“Everyone wants to pimp the King of ’63 but don’t want to talk about the fully formed King of ’68…” – C.R. Gibbs on the Dec. 1, 2015 edition of AllEyesOnDC Presents “A Night of News & Music”

As people across the globe march, sing, and engage in service during the King Holiday weekend, much of the focus will be on “dream” part of the late great Civil Rights icon’s legacy. Indeed, there’s much to learn about Dr. King that our school systems glossed over.

During a recent appearance on AllEyesOnDC, internationally renowned historian C.R. Gibbs talked about the Dr. King who grew in his African consciousness after trips across the Motherland during the 1960s independence movements. For King, connecting with brothers and sisters on the African continent internationalized the human rights struggle and inspired his call to action for a withdrawal of black dollars from white businesses in what would be his final speech before his 1968 assassination in Memphis.

After King’s death and subsequent inner-city riots throughout the country, the fight for black people’s dignity took a more radial turn with the rise of Willie Ricks and Stokeley Carmichael, two proponents of Black Power, the creation of Kwanzaa as an Pan-African holiday, the creation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and other efforts to foster self-determination about people of African descent in the United States.

In this video, Brother Gibbs makes the case for internationalizing the struggle in the spirit of King and Marcus Mosiah Garvey. He also encourages young people to read more and rely on social media less for information gathering.

Though history, as told by the United States government, will forever paint King as a docile integrationist, AllEyesOnDC argues that he was well on his way to taking on positions similar to his theoretical nemesis Malcolm X. Had he been alive, he would have been on the forefront of the nation building exercise that Pan-Africanist communities carry on to this day. Ase’!