In this vein, she said, the struggle for racial equality has been artificially framed as a phenomenon that is no longer relevant and ongoing, and hermetically sealed in the past.
"We want to have a nice Hollywood closure to past struggles so that the problems of the past don't bleed into our current lives," said Davis.
"Martin Luther King, Jr. announced, at the end of his life, a poor people's campaign. This is why, when he was assassinated, he was working with a group of sanitation workers who were trying to get their union recognized in Tennessee.
"So, the struggle was continuing. It was not the case that civil rights had been achieved and now the struggle is over. The conception of democracy-- that, unfortunately, bears a strong resemblance to capitalism-- which is offered to us in this country, relies on the notion of past victories."
If I have to hear one more person here claim that King had somehow "moved on/past/beyond" whatever from civil rights issues when he started his Poor People's campaign, and that he was killed "only when he started tackling the issues of the poor" as if that was not one of the pivotal thrusts of the Civil Rights Movement and something he hadn't put his life on the line for years for, I will scream. It seems that some have chosen to believe that his focus on the poor didn't really start until he began to focus on and talk about the WHITE poor, a group which of course included people that had villiainized him including calling him the "anti-Christ," communist, and "black devil" and had threatened his and his family's life for years.
The campaign was an INTEGRAL PART of his continuing campaign against social injustice and for black rights and equality. Anyone who believes otherwise hasn't listened to a word the man has ever said.
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