My automatic answer to the questioning title is YES. When King was assassinated in 1968, there was no thug culture as we now know it. Thugs have existed for eons. A few outlaws have achieved international fame. Brotherhoods and sisterhoods of the criminal have flourished for centuries in hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. They were a part of human cultures, but they were not generally discussed as a discrete culture.

Prior to the late twentieth century, none of the thugs lived in “hoods,” although some of them wore hoods. They were not commercial objects to be sold back to themselves in the forms of expensive but trashy fashions and overpriced CDs that preserve and broadcast dubious talent. Martin Luther King, Jr. died because he, and thousands of other unnamed people, confronted the hypocrisy of the United States and demanded Freedom. Freedom embraces thug culture. Ms. Tucker’s calculated framing of the question by way of contextual displacement invites ironic affirmation.

Ms. Tucker’s indirect answer to her question is NO. She does not wish to consider that in time ultimate sacrifices may slip into the category of things done in vain. She wishes to protect the glory of the sacrifice against erosion. To be sure, King did not die so the clever and greedy might more easily exploit the oppressed.

She castigates affluent blacks for pimping and earning handsome profits from the lawlessness and the outlaw choices of some young black women and men. She fails, however, to criticize the source: white, corporate America, the major sponsor of benign genocide.

Pimps, we should recall, are themselves pimped by systems. “The popularity of thug culture” Tucker claims, “is among the most serious of modern-day threats to black America, far more dangerous than any lingering institutional racism.” In this sentence, the weakness of Tucker’s informal analysis erupts like a boil.

Institutional racism is the very backbone of the industry that champions and valorizes thug culture. That some presumably intelligent African Americans should be gears in the machinery of institutional racism is not astonishing. They have embraced the current version of the American Dream. After all, they have no obligations under the laws of brute economy to be more noble than Africans who sold other Africans to Europeans.

If Reginald Hudlin and Tracey Edmonds and the non-black black-oriented BET celebrate Kimberly Jones (aka Lil’ Kim) for her crimes, they are acting in ways that historical narratives allow us to predict. Although King did not include either thug culture or racial treason or sinister commodification in his dream-script, these things are undeniable components of our post-1968 America.

Ms. Tucker’s juxtaposing the memory of King’s death with the success of trafficking in lawlessness is sobering. It is regrettable that, on the other hand, she failed to place the abuse of King’s sacrifice in the context of the pervasive lawlessness that is honored at the highest level of American government and business.

Her critique only urges us to recall that some dreamers die young and that their dreams eventually become material for nostalgia. Ms. Tucker teaches us a lesson that is probably quite remote from her intentions. History is a hurricane. It has no respect for the integrity of dreams or dreamers.

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Rev.Dr. MLK Jr Day
Mon, 16 Jan 2006

Good day, Rudy,

Thank you for your continuing wave – or should I say Tsunami – of poems and article links concerning the vast world of African-American issues – rather American and human issues, some of which most deeply affect African- American citizens.

Dr. King’s impact on me has been experienced not just by the rhetoric but by making me conscious of the world in which I was raised. The only person of color I ever really met in my childhood were one or two African-American women who did some weekly housework for several of my aunts. My other image was conditioned by street car and bus rides to downtown Baltimore past street corners which always seem to have many men standing around near bars. 

I remember visiting an aunt at Baltimore and Gilmor sometimes at night and hearing brawls nearby. Obviously an impoverished view of the local community to carry with me in my first decade of life – my pre-MLK time. I was blessed with parents who gave me example of treating everyone the same, though obviously our social world was part of the color divide characteristic of 40s-50s Baltimore. My father worked as stock clerk in the basement of the Bugle Linen Company on Chester St for decades with the African-American women and men involved in laundering rented sheets and tablecloths.

From him I learned to think of everyone as equal. But certainly being immersed in Jamaica for ten years was the defining element in my education about race. Many Jamaicans never experience prejudice until they come to the USA, and I sense it “with” them though I can do little to protect them from it.

Today the NY Times crossword (17 across) refers to Nat Turner – which would have meant little to me before I met you. Thank you for YOU.

—Fr. Zilonka

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Father Zilonka, I recall your making a similar statement about our ignorance of one another. I believe most Americans want to do the right and believe in the right thing. We all suffer under the great weight of not knowing each other very well, of not knowing ourselves. We have not fully embraced what it means to be American.

Of course, we know various classes of us, at least, in myth. David Brooks sees Alito's confirmation as the rise and conquest of a certain ethnic class of Americans, the children of immigrants (without government assistance) who went to Princeton and Yale and such prestigious schools. Yesterday, it was the glorification of the Asians. That is not heard so often now.

Well, there's this young black scholar McWhorter who did the exact same thing on a news program. He contrasted the immigrant plight of the 30s and 40s with those of blacks in the 60s and 70s. He believes he got to Harvard purely on individual achievement. It's very important now more than ever to have alternative media and commentary beyond the Establishment.

This is the rhetoric, of course, that got us where we find ourselves today. We've gotten three decades of it—anti-government (social welfare), anti-poor, anti-black rhetoric and legislation. Government for those who know how and want to play the game of exploiting those least able to defend themselves, that is what we’ve talked ourselves into. But even the best laid plans go awry.

Legislators, judges, the presidents since Reagan have made it very hard for us to turn from the present course. But I believe in the connectedness of which King speaks. It will come clear soon enough we will all have to pay for this hypocrisy this time around. 

—Rudy

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Dear Rudy, here's a song I thought apropo.

"Abraham, Martin and John"   3:03   Trk 23   Disc 3
(Dick Holler)

Smokey Robinson And The Miracles
Tamla Records single #54184
Producer - Smokey Robinson, June 11, 1969
Pop Chart #33 July 5, 1969

Album: 35th Anniversary Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
(1994 Motown Records) 37463 -6334-2.

Transcriber: Awcantor@aol.com

   —Anita

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Only a dying culture would seek to save itself by feeding upon its dead. Only a dying culture would exult about putting some men on the moon while half of mankind lives on the starvation level. (Search for the New Land, p. 148)

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Martin Luther King, Jr., called upon black people to be as Christian as Christ.

—Julius Lester, Search for the New Land (1969; pp151-153)

Revolutions proceed, not by the intensity of one’s desires, but by their own laws. The revolutionary’s duty is to know that what to do can never be separated from when to do. There is, however, always something to do.

—Julius Lester, Search for the New Land (1969; p. 160)

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posted 16, January 2006