“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will,” abolitionist Frederick Douglas once wrote.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this and he led movements for desegregation, voting rights, and worker rights, among other things.

In light of this, it is perhaps poetic justice the Martin Luther King Day we celebrate on Monday came about at Iowa State following student demands.

MLK Day was declared a national holiday in the United States in January, 1986, but it wasn’t officially observed at ISU until January 1994. In the midst of continual public pressure, President Martin Jischke responded to approximately 200 demonstrators on the steps of Beardshear Hall on April 16, 1992, by speaking at the rally himself!

In addition to announcing plans to observe the King holiday when the school calendar could be changed in the ’93-’94 school year, Jischke said, “We cannot be the best land grant university in the nation if we do not have diversity as a central element of that educational excellence.”

Every year in mid-January TV viewers see the same film footage of King: They see him battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963), reciting his “I Have A Dream” speech at a rally in Washington (1963), marching for voting rights in Selma, Ala. (1965) and finally, lying dead on a motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

The chronology of King’s life mysteriously jumps from 1965 to 1968. Did King take some sabbatical near the end of his life?

No, King was still speaking and organizing in his later years and almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV, where King is sanitized for your protection.

In the late ’60s King began to go beyond civil rights and focus on human rights, which included economic rights. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, King said that “the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together.” These, King said, were the “triple evils” that must be addressed and movements must work toward a “restructuring of the whole American society.”

When King came out against the Vietnam War he was loudly denounced by many in the media. The Washington Post said King’s criticism of the war “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” Time accused King of “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”

Some journalists participated in FBI efforts to “neutralize” King. Pat Buchanan (who finished second in the Iowa Republican Caucus in ’96) took material from the FBI and put it in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. On April 2, 1968, two days before King was murdered, the Globe-Democrat ran a canned editorial supplied by the FBI which called King “one of the most menacing men in America.”

In response to his critics King said: “For about 12 years now, ever since the Montgomery bus boycott, I have been struggling against segregation, and I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns, for since justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is an affront to justice everywhere.”

King began to speak out against U.S. neo-imperialism from Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America. “We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism,” he said.

Here are a few more insightful quotes taken from some books available at Parks library:

“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast between poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”

“What we have in the United States is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”

“When there is underemployment and poverty in the white community, they call it a depression: When there is underemployment and poverty in the black community, they call it a social problem.”

“The profit motive of capitalism, the sole basis of the economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered.”

I would argue that King’s statements in the past are just as relevant today as they were in the late ’60s. The agenda-setting media don’t like King’s critical statements about the system today anymore than they did in the late ’60s.

Maybe it’s no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of his life.

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Drew Chebuharis a senior in journalism and mass communication from Muscatine.