“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. …
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
— From Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence”

JARED BALL
Assistant professor of communication studies at Morgan State University, Ball said today: “While many politicians and media pundits are willing to denounce the violence of the shooting spree in Arizona and even the violent rhetoric which preceded it, few of these same figures will denounce the fundamentally violent nature of this nation’s economic system and racial hierarchies. Nor will they denounce the violence inherent in this nation’s foreign military and economic policies all of which result in daily doses of this kind of violence here and abroad. And these are precisely the systems of violence Dr. King worked so aggressively to end.”

Ball is featured in the video “Dr. MLK Jr.: Struggling Not To Lose Him”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167