[ Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs
exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious
violence that he and the freedom movement endured. It largely leaves
out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MARTIN LUTHER KING UNDERSTOOD SOLIDARITY  
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Michael K. Honey
June 21, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs
exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious
violence that he and the freedom movement endured. It largely leaves
out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor _

Martin Luther King leading demonstration in Boston on April 23, 1965,
Hans Bosshard / CC-BY-SA-3.0-CH

 

On May Day 2023, a young black man named Jordan Neely in the midst of
a mental health crisis cried out that he was hungry and thirsty on a
New York City subway. A white male former Marine named Daniel Penny
threw him on the floor and choked him to death. Republican
presidential candidate Ron DeSantis praised the man and compared him
to the biblical Good Samaritan, saying, “Let’s show this Marine
America’s got his back.”

Late at night on April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther
King Jr, interpreted the parable of the Good Samaritan quite
differently, describing him as the member of a scorned caste who had
risked his life to save a person of the dominant race who had been
beaten and robbed and left to perish on the dangerous road from
Jerusalem to Jericho. King told this story at Mason Temple to people
who had risked a dreadful storm to support 1,300 black sanitation
workers, part of the city’s working poor, who were engaged in a
desperate months-long strike against the City of Memphis.

 

King: A Life [[link removed]]
By: Jonathan Eig
Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 688 pages
May 16, 2023
Hardcover:  $35..00;  e-book:  $16.99
ISBN 9780374279295 and 9780374719678

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
 

The workers and King himself were at a breaking point. A few days
earlier at a demonstration, nonstrikers had broken windows, setting
off a riot by vengeful white police who sent hundreds of demonstrators
to the hospital and killed sixteen-year-old, unarmed Larry Payne.
King’s nonviolent leadership and the strike’s success now hung in
the balance.

King had been under unendurable stress for months. He encouraged his
audience to have hope, but he also told strike supporters of his own
terrors going down the Jericho Road, as people had stabbed, jailed,
beaten, and repeatedly tried to kill him. At the end of his talk, he
declared, “I really don’t know what will happen to me now” and
virtually predicted his own death. But instead of fearfully standing
aside, he told his audience to rally with him to the side of the
sanitation workers, no matter the consequences to themselves.

 

The question was not what will happen to us if we take the dangerous
path of extending our empathy to others, he said, but what will happen
to the weak and vulnerable if we do not. “Let us develop a kind of
dangerous unselfishness,” King declared.

The next day on April 4, 1968, an assassin murdered him.

More than fifty years later, Republicans have turned King’s Good
Samaritan story upside down. Some praise Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse, a
white teenager referred to as “a nice young man” by Donald Trump
who, armed with an assault rifle, shot three Black Lives Matter
protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them. (He was
exonerated of any crime.) Like the South’s segregationist White
Citizens Councils, “the Klan in business suits,” Republicans today
urge hatred and violence committed by others to achieve their own
political ends. In a posthumous article titled “Showdown for
Nonviolence” in _Look_ magazine, King warned that white
politicians such as these could use racism to stir up “a kind of
right-wing takeover . . . a Fascist development, which will be
terribly injurious to the whole nation.”

Jonathan Eig’s new biography sounds a warning about the times we are
in, taking us into the heart and soul of King as he goes down the
dangerous and terrifying Jericho Road from his birth on January 15,
1929, to his death in Memphis. I wondered what more could be written
after the tremendous accounts we already have of King, but it turns
out there remains much more to say. Eig has used his sharp
journalistic eye to spin a powerful story of King and the movements in
which he participated, from the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott in
1955–56 to brutal episodes in Mississippi; St Augustine, Florida;
Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Chicago; and Memphis during the 1960s.

When King became an antiwar leader, right-wing paramilitary activists
as well as segregationists put him in their crosshairs. Constantly
confronting chaos and death chiseled him into a leader who felt
frightened, often unsure of himself, and yet called on by the people
and his devotion to what he felt was God’s command to speak out and
organize for a better world.

 

Martin Luther King Jr heading toward Jackson, Mississippi, on the
March Against Fear, June 9, 1966.
As the spokesperson for a mass movement, King went seemingly
everywhere and found himself in jail at least twenty-seven times in
local movements. There he looked up from the bottom of a dark well to
find allies, comrades, and ordinary people who kept pushing. The great
black activist Ella Baker said King didn’t make the movement, the
movement made King; this account helps us to understand that what she
said is true. Sleeping four hours a night, constantly on the road
speaking or reading or writing or organizing, King relentlessly moved
forward. Starting with what he called “phase one” of the freedom
movement, for civil and voting rights, he moved on to making greater
demands and launch increasingly all-encompassing struggles for racial
equality, peace, and economic justice, not only in the South but in
the nation and the world.

King the Radical

Eig shows us how “the radical King,” in Cornel West’s
terminology, came to be. Eig also draws on interviews he conducted
over six years with some two hundred people who knew King and tells us
even more than David Garrow told us decades ago in his King biography
[[link removed]] about
the relentless, illegal FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage
intended to take King out as a leader or induce King to retreat from
public life or to commit suicide
[[link removed]].

In his warped, racist view, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ludicrously
seemed to consider one of America’s most famous Baptist ministers a
communist or a dupe of communists. Eig documents the unrelenting
emotional pressures the FBI and violent white supremacists placed on
King. Eig captures recently released transcripts and FBI agent
summaries of wiretaps as well as tapes of presidents Lyndon Johnson
and John F. Kennedy to show how Hoover tainted their views with his
constant salacious and anti-communist propaganda. Hoover leaked
wiretap reports to legislators, the media, the military, and anyone
who would listen.

Before any reader expresses shock that King — a charismatic
celebrity, on the road for often three hundred days of the year —
had relationships with numerous women outside of his marriage to
Coretta Scott King, we should be clear: the government had no business
taping him. If it hadn’t, we would not have these details of his sex
life. Hoover is now reaching back from the grave to scandalize King.
Eig is shocked by some of what he discovered in newly opened FBI
documents but writes that the bigger scandal is that the media did not
bring Hoover’s campaign to a stop by exposing the FBI’s
disgraceful and illegal campaign.

 

Often at his wit’s end, King had huge emotional needs; he exercised
his male prerogatives in a patriarchal culture that he grew up with in
the black church and seems to have searched recklessly for affection
and intimacy with women despite the knowledge that the FBI was
breathing down his neck. He also saw women as partners in the freedom
movement — especially Coretta Scott King. She was at least as
radical and at least as dedicated as her husband, stood with him
bravely through bombings and death threats, and shored him up through
every crisis. By her refusal to comment on King’s infidelities, she
declared that their private love lives were not anyone else’s
business. Eig documents Coretta King as not only a faithful wife and
partner but as a courageous, principled force who made King’s
leadership possible and pushed the movement to fight for peace as well
as justice. Eig also acknowledges the importance of King’s longtime
coworker and confidant Dorothy Cotton who stood by him in many
campaigns.

Eig’s fast-paced and moving narrative of King’s life journey and
the growing opposition against him impresses on the reader the extent
to which the right-wing and racist crusades against King and other
social democratic advocates distorted the politics of that era, as
they do in our own times. Perhaps only a God-centric person such as
King, who believed he had been called on to follow in the path of
Jesus come what may, could have withstood the systemic and emotional
forces in American life of racism, violence, war, and death.

 

Martin Luther King Jr sits on a couch and speaks on the telephone
after encountering a white mob protesting against the Freedom Riders
in Montgomery, Alabama, May 26, 1961.  (Express Newspapers  //
 Jacobin)
Eig explains King’s roots in the black social gospel, as the son and
grandson of poor and formerly enslaved ancestors who preached the
gospel, and King’s deep belief in a personal God who guarantees
ultimate justice. Step by step, as a young man growing up in the Great
Depression, as a college and doctoral student incorporating the
nonviolent teachings of Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi and the critique of
capitalism by Karl Marx and social gospel theologians, King early on
(not just at the end of his life) became committed to radical
reconstruction of American society and the world. He wove the
principles of democracy and freedom supposedly guaranteed by the
American experience into a radical critique and a demand to resist the
“three evils” of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

It’s a marvelous story. Eig’s account stirs a whirlwind of
exhilarating feelings as well as visceral pain at remembering the
violence and stress that King and his allies in the freedom movement
endured. Eig’s account underlines that people should understand King
not as a “civil rights leader” but as a radical who challenged all
that remains wrong in American life.

In his last organizing effort, the Poor People’s Campaign, King
sought to build a mass movement and left-of-center political coalition
to demand that every person have full and equal access to the basic
necessities of life that one of the richest nations in the world
should be able to offer. He called for reparations and an Economic
Bill of Rights leveraged by voting and demonstrations and a mass
“live-in” civil disobedience action at the nation’s capital.

King demanded the country take a drastic turn in a social democratic
direction, such as he saw in Norway when he had received the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1964. He repeatedly warned that a country that
continues to spend more on the military than human needs is
“approaching spiritual death” and called on the nation to
radically alter its priorities.

Rather than leading us to the Promised Land, King was murdered in
Memphis, followed by the assassination of presidential candidate
Robert F. Kennedy, who might have turned the country away from the
path of criminal wars subsequently waged by President Richard Nixon
and his advisor Henry Kissinger. What Rev. James Lawson calls “the
politics of assassination” turned King’s dream into a nightmare.

King and Labor

Everyone needs to know the story of the only individual African
American for which we have a national holiday, and this book is
essential. The book does have a blind spot, however, largely ignoring
an element in King’s evolution that remains especially important
today: his connection to workers and unions and their significance in
bringing about social justice.

Eig does describe how King learned about working-class issues from his
father’s church, from growing up during the Great Depression, and
from college experiences working on a tobacco farm. He also notes that
Hoover started tracking King when he discovered that his advisor
Stanley Levison wrote speeches that King delivered to unions, both to
raise funds for the civil rights movement and as part of a strategy to
build a broad coalition of interests to change American society.

As Hoover knew, the Communist Party and the nearly half a dozen
leftist civil rights unions that had been expelled in 1949 from the
mainstream labor movement followed that united front strategy. So
did A. Philip Randolph
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Rustin [[link removed]], and
just about every social democratic activist, all of whom understood
that formula of a labor–civil rights coalition that naturally
emerged from social movements of workers and people of color from the
New Deal of the 1930s to the freedom movements of the 1960s.

 

The Packinghouse and Pullman Porters unions, with large black
memberships, supported King’s campaign in Montgomery, and 1199: The
National Health Care Workers’ Union and others joined in throughout
King’s time of leadership. Walter Reuther, who is mentioned but not
identified as president of the powerful United Auto Workers union,
provided much of the bail funds in Birmingham, and joined King to lead
a mass march in Detroit as well as in the March on Washington, to
which his and other unions sent thousands of people on buses, trains,
and planes. That “March for Jobs and Freedom” began as a labor
event and ended as one of the most important mass marches of the
twentieth century.

King addressed many if not most of the major unions and became an
honorary member of some of them. In 1961, he spoke to the AFL-CIO
federation criticizing union racism and warning that a “crisis
confronts us both” in the form of a menacing military,
segregationist, and right-wing coalition that threatens “everything
that is decent and fair in American life” and could “drive labor
into impotency.” Stanley Levison wrote most of this and King’s
other labor speeches, but King gave those speeches life. He did not
just follow a script written by someone else. He felt labor struggles.

A few days after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Olso, Norway,
where he called for a universal campaign for peace and economic
justice, he came back to Atlanta to go on the picket line. On behalf
of eight hundred black women who worked in his church’s
neighborhood, he joined their effort and stayed with it until they won
their strike against the Scripto manufacturing company. Working with
labor advisors and union allies, King thoroughly imbibed the idea of
labor solidarity. What civil rights leader besides King would have
stepped into the Memphis sanitation strike, as part of his Poor
People’s Campaign, unprepared but quickly assessing the crisis at
hand, to call for a general strike of black teachers, students, and
working people?

 

Martin Luther King is surrounded by leaders of the sanitation strike
as he arrived to lead a march in support of the striking workers, on
March 28, 1968, in Memphis.
Had things turned out differently, such an event in Memphis would have
signaled a major turning point for the movements of the 1960s. His
“All Labor has Dignity” stump speech to Memphis workers on March
18 speaks to both his familiarity with unions and his passion for the
black working poor.

“You are reminding not only Memphis, but you are reminding the
nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and
receive starvation wages,” he said. “We can all get more together
than we can apart; we can get more organized together than we can
apart. And this is the way we gain power.” King understood
solidarity.

Like other biographers of King, Eig’s account of King’s last
campaign in Memphis remains spare, telling us not enough about the
movement and its consequences for how we remember King. As in
Montgomery in 1955, in 1968 King infused a local struggle with larger,
universal demands for solidarity.

“He gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of
Memphis, and the peasants of Vietnam,” said Coretta Scott King.

On April 8, while white supremacists reveled in his death and
continued to call King a communist and authorities feared another
riot, she and three of her children led tens of thousands of Memphians
along with strikers, Reuther, and other unionists in a disciplined,
silent march in Memphis. She called on them to renew their dedication
to King’s nonviolent vision to “make all people truly free and to
make every person feel that he is a human being.” Weeks later, the
sanitation workers won their strike and gained recognition for Local
1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME). Labor and civil rights alliances helped to make
public employees the fastest-growing segment of unions in the country.

On April 4, 2018, fifty years after King’s death, tens of thousands
of us gathered in Memphis to rededicate ourselves to King’s labor,
civil rights, and human rights coalition and to defy the corrupt,
racist, and anti-union agenda of the Trump regime. Unions honor King
today as a labor as well as freedom movement leader. Workers in
Memphis and other places still use the “I Am a Man” slogan as part
of their protests today.

Although Eig does not fully bring to the fore King’s vision of union
and worker solidarity, he excels in highlighting King as a person and
dramatizing his many struggles. In reading this book, I felt an
upsurge of hope that we may be able to alter what looks like an
increasingly dismal future. It’s a beautiful book that requires
every reader to grapple with both the contradictions and the glory of
one of our leading historical protagonists for peace, freedom,
economic justice, and equality.

What more can readers read to understand King’s prophetic voice and
vision? Turn additionally to stories written by labor and civil rights
historians on King’s project to abolish poverty and demand that
“all labor has dignity,” as he said in Memphis. “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote in his
“Letter from Birmingham Jail.” We still need to fully embrace
King’s framework of global solidarity in the struggle to end racism,
poverty, and war. This new biography tells a story that helps to keep
hope alive that we may someday attain King’s beloved community of
social and economic justice.

_[MICHAEL K. HONEY is the editor of King’s labor speeches, All
Labor Has Dignity (2011). A historian of labor and civil rights at
the University of Washington Tacoma, his books include Going Down
Jericho Road: the Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last
Campaign (2007), winner of the Robert F. Kennedy book award, and To
the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic
Justice (2018).]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this to Portside._

_Our new issue on conspiracy is out now. Subscribe today to get it in
print at a special discounted rate!
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* Martin Luther King Jr.
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* Martin Luther King
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* MLK
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* African Americans
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* civil rights movement
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* Labor Movement
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* Trade Unions
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* Racism
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* 1960s
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* Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike
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