Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Dr. King’s Televised Challenge to Obama: Tavis Smiley's Anti-War MLK
Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
31 Mar 2010
🖨️ Print Article
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Since the onset of the Obama phenomenon, Dr. Martin Luther King’s birth and death days have been “polluted” by false and ahistorical comparisons between Obama and MLK. The two men represent opposite political poles: one, a radical opponent of imperial war and concentrated economic power, the other, an ally of Wall Street and commander-in-chief of “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In focusing on King, the man of peace, Tavis Smiley’s PBS special corrects a history that has been distorted, sometimes beyond recognition – not the least by the revisionist and poseur in the White House.

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • goerge herbert walker bush
    Bruce A. Dixon , BAR managing editor
    If There's A Hell Below, That's Where He'll Go: The BAR Obituary on George H.W. Bush
    07 Dec 2018
    George Herbert Walker Bush was born in 1924, the son of Prescott Sheldon Bush, a banker and politician, senator from Connecticut from 1952 to 1963.
  • Marc Lamont Hill and the Legacy of Punishing Black Internationalists
    Noura Erakat
    Marc Lamont Hill and the Legacy of Punishing Black Internationalists
    07 Dec 2018
    Hill’s bold statement to the UN is part of the internationalist Black radical tradition, exemplified by Paul Robeson, the Black Panther Party, and today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
  • All US Presidents, Living and Dead, are War Criminals
    Glen Ford , BAR executive editor
    All US Presidents, Living and Dead, are War Criminals
    06 Dec 2018
    Especially at state funerals, media and politicians pretend that US presidents are honorable men, instead of the mass murderers that all of them become in office.
  • Stable working class neighborhoods are the bane of speculators, developers and capitalist politicians.
    Raymond Nat Turner , BAR poet-in-residence
    Cranes and Tents
    05 Dec 2018
    Lording over the landscape like giant Insects sucking soul, blood, chocolate into multi-colored mushrooms Metastasizing citywide. Officers ordering vacant storefronts,
  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Time to De-Colonize Human Rights!
    Ajamu Baraka , BAR editor and columnist
    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Time to De-Colonize Human Rights!
    05 Dec 2018
    The post-WW II promise of human rights was a compact meant for white people only, but a People-Centered Human Rights framework seeks global liberation and transformation.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us