jan 10, 2018 - The radicalism of WEB Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. Communist Party USA 2018, Jan 10

Description:

As the debate between Cornell West and Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates, how to confront racism and capitalism remains at the top of the freedom movement’s agenda. Has all hope for defeating racism disappeared or is it possible by identifying its sources in capitalist empire to discover a means for combating its influence and rescuing both people of color and whites from the ideology’s influence?

Both issues were at the center of the lives and work of WEB Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., who as they matured, developed an increasingly radical critique of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Du Bois had said famously that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line” and early on saw imperialist conflict as its outgrowth pointing to the African roots of World War I. Martin Luther King Jr. while early in his career following the lead of the civil rights movement focused on combating de jure segregation, as time went by saw the link between the bombs that drop in Vietnam and why they are “exploding at home.”