There has been some attention given to the issue of racism in America due to the attempts of some sectors of the corporate media to engage in character assassination of presidential candidate Barack Obama based on comments made by his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright. However, much of the conversation has glossed over or treated racism on a very superficial level, such as saying that the issues that Reverend Wright made were "in the past." The 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. provides us another opportunity to have a substantive conversation about racism in the United States.

On Sunday, March 30, the Grand Rapids Press ran a 2-page spread in preparation for the anniversary of King's assassination. King was shot dead while in Memphis, Tennessee in support of a sanitation workers strike. There were a total of three articles and a selection of excerpts from his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. The first article was entitled "Did King foresee his death?" The only reference in this short article to the issue of whether or not King knew he would be killed, was an short reference to his speech the night before he was killed where he said, "And I have he seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you." Beyond this, there is no exploration of whether or not King knew he would be killed or even how many attempts were made on his life. In his new book April 4, 1968, Michael Eric Dyson tackles the issue that the Grand Rapids Press fails to. Dyson says that King's house was bombed, that he received countless death threats by phone and mail and in the last few years of his life there would be delays at the airport every time he flew, since there were always concerns of bombs being planted. King knew his time was short and he agonized over it, according to Dyson, but it never prevented him from taking a stand.

Another article on the 40th Anniversary of King's assassination was entitled "Legacy runs wide, not always deep" and is based on a survey done by Ohio University and Scripps Howard News Service. The survey sections cited in the Grand Rapids Press article primarily deal with question like whether or not King had any impact on daily life in America. The third article the Grand Rapids Press included was entitled "Obama's dream: The audacity of comparing." This article, billed as an "Analysis" piece, made a very superficial attempt to compare the rhetorical styles and messages of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Barack Obama. These three article along with excerpts from King's 1963 "I have a Dream" speech do little to remember the real Dr. King. They also fail to foster any serious discussion on racism in America today.

There are only a few words in the entire 2-page spread on the 40th Anniversary of King's assassination that even mention that he was in Memphis and only one reference to the sanitation workers strike he was there to support. There is also no mention of the project that King was most involved in organizing around the time of his assassination, The Poor People's Campaign. The Poor People's Campaign was planned as a mass occupation of Washington, DC to demand racial and economic justice for the millions of Americans that were living in poverty. There is also no discussion or even a mention of who was involved in the lynching of Dr. King. No mention of James Earl Ray, the man arrested and charged with King's assassination nor the more recent investigations which claim that local law enforcement, the FBI, and even the National Guard played a role in King's death. For those interested in the involvement of law enforcement agencies in King's assassination, the best book to date on this matter is An Act of State by William Pepper.

This lack of substantive reporting on the 40th Anniversary of Dr. King's death begs the question, "why such poor coverage of an important part of American history and the Civil Rights movement?" At some level it is difficult to say, but in many ways it seems that this poor coverage is a refusal by the media to confront why Dr. King was such a threat to power structures in America. This is why time and time again King is primarily limited to the "I Have a Dream" moment, where the emphasis can be placed on the positive and people can toss around phrases like "King said we should judge people not on the color of their skin, but on their character." This is why media pundits and eventually Senator Obama decided to criticize Rev. Wright for his condemnation of the US, because they do not want to deal with the ugly realities of this country's history at home and abroad, realities that continue to this day.

In his last few years, King became more radical and began to expand his criticism of America. King named the three evils that confronted America--militarism, capitalism, and racism. In one speech just before his death, King was preaching on the story about Lazarus and the rich man. At the end of that sermon he said:

"Dives went to hell because he didn't use his wealthy to bridge the gulf that separated him from Lazarus. That's why he went to hell. And if America doesn't use its wealth to bridge the gulf between the rich nations and the poor nations, between the poor and the rich of this nation, it is going to hell."

Now, what makes this comment different from Rev. Wright's when he said "God Damn America"? King was also increasingly critical of white America, especially after the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In his 1967 speech entitled "Which Way It's Soul Shall Go" King said, "I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of Americans are racist either consciously or unconsciously." King was equally critical of poverty and the economic system that American's lived under. In his "Why We Can't Wait" speech King said:

"No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures, which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial."

In the third "evil" that King identified, militarism, he was relentless in his last two years of condemning the Vietnam War. He did this most forcefully in his 1967 speech "Beyond Vietnam." In that speech King said:

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked - and rightly so - what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and 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."

In another speech, King referred to US political leaders as war criminals. "We are criminals in that war, and we have committed more war crimes than any other nations, and I will continue to say it."

These are the words and actions of Dr. King that continue to be omitted from the media's discussion of racism in America. This deliberate omission is a form of denial, which will never allow us to have any lasting justice and will limit our ability to hold candidates and politicians accountable for their actions. If we are serious about working for racial and economic justice in this country and want to confront "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," then we need to be as bold as Dr. King in our words and as confrontational in our actions as he and the movement of which he was part.