Bernie Sanders
Related: About this forumBernie Sanders in the Deep South
April 11, 2018
3:09 pm
By
Briahna Joy Gray
Excerpts:
Last week, I joined Bernie Sanders in Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination. Sanders was overwhelmingly well received by both passersby and the local audiences who came to hear him speak. But so far, the media coverage of his trip has revolved around a brief aside, in which Sanders faulted the Democratic Party for its recent legislative failures.
In fact, if Beale Street could talk, it would tell a very different story about Bernie Sanders than the now-familiar critique that he is insufficiently sensitive to racial issues. As I walked with Sanders down Memphiss famous thoroughfare, his popularity, including among the predominantly black crowd attending the commemorative festivities, was self-evident. The senator was stopped every few feet by selfie-seekers and admirers. Yes: Perhaps this is to be expected of any politician with a national profile, but given his poor showing in Mississippi during the 2016 Democratic primary, in which he secured less than 17 percent of the black vote, I had thought the senator and his small cohort might go unnoticed. I was wrong.
Wednesday evenings summit in Jackson with the, dare I say, charismatic 35-year-old black progressive Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, was designed to further cement the class and race theme by reminding the audience of Dr. Kings emphasis on economic matters toward the end of his life. Kings economic message True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring hung over the discussion both literally and figuratively, and the panel opened with a chorus of young black students demanding, What does economic justice look like on southern soil?
During the discussion, it was difficult to ignore the parallels between late-period Kings focus on economic equality and Sanderss own priorities: You have to appreciate that while [King] was [challenging President Johnson on the Vietnam War], suddenly the money for his organization starts drying up, Sanders said. And then in the midst of this
he said, we gotta attack racism in all its forms, but we have to deal with economic justice. Im gonna organize, he says, a poor peoples march a poor peoples campaign. Were gonna march on Washington. Were gonna have low-income African-Americans, low-income whites, low-income Latinos, low-income Native Americans, were gonna stand together to demand that the United States change its national priorities man, what courage that was.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/what-really-happened-when-bernie-sanders-went-to-mississippi.html
Senator Bernie Sanders joins with others during an event to mark the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination on April 4, 2018, in Memphis, Tennessee. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Donkees
(32,396 posts)disillusioned73
(2,872 posts)a lil taste of reality.. hard to find lately
gREAT QUOTE;
"Mayor Lumumbas closing remarks at the panel reinforced the theme that identity alone is not enough: There was a time, he explained, where our fight was to get leadership that looked like us. Now our mission must be to have leadership that thinks like us.