Andrew Young is again making the rounds calling black protesters “hoodlums” for demonstrating their rage. It recalls a conversation he had with Dr. King in March 1968 as the city of Newark again teetered on the brink of rebellion. Gather round, it’s story time. 1/

It is March 27, 1968. A week before he would be killed in Memphis. He is at the home of Harry Belafonte, along with Stanley Levinson, Young, and several others. Earlier that day, he’d met with Amiri Baraka in Newark, a city still reeling from the previous year’s rebellion. 2/

King confided to his friends his fear that Newark was poised to erupt again. At the time, he’d been organizing the Poor People’s Campaign, a multiracial occupation of Washington that meant to press the U.S. into a serious confrontation with material poverty. 3/

As Belafonte recalls, he was in a “surly mood”. He confided in his friends that the meeting with Baraka had gotten to him, that suffocating conditions and a willingness among youth to embrace violent resistance tactics were testing his long-haul strategy of nonviolent change. 4/

“I wholly embrace everything they feel,” King said of the militancy in Newark. I have more in common with these young people than anybody else in the movement. I feel their rage. I feel their pain. I feel their frustration." 5/

"It’s the system that is the problem, and it’s choking the breath out of their lives." As Belafonte recalls, it was Young who ratcheted up King’s anger. “I don’t know, Martin,” Young said. “It’s not the entire system. It’s only part of it, and I think we can fix that.” 6/

“I don’t need to hear from you, Andy,” King clapped back. “You’re a capitalist, and I’m not. The trouble is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources." 7/

"With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.” 8/

It is a remarkable exchange because it lays bear some fundamental questions about how exactly we ought to appraise both King and the evolving demands of racial justice. 9/

King was very clear that tinkering at the edges was not going to cut it. It was true then and it is true now. Young’s comments to King and his appraisal of fed up protesters as opportunistic hoodlums must be dismissed and censured for the smug condescension it is. 10/

It does not occur to him and so many other ‘leaders’ that folks out in the street have, in fact, made a reasoned judgement about the world they inhabit with white Americans. All they see is unintelligible noise that must be managed and policed. 11/

Their smugness is entirely about a vision that does not see poor and working people as needing care and concern. It is about calling protesters hoodlums and fugitives in order to legitimize their leadership over the unruly. 12/

Because for some of these leaders, to acknowledge that protesters are making reasoned appraisals—that is, to regard them as people with a fucking point—is to concede their own leadership has failed on some level. They would never do that. 13/

So, in conclusion, fuck them.

// end thread.