All Your Heroes are Outlaws

Do you ever notice that around the time of Martin Luther King day, there seem to be people coming out of the woodworks to celebrate his life? Frankly, a lot of those people who celebrate MLK are the exact people he was talking about when he made this less-famous quote:

And so, to gain it, they rationalized – insisting that the unfortunate Negro, being less than human, deserved and even enjoyed second class status … White men soon came to forget that the Southern social culture and all its institutions had been organized to perpetuate this rationalization. -Martin Luther King

And there’s more than that in the article. Why are we talking about Martin Luther King?

Because Billie Holliday, and the fact that she suffered the same headwinds as King. And not to call Taylor Swift a civil rights icon, but she’s definitely hated by the same people. No, none of Taylor Swift’s music compares to Strange Fruit, Billie Holliday’s public comment on the lynchings that were being summarily ignored by most of the United States.

We talk about this and more on this next episode of Right and Freedom.