslide election a year ago and was sworn in as president on June 30, said the president has vowed to protect journalists.

“As regards your concerns on the safety of journalists in the country, may we note that the Administration of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr has clearly expressed its full commitment to protect the same and uphold press freedom,” assistant secretary Clemencia Cabugayan wrote in response to CPJ’s request to meet with the president.

Journalist killings

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, a local press freedom group, says Marco Jr.’s change in tone has not translated into improved conditions on the ground, particularly in provincial areas that rank among the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist.   

The union’s research, compiling the various threats facing Filipino journalists, ranging from red-tagging to cyber libel to physical attacks, shows the 53 press freedom violations recorded during Marcos Jr.’s first year in office have outpaced the average of 41 per year during Duterte’s six-year term.

“Our colleagues on the ground still feel the pressure,” said Ronalyn Olea, the group’s secretary-general, who met CPJ wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Free Frenchie Mae Cumpio.” “There’s been no undoing of anything of how the media is treated … we’re not letting down our guard.”

Three Filipino journalists – Percival Mabasa, Renato Blanco, and Federico Gempesaw – have been murdered in connection with their work in the year since Marcos Jr. took office. Their deaths have so far tracked the woeful pattern of previous media killings in the Philippines, where CPJ research shows justice is consistently denied.  

Advocates and journalists see last October’s killing of radio journalist Mabasa, known for his scathing critical political commentaries against Duterte, as a key test case of Marcos Jr.’s resolve to achieve justice and reverse the tide of impunity in media murders seen in successive administrations.

The suspected gunman has been arrested, but those charged in the assassination’s planning, top-ranking national prison system officials Gerald Bantag and Ricardo Zulueta, are on the run from pending arrest warrants. (CPJ could not reach Bantag or Zulueta for comment on the murder charges).

Roy Mabasa, Percival’s younger brother who is also a journalist, believes the real mastermind behind the killing is even more powerful than the identified suspects, he told CPJ, noting that the vast majority of the murdered journalist’s last 200 or so programs were critical of Duterte, with fewer focused on Marcos Jr. and only a handful related to Bantag. 

“Percy’s killing sent a message,” said Mabasa, who articulated concerns about his own personal security for being so outspoken in his pursuit of justice for his fallen brother, including in press interviews and his radio program. “It’s a wake-up call to be vigilant about those in power.”

‘Complex PTSD’

Editors, journalists and activists told CPJ that if Marcos Jr. moved more overtly to reverse Duterte’s wrongs against the free press, it would send an important signal that the change in tone from Malacañang, the presidential palace, is actually being backed with press freedom-protecting action and reform.

But the same sources said they are not yet convinced the president intends to dismantle the repressive machinery Duterte built and deployed to cow the media and that Marcos Jr. may remobilize it to curb critical reporting when the current press-president honeymoon period ends.

Duterte’s press freedom-eroding legacy is perhaps most clearly seen at ABS-CBN, once the country’s most widely viewed and influential news broadcaster that now operates as a shell of its former self. ABS-CBN lost its free-to-air operating franchise under Duterte, a politicized decision that forced the station to close all of its regional bureaus, shut down its current affairs shows and retrench hundreds of staff reporters.

ABS-CBN editors who spoke to CPJ said they are no longer actively pursuing a new franchise as the only available frequency has since been allocated to a political ally of Duterte, who, they say, has de-emphasized public service news for more lucrative entertainment programming.

Jeff Canoy, ABS-CBN’s chief of reporters, said the news broadcaster is still dealing with what he characterized as “complex PTSD” caused by the station’s shutdown, massive loss of staff and news departments, and discrediting of the station and its journalists by online trolls who echoed and amplified Duterte tirades against the broadcaster.

“The democratic space has become smaller because of what we lost with the franchise,” said Canoy. “And it’s opened up a lot of venues for lies and propaganda online… Many now genuinely believe mainstream journalists are now the enemy… That’s the sad reality.”

(Crispin and Beh reported from Manila and Tacloban City.)

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Shawn W. Crispin.

The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provides an opportunity to step back and reflect on the significance of his life and work. It is particularly important to do so this year, with unapologetic racism on the rise and a Cold War atmosphere permeating Washington.

Dr. King had a deep understanding of the links between America’s domestic and foreign predicaments, expressed most clearly in his speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4 1967, one year before he was assassinated.

King understood that Vietnam was not an isolated case of U.S. military adventurism:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality… we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees [like the one against the war in Vietnam] for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

King’s predictions about where the United States would intervene were not accurate, but the process he described has all too sadly played out, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Somalia to Syria and beyond.

These direct interventions don’t take into account America’s role as the world’s leading arms trading nation, supplying equipment to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that have been used in a brutal war in Yemen that has led to direct and indirect deaths approaching 400,000 people. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States supplied weapons to 103 nations between 2017 and 2021 — more than half the countries in the world. For many citizens of the world, their first association with America is a U.S. soldier or a U.S.-supplied weapon in the hands of their government or one of their adversaries.

This U.S. record of wide-ranging military intervention and runaway arms sales is a far cry from the “diplomacy first” foreign policy that the Biden administration has pledged to pursue. To its credit, the administration stuck to its commitment to get the United States out of its disastrous 20-year engagement in Afghanistan. And in some cases, as in Ukraine, U.S. arms have been supplied for defensive purposes, to help Kyiv fend off a brutal Russian invasion. But on balance, the United States still adheres to the kind of militarized foreign policy that Dr. King warned us about well over 50 years ago.

Quincy Institute non-resident fellow and Tufts University professor Monica Toft has noted the broader impacts of America’s addiction to military force in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs:

This is an unfortunate trend. For evidence, look no further than the disastrous U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The overly frequent resort to use of force also undermines U.S. legitimacy in the world. As the U.S. diplomatic corps and American influence abroad shrink, the country’s military footprint only grows.

Toft also points to the impact on U.S. interventionism on the reputation of America in the world. A Pew research poll conducted between 2013 and 2018 found that the number of foreigners who considered the United States a threat nearly doubled over that time period, from 25 percent to 45 percent.

King also underscored the domestic consequences of rampant interventionism:

A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

The domestic costs of militarism are painfully present today. The budget signed by President Biden last month provides $858 billion for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. That’s well over half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget — the portion that includes virtually everything the government does other than mandatory entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare: environmental protection, public health, administration of justice, job training, education, and more. Meanwhile Congress has resisted the administration’s attempts to get additional funding for Covid relief, and terminated the Child Tax Credit, one of the most effective means of eliminating poverty.

King understood that the roots of the warfare state run deep, driven by the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Groups like the Poor People’s Campaign, co-chaired by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis and inspired by Dr. King, have taken up the call to address these issues. More groups and individuals need to do so if we are to foster a genuine “diplomacy first” foreign policy, with the immense benefits for American and global security and prosperity and equality at home that would entail.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Hartung.

The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provides an opportunity to step back and reflect on the significance of his life and work. It is particularly important to do so this year, with unapologetic racism on the rise and a Cold War atmosphere permeating Washington.

Dr. King had a deep understanding of the links between America’s domestic and foreign predicaments, expressed most clearly in his speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4 1967, one year before he was assassinated.

King understood that Vietnam was not an isolated case of U.S. military adventurism:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality… we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees [like the one against the war in Vietnam] for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

King’s predictions about where the United States would intervene were not accurate, but the process he described has all too sadly played out, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Somalia to Syria and beyond.

These direct interventions don’t take into account America’s role as the world’s leading arms trading nation, supplying equipment to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that have been used in a brutal war in Yemen that has led to direct and indirect deaths approaching 400,000 people. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States supplied weapons to 103 nations between 2017 and 2021 — more than half the countries in the world. For many citizens of the world, their first association with America is a U.S. soldier or a U.S.-supplied weapon in the hands of their government or one of their adversaries.

This U.S. record of wide-ranging military intervention and runaway arms sales is a far cry from the “diplomacy first” foreign policy that the Biden administration has pledged to pursue. To its credit, the administration stuck to its commitment to get the United States out of its disastrous 20-year engagement in Afghanistan. And in some cases, as in Ukraine, U.S. arms have been supplied for defensive purposes, to help Kyiv fend off a brutal Russian invasion. But on balance, the United States still adheres to the kind of militarized foreign policy that Dr. King warned us about well over 50 years ago.

Quincy Institute non-resident fellow and Tufts University professor Monica Toft has noted the broader impacts of America’s addiction to military force in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs:

This is an unfortunate trend. For evidence, look no further than the disastrous U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The overly frequent resort to use of force also undermines U.S. legitimacy in the world. As the U.S. diplomatic corps and American influence abroad shrink, the country’s military footprint only grows.

Toft also points to the impact on U.S. interventionism on the reputation of America in the world. A Pew research poll conducted between 2013 and 2018 found that the number of foreigners who considered the United States a threat nearly doubled over that time period, from 25 percent to 45 percent.

King also underscored the domestic consequences of rampant interventionism:

A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

The domestic costs of militarism are painfully present today. The budget signed by President Biden last month provides $858 billion for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. That’s well over half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget — the portion that includes virtually everything the government does other than mandatory entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare: environmental protection, public health, administration of justice, job training, education, and more. Meanwhile Congress has resisted the administration’s attempts to get additional funding for Covid relief, and terminated the Child Tax Credit, one of the most effective means of eliminating poverty.

King understood that the roots of the warfare state run deep, driven by the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Groups like the Poor People’s Campaign, co-chaired by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis and inspired by Dr. King, have taken up the call to address these issues. More groups and individuals need to do so if we are to foster a genuine “diplomacy first” foreign policy, with the immense benefits for American and global security and prosperity and equality at home that would entail.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Hartung.