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Dear Progressive Reader,

Today marks the ninety-third anniversary of the birth of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. As I chronicled ([link removed]) in 2018, the road to establishing a national holiday in his honor was a long and bumpy one. The first national commemoration took place on January 15, 1986, nearly twenty years after his tragic murder in Memphis, Tennessee. King wrote for The Progressive several times in the 1960s; most well known is his article “Tears of Love” which is better known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail ([link removed]) ,” written in longhand in his cell in April 1963. In this epistle, King said, “More and more, I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good
people.”

Many of King’s messages have been sanitized or hidden over the years. As Yohuru Williams noted ([link removed]) last year, in the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurgency, “King would likely have drawn a clear connection between this failed insurgency and racial politics. He asked, in a broad sense, why efforts to solve the nation’s division—and its underlying issues of racial and economic inequality—had never been fully pursued.” A 2019 book, King and the Other America by French cultural historian Sylvie Laurent, takes an in-depth look at King’s own efforts to address these underlying issues. In response to the political divisions in the America of Donald Trump, Laurent says ([link removed]) , “Had King’s more radical and dialectical grasp of the nexus of class inequality in a racialized democracy been considered, the political splintering of the
working class along racial lines could, perhaps, have been prevented.”

This past week, the issue of voting rights appears to have suffered several defeats. Here in Wisconsin, in a case being watched around the country, a judge declared ([link removed]) that “ballot drop boxes” are not legal. Nationally, the attempt to codify voting rights at the federal level was dealt a blow by Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who said ([link removed]) she would not support her party and her President in their effort to modify the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rules. This is not the filibuster of Jimmy Stewart, speaking against corruption and greed ([link removed]) in the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or even Senator Rand Paul putting on a catheter and talking for nearly thirteen hours ([link removed]) in opposition to U.S. drone warfare. Rather, this is about filibuster rules
that, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates ([link removed]) , allow a minority party in the Senate to hold legislation hostage, in spite of strong popular support.

Nicolas J.S. Davies and Medea Benjamin report this week on a newly released listing of U.S. airstrikes—the first time the numbers have been published since Donald Trump ordered their disclosure halted in February 2020. “Over the past twenty years,” their report reveals ([link removed]) , “U.S. and allied air forces have dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries—an average of forty-six strikes per day." Also, Edward Hunt examines ([link removed]) an apparently unquestioned 2019 directive that makes U.S. diplomats into advocates of imperialism. And David Rosen delves into ([link removed]) a new report that looks at data about the rising rightwing movements opposed to democracy and equality.

Plus, Anthony Pahnke urges federal support for farmers; Sarah Cords reports on ([link removed]) the Tesla Corporation and C.E.O. Elon Musk’s efforts to silence whistleblowers; Eleanor J. Bader provides a portrait ([link removed]) of the life and work of scholar and activist Chip Berlet, whose decades of chronicling rightwing movements is celebrated in a new book, Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy; and Ed Rampell pens a remembrance ([link removed]) of the late actress Betty White as an activist for racial and gender equality and animal rights.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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