Martin Luther King: l'histoire oubliée

J'aime bien cet article sur le site de POLITICO parce qu'il rappelle à quel point les dernières années de Martin Luther King furent complexes et les résultats mitigés. Sil s'est attaqué avec succès à la ségrégation dans le sud, il lui sera encore plus difficile d'attaquer la discrimination dans le nord, une réalité plus subtile à démontrer. On nuance ainsi l'idée qu'il n'y avait que les "méchants sudistes", que la question raciale était marginale dans le nord du pays. En cette journée Martin Luther King aux États-Unis, il est important de se rappeler toute l'histoire, ce qui n'atténue en rien les réalisations du grand homme.

 "King was aghast at the ugly reception accorded his peaceful marchers. “I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate,” he mournfully observed.

Almost 50 years after his death, we remember MLK as the transcendent figure who helped lift the South out of Jim Crow. We also remember him as almost preternaturally calm in the face of great pressure and danger. He was indeed all of these things. But the passage of time has obscured his dimensionality. In the last years of his life, King expanded his vision beyond the former Confederacy and took on a broader struggle to dismantle America’s jigsaw edifice of racial and economic discrimination—a struggle that took him deep into northern states and cities, where onetime allies became bitter enemies. He did so even as he strained to keep a fractious civil rights movement unified, and in the face of unremitting sabotage from federal authorities."

  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/martin-luther-king-struggle-history-forgot-214637