[ King called himself a democratic socialist. He believed that
America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political
power."]
[[link removed]]

A TRUE AND VISIONARY RADICAL, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. WAS NO MODERATE
 
[[link removed]]


 

Peter Dreier
January 16, 2023
Common Dreams
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
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*
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_ King called himself a democratic socialist. He believed that
America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political
power." _

Civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers a
speech agains the Vietnam War to a crowd of approximately 7,000 people
on May 17, 1967 at UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza in Berkeley,
California., (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

 

In his absorbing profile
[[link removed]] of
the writer Alex Haley (author of "Roots" and "The Autobiography of
Malcolm X") in the _New York Times Book Review_ a year ago, Michael
Patrick Hearn made a familiar mistake. He wrote: "Politically [Haley]
he was a moderate, philosophically more Martin than Malcolm."

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was no moderate. Today, he is viewed as
something of an American saint. His name adorns schools and street
signs. His birthday—January 15, 1929—is observed as a national
holiday on the third Monday of January each year. This year as in
years past, Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King's
name to justify their beliefs and actions.

But in his day, King was considered a dangerous troublemaker. Both
Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson worried that King was being
influenced by Communists. King was harassed by the FBI and vilified in
the media. The establishment's campaign to denigrate King worked. In
August 1966 - as King was bringing his civil rights campaign to
Northern cities to address poverty, slums, housing segregation and
bank lending discrimination—the Gallup Poll found that 63% of
Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33% who
viewed him favorably.

King called himself a democratic socialist. He believed that America
needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He
challenged America's class system and its racial caste system. He
opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country's
misadventure in Vietnam. He was a strong ally of the nation's labor
union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he
had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike.

King's views evolved over time. He entered the public stage with some
hesitation, reluctantly becoming the spokesperson for the Montgomery
bus boycott in 1955, at the age of 26. King began his activism in
Montgomery as a crusader against racial segregation, but the struggle
for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic
and social justice and peace.

During the early 1960s, the nation's media accurately depicted both
King and Malcolm X as threats to the status quo. But the media
portrayed Malcolm X as an almost demonic force because he described
white people as "devils," and called on Black Americans to use
self-defense - including violence, if necessary - to protect
themselves from racist thugs and police brutality. King - a proponent
of nonviolent civil disobedience and racial integration - was dismayed
when Malcolm X, SNCC's Stokely Carmichael, and others began advocating
"black power," which he warned would alienate white allies and
undermine a genuine interracial movement for economic justice.

Just as King's views evolved over the years, Malcolm X's ideas
changed, too. Toward the end of his life, he had rejected Black
separatism and by-any-means-necessary tactics. In 1963, he traveled to
Africa, the Middle East and Europe, where he met radical white people
whose political ideas he agreed with. When he was in Ghana, someone
asked him "What do you think about socialism?" Malcolm X asked: "Is it
good for Black people?" "It seems to be," came the response. "Then I'm
for it," Malcolm X said.

In 1964 he broke with the Nation of Islam and rejected its policy of
non-cooperation with the civil rights movement. He reached out to King
and other civil rights leaders.

When Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, King sent this
message to his wife: "I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and
felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence
and root of the problem."

In reviewing King's life, we can see that the seeds of his later
radicalism were planted early.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, the son of a prominent
black minister. Despite growing up in a solidly middle-class family,
King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression,
particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate
school, he wrote an essay describing the "anticapitalistic feelings"
he experienced as a youngster as a result of seeing unemployed people
standing in breadlines.

During King's first year at Morehouse College, civil rights and labor
activist A. Philip Randolph spoke on campus. Randolph predicted that
the near future would witness a global struggle that would end white
supremacy and capitalism. He urged the students to link up with "the
people in the shacks and the hovels," who, although "poor in
property," were "rich in spirit."

After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, King studied theology at
Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (where he read both
Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx), planning to follow in his father's
footsteps and join the ministry. In 1955, he earned his doctorate from
Boston University, where he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the
influential liberal theologian. While in Boston, he told his
girlfriend (and future wife), Coretta Scott, that "a society based on
making all the money you can and ignoring people's needs is wrong."

When King moved to Montgomery to take his first pulpit at the Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church, he was full of ideas but had no practical
experience in politics or activism. But history sneaked up on him. On
Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and veteran
activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), decided to resist the city's segregation law by
refusing to move to the back of the bus on her way home from work. She
was arrested. Two other long-term activists - E. D. Nixon (leader of
the NAACP and of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and Jo Ann
Robinson (a professor at the all-black Alabama State College and a
leader of Montgomery's Women's Political Council)—determined that
Parks' arrest was a ripe opportunity for a one-day boycott of the
much-despised segregated bus system. Nixon and Robinson asked black
ministers to use their Sunday sermons to spread the word. Some
refused, but many others, including King, agreed.

The boycott was very effective. Most black residents stayed off the
buses. Within days, the boycott leaders formed a new group, the
Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). At Nixon's urging, they
elected a hesitant King as president, in large part because he was new
in town and not embroiled in the competition for congregants and
visibility among black ministers. He was also well educated and
already a brilliant orator, and thus would be a good public face for
the protest movement. The ministers differed over whether to call off
the boycott after one day but agreed to put the question up to a vote
at a mass meeting.

That night, 7,000 blacks crowded into (and stood outside) the Holt
Street Baptist Church. Inspired by King's words—"There comes a time
when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of
oppression"—they voted unanimously to continue the boycott. It
lasted for 381 days and resulted in the desegregation of the city's
buses.

During that time, King honed his leadership skills, aided by advice
from two veteran organizers, Bayard Rustin and Rev. Glenn Smiley, who
had been sent to Montgomery by the pacifist group, Fellowship of
Reconciliation. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home was
bombed, and he was subjected to personal abuse. But - with the
assistance of the new medium of television - he emerged as a national
figure.

In 1957, with the help of Rustin and organizer Ella Baker, King
launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to help
spread the civil rights crusade to other cities. He helped lead local
campaigns in different cities, including Selma and Birmingham,
Alabama, where thousands marched to demand an end to segregation in
defiance of court injunctions forbidding any protests. While
participating in these protests, King also sought to keep the
fractious civil rights movement together, despite the rivalries among
the NAACP, the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SCLC.

Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles, spoke
more than 2,500 times, and was arrested at least 20 times, always
preaching the gospel of nonviolence. King attended workshops at the
Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which connected him to a network
of radicals, pacifists and union activists from around the country
whose ideas helped widen his political horizons.

It is often forgotten that the August 1963 protest rally at the
Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream"
speech, was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King
was proud of the civil rights movement's success in winning the
passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the
following year. But he realized that neither law did much to provide
better jobs or housing for the masses of black poor in either the
urban cities or the rural South. "What good is having the right to sit
at a lunch counter," he asked, "if you can't afford to buy a
hamburger?"

King had hoped that the bus boycott, sit-ins and other forms of civil
disobedience would stir white southern moderates, led by his fellow
clergy, to see the immorality of segregation and racism. His famous
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written in 1963, outlines King's
strategy of using nonviolent civil disobedience to force a response
from the southern white establishment and to generate sympathy and
support among white liberals and moderates.

"The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so
crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,"
he wrote, and added, "We know through painful experience that freedom
is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by
the oppressed."

King eventually realized that many white Americans had at least a
psychological stake in perpetuating racism. He began to recognize that
racial segregation was devised not only to oppress African Americans
but also to keep working-class whites from challenging their own
oppression by letting them feel superior to blacks.

"The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man
Jim Crow," King said
[[link removed]] from the
Capitol steps in Montgomery, following the 1965 march from Selma. "And
when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty
pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that
told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white
man, better than a black man."

When King launched a civil rights campaign in Chicago in 1965, he was
shocked by the hatred and violence expressed by whites as he and his
followers marched through the streets of segregated neighborhoods in
Chicago and its suburbs. He saw that the problem in Chicago's ghetto
was not legal segregation but "economic exploitation"—slum housing,
overpriced food and low-wage jobs—"because someone profits from its
existence."

These experiences led King to develop a more radical outlook. King
supported President Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty in
1964, but, like his friend and ally Walter Reuther, the president of
the United Auto Workers, King thought that it did not go nearly far
enough. He began talking openly about the need to confront "class
issues," which he described as "the gulf between the haves and the
have-nots."

In 1966 King confided to his staff: "You can't talk about solving the
economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of
dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying
profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting
on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are
messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading
in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that
something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better
distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a
democratic socialism."

King became increasingly committed to building bridges between the
civil rights and labor movements. Invited to address the AFL-CIO's
annual convention in 1961, King observed, "Our needs are identical
with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable
housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in
which families can grow, have education for their children, and
respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands
and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and
labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing
anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the
other mouth.

He continued: "The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the
nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions,
labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole
nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack
labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them."

In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King proclaimed,
"Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be
a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's
children."

Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King
said, "Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly
twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against
poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but
with elementary economic justice."

King's growing critique of capitalism coincided with his views about
American imperialism. By 1965 he had turned against the Vietnam War,
viewing it as an economic as well as a moral tragedy. But he was
initially reluctant to speak out against the war. He understood that
his fragile working alliance with LBJ would be undone if he challenged
the president's leadership on the war. Although some of his close
advisers tried to discourage him, he nevertheless made the break in
April 1967, in a bold and prophetic speech at the Riverside Church in
New York City, entitled "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence."
[[link removed]] King
called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"
and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against
militarism. King argued that Vietnam was stealing precious resources
from domestic programs and that the Vietnam War was "an enemy of the
poor." In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
(1967), King wrote, "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they
destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America."

In early 1968, King told journalist David Halberstam, "For years I
labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of
society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite
differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire
society, a revolution of values."

King kept trying to build a broad movement for economic justice that
went beyond civil rights. In January, 1968, he announced plans for a
Poor People's Campaign, a series of protests to be led by an
interracial coalition of poor people and their allies among the
middle-class liberals, unions, religious organizations and other
progressive groups, to pressure the White House and Congress to expand
the War on Poverty. At King's request, socialist activist Michael
Harrington (author of The Other America, which helped inspire
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to declare a war on poverty) drafted a
Poor People's Manifesto that outlined the campaign's goals. In April,
King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to help lend support to striking
African American garbage workers and to gain recognition for their
union. There, he was assassinated, at age 39, on April 4, a few months
before the first protest action of the Poor People's Campaign in
Washington, DC.

President Johnson utilized this national tragedy to urge Congress to
quickly enact the Fair Housing Act, legislation to ban racial
discrimination in housing, which King had strongly supported for two
years. He signed the bill a week after King's assassination.

Throughout his life, King had his moments of despair. He lamented that
the factions within the civil rights movement undermined its
potential. He was frustrated at the reluctance of some liberal
politicians, including President Johnson, to fully embrace the freedom
movement unless they were confronted with protests. He wondered
whether he had the stamina needed to endure the constant travel,
speeches, and threats on his life.

But King would have rejected the nihilism and fatalism of what is now
called "Afro-Pessimism,"
[[link removed]] a
perspective that views American racism as so intractable that no
movement for justice can redeem the nation's democracy, or its soul.

King would certainly be appalled by the recent upsurge of white
supremacist and neo-fascist violence, catalyzed in part by Donald
Trump. But he would recognize that they are the heirs of racist thugs
like Bull Connor, George Wallace, the White Citizens Councils, and the
Ku Klux Klan of his day.

If he were alive today, King would no doubt still be on the front
lines, lending his voice and his energy to major battles for justice.

Voting rights: Along with other civil rights leaders, King fought hard
to dismantle Jim Crow laws that kept blacks from voting. He was proud
of his role in pushing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
He'd be outraged by the Supreme Court's rulings to weaken the law
that, among other things, have increased the number of black voters
and black elected officials. Today, he'd be fighting to stop voter
suppression by Republican-controlled states—for example, by
requiring photo IDs in order to vote, shrinking the early-voting
period, and ending same-day voter registration and pre-registration
for teenagers who will turn 18 by Election Day. He'd be mobilizing on
behalf of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Gun violence: During the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, King faced
constant death threats and feared for his family's life. He owned
several guns and allowed armed guards to protect his home. But Bayard
Rustin—a pacifist who was one of King's closest advisers—persuaded
King to give up his guns and guards and embrace a nonviolent strategy.

King's commitment to nonviolence grew stronger as he grew older. After
John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, King wrote: "By our readiness
to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing
our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero
is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing,
by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in
which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes."

Today he would be pushing for tougher limits on gun ownership. He
would have joined activists who are fighting to overturn states'
shoot-first "stand your ground" laws and “open carry” laws. He
would be calling on cities, colleges and churches to divest from
companies that manufacture military-style assault weapons.

Mass incarceration: King recognized that the criminal justice system
has long had a double standard when it comes to the treatment of black
and white Americans. Today he would be joining groups like the ACLU
and Black Lives Matter that have been protesting policies that have
resulted in over two million Americans behind bars, many for
nonviolent, minor offenses. He'd be supporting the growing number of
progressive district attorneys and prison reformers who advocate for
changing the cash bail system that ensnares innocent poor people
behind bars. He'd be in the streets with activists and their allies
demanding reforms to hold police accountable for racial profiling and
the killing of unarmed Black Americans.

Income inequality and workers’ rights: King warned about the "gulf
between the haves and the have-nots." That gulf has gotten wider.
During the final few years of his life, King focused much of his
energy on helping low-wage workers fight for rights and respect. His
insistence that America needed a "better distribution of wealth" is
even more timely today.

Today he would join the growing campaigns to unionize and improve pay
and working conditions for workers who earn poverty-level wages.
Raising the minimum wage was one of the more demands of the March on
Washington. Today he might disrupt Walmart stockholder meetings to
demand that the company pay employees a living wage, and join Amazon,
Starbucks, and other workers on their picket lines for economic
fairness. He'd also be vocal about raising the current federal minimum
wage, $7.25 an hour, which Congress hasn't increased since 2009, to at
least $15 an hour. He’d be pleased by a recent Gallup poll finding
that 71 percent
[[link removed]] of
Americans support unions—the highest level since 1965.

Women's reproductive freedom: In 1966, King was one of four recipients
of Planned Parenthood's first Margaret Sanger Award, named for the
group's founder, a pioneer in educating women about birth control. In
accepting the award, King said that "there is a striking kinship
between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts." He noted
how "at the turn of the century, she went into the slums and set up a
birth-control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she
was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her
actions."

King never spoke publicly about his views on abortion, and he was
murdered five years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in
1973, but he was a fervent advocate for universal health care.

"Of all the forms of inequality," he said in 1966, "injustice in
health care is the most shocking and inhumane." Today, he’d be part
of the movement to protect women's access to health care and
reproductive freedom that are under attack by the U.S. Supreme Court,
conservative governors and state legislators, and anti-abortion
activists. He would be appalled by the Supreme Court’s ruling last
year to overturn _Roe v Wade_. He's being linking arms with others to
challenge those who are trying to shut down Planned Parenthood
clinics.

Immigrant rights: King would be pleased by the ties between the civil
rights and immigrant rights movements. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), one of
the original Freedom Riders and a close King ally, once spoke at a
rally and explained: "Martin Luther King would be very proud. We are
white, black, Hispanic, Native American -- we are one family, in one
house, and we are not going to let anybody turn us around."

King would be part of the broad coalition pushing for comprehensive
immigration reform, energized by young activists who call themselves
Dreamers, a term that evokes King's 1963 speech. Many of these young
people share the values, culture and aspirations of other American
youth, but they feel, as King described the typical African American
50 years ago, like “an exile in his own land.”

National spending priorities: King called for significant cuts to
military spending in order to fund a comprehensive plan to create
jobs, rebuild cities, improve schools and lift the poor out of
destitution. Some ideas in the "domestic Marshall Plan" that King
supported was evident in President Biden's Build Back Batter
legislation, designed to address the overlapping issues of jobs,
poverty, child care, and climate change, but King would embrace even
bolder ideas promoted by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and
Democratic Socialists of America.

Housing and predatory lending: Appalled by the slums, bank redlining,
and blatant residential segregation in our major cities, especially in
the North, King lobbied hard for anti-discrimination laws in the
1960s. Today, King would be equally outraged to learn that banks
continue to discriminate against Black and Latino consumers. He’d be
pleased by the Justice Department’s ruling this month to require the
Los Angeles-based City National Bank to pay more than $31 million
[[link removed]] for
refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominately Black and Latino
communities.

King would be outraged by the growing numbers of homeless Americans -
many of whom have jobs - in our cities. As part of his crusade the
change national priorities, he'd call on Congress to increase the
federal budget for subsidized housing that has never recovered by the
slashes of the Reagan era. He’d be pleased by the growing activism
around housing insecurity around the country. He'd link arms with
activists fighting for rent control in cities around the country, and
push local and state governments to reform zoning laws to allow more
affordable and mixed-income housing to be built, especially by
nonprofit developers. He'd have embraced the labor and housing
activists in Los Angeles who in November won a ballot measure (with
58% of the vote) to raise the real estate transfer tax on all
commercial office and apartment buildings and single-family mansions
that sell for over $5 million in order to create a $900 million a year
fund for housing construction and rent relief.

LGBT equality: Typical of most Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, King
did not approve of homosexuality, even though his close adviser Bayard
Rustin was openly gay. But when some civil rights leaders objected to
Rustin's role as the key organizer of the March on Washington, worried
that it would tarnish the movement, King insisted that Rustin stay in
the job.

Since the 1960s, public opinion toward gay Americans has shifted
dramatically. Had King encountered more openly gay men and women, his
views probably would have evolved as well. After all, when King spoke
out against state laws banning interracial marriage in 1958, he
sounded a lot like those who advocate for same-sex marriage today:
"When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that
society has cut off a segment of my freedom."

Today, with the support of the NAACP and a growing number of black
clergy members supporting gay rights, King would stand—and sit in
when necessary—with the LGBT community to defend same-sex marriage
and end other forms of discrimination against gay Americans.

Anti-Semitism: King had many Jewish friends and often expressed his
appreciation for the close affinity between the black and Jewish
communities. In 1958, speaking at a meeting of the American Jewish
Congress
[[link removed]],
King said: “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people
were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe.
Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to
rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by
others an impossibility. In 1964, King said: “It would be impossible
to record the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the
Negro’s struggle for freedom — it has been so great.”

King would be appalled by the upsurge of anti-Semitic incidents --
including shooting deaths and attempted murders at synagogues, Jewish
stores, and Jewish homes, and growing acceptance
[[link removed]] of
anti-Jewish stereotypes — during the past few years. He would be
speaking out about the rise of white-supremacist and anti-Semitic hate
groups, on display in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Colleyville, Texas,
and many other cities, and emboldened by the rhetoric
[[link removed]] of
former President Donald Trump.

The night before he was killed by an assassin, King spoke at a rally
for the striking garbage workers in Memphis. He told the crowd about a
bomb threat on his plane from Atlanta that morning, saying he knew
that his life was in danger because of his political activism.

"I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place.
But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over,
and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I
want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised
Land."

We haven't gotten there yet. The best way to honor his memory is to
continue his struggle for social justice.

_Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp distinguished professor of politics at
Occidental College. He joined the Occidental faculty in January 1993
after serving for nine years as Director of Housing at the Boston
Redevelopment Authority and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray
Flynn. He is the author of "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th
Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame" (2012) and an editor (with
Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin) of "We Own the Future: Democratic
Socialism, American Style" and co-author of "Baseball Rebels: The
Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and
Changed America" (2022)._

* Martin Luther King
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* Radicalism
[[link removed]]
* Civil Rights
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* DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
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*
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*
*
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