Celebrating or Understanding Dr. King?
Martin Luther King Day usually generates a divide between a public celebration that often focuses narrowly on the “I Have A Dream” speech and a scholarly complaint that King is being co-opted or made safe. Here’s why we need to understand him better.
There is a statue of Martin Luther King on the outside of Westminster Abbey. There is a monument on the Mall; and when I visited China, I discovered that Chinese students in advanced English classes often listen to and examine closely the “I Have A Dream” speech. I gave a talk about Dr. King while I was in China and was slightly unsettled by a question from the audience. “How much did King have to pay the crowd so that they applauded in the right places?” At the time, I thought this was an indirect indication of what might be common political practice in China, but others have said that it more likely reflected the Chinese view that American politics operates on the basis of money and that Americans are good at staging things. Whatever the motivation behind the question, it confirmed how completely King is a global rather than just an American figure.
Giving talks about Martin Luther King in England, I occasionally come across some cynicism. This usually occurs in the context of a comparison between King and Malcolm X. King, they argue, is the preference of white people, the kind of black leader some whites (the liberals) feel comfortable applauding. Malcolm is the more authentic black leader who did not care how white people felt and as the saying goes — told it like it is.
This negative comparison usually entails a limited understanding of King’s demands and his nonviolent practice. His demands grew over his career and his radicalism became more apparent. His 1968 Poor People’s Campaign was founded on the idea that a nation as affluent as the United States need not have inhabitants who struggle to feed their families, live in inadequate housing, suffer because they cannot get the healthcare they need, and don’t enjoy the employment and educational opportunities to fulfil their potential. Pressed to come up with a policy that would address this issue, King proposed a federally funded guaranteed income which would have ensured that all US families had a household income sufficient to meet these needs. This was also linked to a massive public works program. Lifting the poor above the poverty line through guaranteed jobs or income would win the War on Poverty that President Lyndon Johnson had said he wanted to wage. At the same time, King urged America to end its war in Vietnam. Famously, he declared (exactly a year to the day before his assassination) that the bombs America dropped in Vietnam exploded at home. Thus, the aim of the Poor People’s Campaign for which King was working at the time of his death was to get Congress to decide which war were they fighting?
Privately, King was happy to describe himself as a democratic socialist and equally he was ready to complain to others that American political discourse made it hard to discuss socialism without being silenced by “Red Scare” tactics. It’s precisely because Martin Luther King was both so aware of American capitalism’s deficiencies and so keen to see it move towards a Scandinavian-style social democracy (Sweden had impressed him) that scholars find the contemporary American celebrations of him so misleading.
Popular understanding of his nonviolence can also be rooted in misunderstanding. King’s abiding commitment to nonviolent direct action (to use the proper terms) is often taken as a sign of his moderation compared to the armed struggle tactics associated with late Sixties’ militancy, a period in which Mao’s declaration that power comes from the barrel of a gun was quoted approvingly. King’s position is said to mark him as a reformer rather than a revolutionary and as someone intent on winning whites over rather than toppling their power. It seems to suggest that he retained a trust in white America that Malcolm X never felt it deserved.
To my mind, this is a misreading. What impresses me about King’s nonviolent practice is that it is pragmatic rather than romantic. It sprang from his own knowledge and mistrust of white America. He had lived in the Jim Crow South and in the de facto segregated North (he recalls how apartments in Boston were said to be already rented whenever he came to view them). Like his close movement colleague James Bevel, a Mississippi native, King sensed that as a minority (circa eleven percent of the US population during his lifetime), African Americans could not afford a toe-to-toe war of attrition with white America. Bevel was forthright, telling protesters in Selma that retaliation would be used as an excuse to kill them all. Thus, nonviolence wasn’t based just on its ethical superiority, although King spoke with conviction about Christ’s admonition to love your enemies and the scriptural warning that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword. Even while his theological training and pastoral calling made those words resonate, he was not blind to their appeal to white America as well. It was one of the founding practices of Afro-Christianity from slavery on that the beliefs that white Christians ostensibly cherished provided a clear basis for racial equality and justice. There was a vein of guilt to be tapped in Christian America. There is an even older maxim that tactically it is sound to promote division among your enemies, and conversely ill-advised to foster their unanimity.
The spectacle of violence inflicted on non-violent protesters in Birmingham in 1963 or Selma in 1965 divided white America, re-aligning political forces so that the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 became possible. The justifiable demands for Black Power in 1966 and the spectacle of Black Panthers carrying weapons and their reported advocacy of armed resistance, particularly targeting law enforcement in 1967–68, certainly divided white America far less, and made King’s quest for further legislation and improvement more difficult. This was partly due to selective media presentation with the Panthers’ armed self-defense units attracting more coverage than their medical and educational initiatives.
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0)
At the same time, the Panthers and others also added fuel to King’s own radicalism, and planted in the minds of many city politicians the spectre of racial clashes if improvements did not come. Mayor Daley of Chicago opposed Martin Luther King’s efforts to abolish the slums of the Windy City, but he also used the ghetto disturbances of 1966 and the clashes between white residents and black demonstrators over open housing as well as his own leverage in Democratic circles to get more money for local anti-poverty programs.
Martin Luther King deserves his monument and his annual commemoration but not because he was a dreamer or because he enabled America to overcome racial prejudice. Certainly, he would not support recent efforts to scale back efforts to protect African American employment or voting rights on the false premise that they are no longer necessary and that America can achieve what conservatives term color-blind justice. His final year was consumed by his knowledge that far more fundamental change was needed. He spoke of three evils that beset the world and needed to be vanquished: racism, militarism, and materialism. Look at our world today and his words echo loudly, but for King, justice began when you were ready to put your life on the line, not when you just nodded and smiled sympathetically. Remember that this Martin Luther King Day.
