An Act of State by William F. Pepper

Author:William F. Pepper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

I was the author of that article which appeared in the January 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine. We would meet soon after and his resolve would harden.

With the steady deterioration of the quality of life in urban America, city after city erupted in violence for the next six months of 1967. Military intelligence was derived from those urban riots that Martin King had singular popularity amongst the urban poor and that he had every intention of mobilizing the largest gathering of American poor ever assembled in the nation’s capital. It was to be a peaceful encampment to remind the Congress that these legions of poor people existed, that they had faces and voices, families, rights, and hopes which were unfulfilled, and they were not going to go away.

Like Gandhi’s ragged forces confronting the might of the British Empire, Martin King’s equally unkempt wretched of America were scheduled to come to the seat of power and demand the unthinkable – the reallocation of resources and priorities in the richest country on earth so that no child would go to bed hungry, health care and education would be available to all, and basic food, shelter, and clothing would become a right of every person. Such was the concept of brotherhood. The Indian rebellion against the rule of the British Empire was, of course, indirectly a struggle against the commercial interests and wealth sustained by the British government, but the goal was separation and independence from the political control and decisions of Whitehall. The point was that the empire had seen its day. The end was inevitable. The Congress Party and the nationalist movement hastened its end.

In the American south, continued segregation of the races was also on a tight time line. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education overturning Plessey v. Ferguson’s doctrine of separate but equal education for blacks and whites spelled the end of the day for the segregation of the races. Martin King and his followers accelerated this inevitable process. They moved forward the hour hand of the death-knell clock.

From the moment that he formally opposed the war, followed by his commitment to the Poor People’s Campaign, Martin King began a fateful struggle against another type of colonial domination and another colonialist master. This enemy would emerge as the most powerful domineering force ever to span the globe. During the last year of his life, he became locked in a deadly struggle with the behemoth of transnational corporate colonialism and the awesome power of its steward state, the United States of America.

Whilst the earlier forms of oppression confronted by Gandhi and King were in decline, when King turned his attention to economic injustice, it was another matter. He had come to realize that the fundamental, underlying injustice in American life was the exclusion of the poor of all races and cultures from the opportunity to attain even the bare minimum of the necessities of life. Martin King, then, entered a new and different arena. He was

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