Too much of the corporate media’s  understanding of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King JR. and Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi is advanced separated from their basic cultural contexts.    Both are projected as citizens of the world disembodied from the national struggles that produced them and in which they faithfully served. 

Dr. King, for instance, from his first Montgomery Improvement Association address in 1954 to his last oration in Memphis in 1968, spoke out of a Black collective consciousness and self-determination.  His vision was subsequently universalized to be sure.  But it was corporately universalized out of the particularity of the African American/African World freedom struggle.  Thus King, in his opening Montgomery Bus Boycott call for an African American non-violent social movement of resistance to racial segregation, says:

“When the history  books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people–a black people–who injected new meaning into the veins of civilization.’  This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.”

Moreover, when Dr. King said, in his last oration in Memphis “We as a people will get to the Promised Land.”   He is speaks clearly out of the context of the Black Freedom struggle. 

Similarly, Mahatma Gandhi historically, in a similar manner to Dr. King, emerges as a spokesperson and as an eventual martyr of the Indian independence movement both in South Africa (where it is objectively allied with the Black South African Freedom Movement) but also of the Indian independence movement on the Indian sub-continent and throughout the British Empire.

More, Gandhi’s first major public voice, both as columnist and as newspaper editor and publisher, was called INDIAN OPINION (IO).   IO’S purpose was to directly mold the opinion of the South African India community as well as indirectly the opinion of the India community of the Asian sub-continent, as well as the international India diaspora for racial and social justice.

Looking back on IO in his memoir Gandhi writes  “I believe that a struggle that chiefly relies on internal strength cannot be wholly carried on without a newspaper, it is my experience that we could not perhaps have educated the local Indian community, nor kept Indians all over the world in touch with the course of events in South Africa in any other way, with the same case and success as through the Indian Opinion, which therefore was certainly  a most useful and potent weapon in our struggle.”

Afrocentricity Opinion stands as a voice in both the King and Gandhi social movement traditions-particular and yet universal at the same time-both for social justice generally and for African American racial justice particularly.

Full Disclosure:  The philosophical and literary content of this AO mission statement is indebted to the Kawaida (Tradition & Reason) African-Centered philosophy, which we’ve studied, dialogued with-for over 35 years-and advocate.  More, Kawaida was created and is advanced by Dr. Maulana Karenga, Afrocentricity Ethicist, Maatian Moral Teacher, Professor, and Chair of Africana Studies at California State University-Long Beach.  Dr. Karenga is the Creator of Kwanzaa and Nguzo Saba, Executive Director of the African American Cultural Center/Us, Los Angeles, and author of over 24 Books and enumerable scholarly and Black Press articles.  Author of ESSAYS ON STRUGGLE-Position and Analysis, 2016, Dr. Karenga has a forthcoming book who’s working title is “The Liberation Ethics of Minister Malcolm X (Al Hajj Malik Shabazz).”  

13.  The above said, all short-comings in the above AO statement are this writer’s.

Respectfully submitted: Rev. Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Pastor of Reformation Church-Chicago (“Young Barack Obama’s sanctuary for community organizing”), for Afroceentricity Opinion, Updated: 12-12-18   

 

   

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