Martin Luther King, the Radical

Martin Luther King, the Radical

When Martin Luther King stood at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28^th, 1963 and delivered his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, it was a defining moment for the civil rights movement. It was an event which shaped modern America by giving voice to the hundreds of thousands of black Americans who were suffering under injustice and racial discrimination; the speech cemented Dr King as an American civil rights hero who paved the way for racial equality. When the mainstream media remembers the life of Dr King, it often seems to jump, after this speech, to images of the Selma marches in 1965, and then to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. It was not that King’s views remained static after 1965 – far from it: in these three years he became much more radical in his assessment of American politics and the economic system. During these later years, King moved on from fighting racial injustice in America, to tackling the wider problem of global injustice. He focussed his attention on what he believed were the “triple evils” of racism, poverty, and war, and fighting these required not “a little change here, a little change there,” but a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”[1] However, these radical views are rarely explored when we remember Dr King today. It seems we have sanitised and, to some extent, even manipulated our vision of King into a more palatable metaphor for hope, rather than the more uncomfortable, potent radical he became in his later years.

By 1966, when Dr King had moved North into Chicago, the civil rights movement had delivered the black community protection through law, but had failed to eradicate the problems of economic inequality: an estimated 22-33 percent of Americans (black and white) lived in poverty in 1960.[2] Dr King became convinced he needed to move his focus beyond civil rights and dedicate his efforts to eliminating this economic inequality. In May 1967, at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King stated “we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.” To him, human rights included the economic rights of decent housing and decent pay across all racial lines. He concluded that economic problems were rooted within the American capitalist system itself: “something is wrong with capitalism as it now stands … we are not interested in being integrated into this value structure. Power must be relocated.”[3]

He presented radical solutions in this speech, demanding a “redistribution of economic and political power” and a multi-racial “non-violent army of the poor”. In 1967, King put pressure on politicians to pass the Economic and Social Bill of Rights which would guarantee: $30 billion for anti-poverty programmes; the elimination of slums through social housing construction and an annual liveable wage.[4] He also announced a Poor People’s Campaign (PPC), which involved a march on Washington and for people to set up camp within the city until the Bill was passed.

However, this push for fundamental economic change was worrying many people. African-Americans who had seen the benefits of the American economic system were apprehensive that this change may spell disaster for them. Many resented King’s idea for social housing, believing their own ‘hard-earned’ properties would be de-valued. People believed that King’s movement towards democratic socialism was a worrying prospect, given the deep-rooted fear of communism in America. Indeed, King’s attacks on capitalism saw him labelled as a communist; the FBI even demanded of Congress that they oppose the PPC given that King was an “instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine the nation.”[5]

Reinforcing this criticism of King’s new political stance was his opposition to the Vietnam War. When King first saw images of children scorched by US napalm attacks (whilst eating his breakfast) he is reported to have remarked “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.”[6] King opposed war in general due to his Christian beliefs. He saw it as morally wrong, not just because of the lives it destroyed, but because it was an “enemy of the poor,”[7] consuming vital resources which could be used in other ways, such as anti-poverty programmes. King was not the first black activist to oppose the war – his wife Coretta had spoken at anti-war demonstrations in 1965, and Stokely Carmichael, in his famous 1966 ‘Black Power speech’, called American involvement in Vietnam “immoral and illegal.”[8] However, King certainly became one of the most high-profile and vocal opponents of American actions in Vietnam.

On April 4^th, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination in Memphis, King presented a speech named ‘Beyond Vietnam.’ It was passionately critical of American policy in Vietnam and its foreign policy in general; King called America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and called for an international crusade against poverty, racism, and militarism.[9] In 1967, most Americans still supported American actions in Vietnam and King’s criticism was poorly received in the media and by fellow civil rights groups. The Washington Post said in an editorial that “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence.”[10] The FBI branded him a traitor and, notably, President Johnson dis-invited King to the White House and was reported to feel betrayed by the pastor whom he had supported in the struggle for civil rights.

It is clear, then, that in the last few years of his life, King’s focus had shifted from civil rights to populist economics and anti-war activism. These movements towards a more radical ideology were not only worrying those in the black communities whose economic situation was improving, but angering those in the media and government who had supported the civil rights movement but were now concerned with his ‘communist’ ideology. As journalist David Halberstam said, King himself knew he was “treading in difficult water” by criticising the capitalist system in which so many had so much invested, and was “increasingly at odds with the rest of society.”[11]

Some have claimed that this increasing radicalism put a target on Dr King’s back, indeed the King family has always maintained that the US government was involved with his assassination. Even if there was no connection between government agencies and his death, the White House, and many others, have been able to capitalise on King’s legacy. However, it is the more moderate King they quote, not the radical he became in his last years. When President Reagan created Martin Luther King, Jr, Day in 1983, no mention was made of the pastor’s attempts to tackle poverty or his anti-war sentiment. Indeed, as Gomer and Petrella wrote in a 2013 article, “absent entirely from Reagan’s representations of King are his critiques of capitalism, the war in Vietnam, nuclear weapons, or white supremacy.”[12] Furthermore, when George W. Bush commemorated the 50^th anniversary of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, he distilled King’s vision down to the ideal that society should judge “not the color of a person’s skin, but the content of their character.”[13] It could be argued that it is convenient for conservatives to focus on King’s message of ‘colour-blindness’ rather than his more socialist policies. After all, colour-blindness removes the need for affirmative action because “King’s version of a colorblind society would not include hiring quotas.”[14]

It is not just conservatives who appear to have narrowed King’s legacy. Barack Obama consistently used the more moderate rhetoric of the pastor during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, failing to quote King regarding the PPC or other such radical reforms.[15] As the academic Andrew Hartman argues, King was “much, much closer to an actual socialist than Obama” [16] and the former president would not have wanted to alienate potential voters by invoking King’s more radical views.

The poet Carl Wendell Hines wrote upon Dr King’s death, “Dead men make / such convenient heroes”.[17] Dead men certainly cannot dictate their own legacy; it seems that America has preferred the memory of King as a moderate idol rather than a radical pariah. Whether this is deliberate manipulation by politicians and political commentators, or simply comfortable convenience, King’s radical ideology has been largely removed from the memory of the public. Without his radicalism King is palatable, King is positive, and King is the sanitised hero which American society demands.