While conservatives continue their annual desperate attempt to colonize the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., King stubbornly remains a revolutionary figure, one who was blatantly socialist and vehemently anti-capitalist. In fact, King drew a direct line between Western capitalism and the exploitation of African countries. He knew what had turned those countries into "shitholes." A trip to Ghana in 1957 to celebrate that nation's independence from England and the election of a new prime minister solidified King's view that the treatment of African Americans by whites in the United States was strikingly similar to the effects of colonialism in western and southern Africa.
In a sermon after his Ghana trip called "Birth of a New Nation" (goddamn, you know King knew exactly what he was doing with that title), King connected Ghana to the slaves in biblical Egypt ridding themselves of their chains, and he explained what had just happened:
"Prior to March the sixth, 1957, there existed a country known as the Gold Coast. This country was a colony of the British Empire. This country was situated in that vast continent known as Africa. I’m sure you know a great deal about Africa, that continent with some two hundred million people, and it extends and covers a great deal of territory...
"For years the Gold Coast was exploited and dominated and trampled over. The first European settlers came in there about 1444, the Portuguese, and they started legitimate trade with the people in the Gold Coast. They started dealing with them with their gold, and in turn they gave them guns and ammunition and gunpowder and that type of thing. Well, pretty soon America was discovered a few years later in the fourteen hundreds, and then the British West Indies. And all of these growing discoveries brought about the slave trade."
King continued to tell the story of the Gold Coast, bringing it to the then-present: "Finally, in 1850, Britain won out, and she gained possession of the total territorial expansion of the Gold Coast. From 1850 to 1957, March sixth, the Gold Coast was a colony of the British Empire. And as a colony she suffered all of the injustices, all of the exploitation, all of the humiliation that comes as a result of colonialism. But like all slavery, like all domination, like all exploitation, it came to the point that the people got tired of it."
After talking about how the Gold Coast became Ghana, King brought it back to his opening images, "Ghana reminds us that freedom never comes on a silver platter. It’s never easy. Ghana reminds us that whenever you break out of Egypt, you better get ready for stiff backs. You better get ready for some homes to be bombed. You better get ready for some churches to be bombed. You better get ready for a lot of nasty things to be said about you, because you getting out of Egypt. And whenever you break aloose from Egypt, the initial response of the Egyptian is bitterness."
Martin Luther King would fuck up the shit of Donald Trump and his coterie of Republican motherfuckers because that is what he did, and he would specifically fuck up Trump's shit now over the ersatz president's inability to see beyond his own racism when it comes to African nations and their people. King would call out the oppressors for their oppression because that, too, is what he did.
When we remember King, it should always be as a balls-to-the-wall fighter for people of color and, eventually, for all disempowered people. He would be in the streets, marching now, and he would be confronted by white people with tiki torches and uncontrollable cops, and Donald Trump would blame King for any violence that took place because that is what he does.
