In the US in 2016—and specifically for educators—the need to confront racism must remain central to all efforts to overcome inequity and injustice. Among the privileged—white-, male-, heterosexual-skewed—there is no room for “yes, but,” although there remains ample room for stepping back, being silent, and then listening as first steps to offering solidarity in the action needed to confront the false narratives of “meritocracy” and “rugged individualism,” and then to overcome the irrefutable inequities linked to race, class, gender, and sexuality.
One commitment is to resist the whitewashing of Martin Luther King Jr. as a passive radical. So here, I offer some readings, varied and important, but pathways to honoring the radical MLK and to resisting the lingering dream deferred.
Final Words of Advice/ “Where do we go from here?” (1967), Martin Luther King Jr.
The Trumpet of Conscience, Martin Luther King Jr.
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Haley’s fairy tale ignores our history
Enslaved Africans of George Washington Depicted as ‘Happy and Joyful’ in New Children’s Book
The Forgotten, Radical Martin Luther King Jr., Matt Berman
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Christian Radical—And Saint, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
Read This Before Co-Opting MLK Jr., Jose Vilson
The Revisionist’s Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have A Dream For Most Of Us,” Jose Vilson
Harlem, Langston Hughes
Let America Be America Again, Langston Hughes
The white man pathology: inside the fandom of Sanders and Trump, Stephen Marche
Schools, black children, and corporal punishment, Dick Startz
“Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.”
The Causal Effects of Cultural Relevance: Evidence from an Ethnic Studies Curriculum, Thomas Dee, Emily Penner
Questioning Payne | Teaching Tolerance
Toolkit for “Questioning Payne” | Teaching Tolerance
50 Years After Selma, White Lives Still Matter More, Stacey Patton
The Oscars’ Racist Refusal to Honor Modern Black Heroes, Stereo Williams
Should We Marvel at a Black Captain America?
The Martian: Allegory of Whose Lives Matter
Nicolas Sparks and the Allegory of Pretty White People Who Struggle until Everything Works Out
James Baldwin: “the time is always now”
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 
Reblogged this on As the Adjunctiverse Turns.
Reblogged this on The Academe Blog and commented:
Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University has assembled a good selection of links demonstrating that Martin Luther King Jr. was no “passive radical.”