Jill Yesko, University Relations
Contact (336) 334-5371
Posted 1-30-07
GREENSBORO, NC – Thirty-eight years after his assassination, Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy continues to be debated.
Was King a peaceful radical whose ideas were grounded in the dynamics of the Civil Rights movement? Or was he a convenient hero whose sometimes incendiary words have been watered down by media eager to transform him into a “plaster saint?”
In his just published 472-page book from the University of Pennsylvania Press, “From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice,” Thomas Jackson, associate professor in the History Department at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, notes that sorting out King’s legacy, is no easy endeavor.
Jackson's book has received the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. The award is given for the best book on any aspect of the struggle for Civil Rights since the inception of the United States.
While King’s words such as his iconic “I Have a Dream Speech” are well chronicled, less well-remembered is his non-violent opposition to the Vietnam War and visit to India to study the teachings of Mohandas Ghandi.
Jackson recounts King’s early opposition to the Vietnam War, well before President Lyndon Johnson sent troops there in 1965.
“At his most radical, King charged that the U.S. military was simply a tool of American corporate interests abroad,” Jackson said. “America's and Vietnam's poor suffered terribly as a result.“
King believed that economic security was the key to peace the world over, Jackson notes.
“The lessons of Dr. King are important only if we understand how he spoke not just as an inspiring visionary or tactician of protest, but as a political leader whose defeats sometimes overshadowed his successes,” Jackson said.
Jackson holds a PhD in U.S. history from Stanford University. He was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia.
