MLK: A Legacy Received
I.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a docile, apolitical figure. He was a profound, heterodox thinker who was deeply committed to social and economic justice, as he made clear through his life’s work. Nonviolence, not passivity, was his creed.
The King of public memory, by turns the subject of hagiography and the object of scorn, reveals the schematic and simpleminded historical perspective of conservative opinion—and some important blind spots on the left. Those who would suppress his legacy for what they deem his radicalism or his “unsavory opinions about riots” (Steven Crowder) are functionally no different from those who pretend his philosophy begins and ends with the “I Have a Dream” speech. These facsimile Kings tell us where their expectations lie. The insinuation that a Black civil rights leader has to be sufficiently nonviolent, amiable, or “pro-American” in order to be worthy of praise is an expression of racism, pure and simple.
Last year, Steven Crowder uploaded a video titled “Top 5 Things You DIDN’T KNOW About MLK!” In it, Steven decries protesters tearing down statues, falsely states that Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves, and echoes a spurious claim about King witnessing a rape. Much of the segment is devoted to the Reverend Doctor’s views on rioting. By now everyone is familiar with his line about the riot as “the language of the unheard.” Crowder submits this line as evidence of King’s late radical turn, but the concept actually figures in his earlier writing too. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King explained to local religious leaders who had repudiated his nonviolent direct action tactics that in so doing, they were effectively sanctioning violence: “If [Black people’s] repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.”1 The unheard require an audience and an outlet; ignoring or degrading them would not make them disappear, because it would not allow for substantive changes in the conditions in underserved communities.
To his credit, Crowder does play a largely unedited section of the 1967 speech “The Other America,” in which King expounded “the language of the unheard,” as well as a passage from another speech. But the benefit of his research is that King’s disavowals of violence are “too open-ended” for him. “It’s worse than I thought. . . . He actually more often encouraged violent protesting than he discouraged it, and that is probably disappointing to a lot of people.”
How did Steven arrive at this conclusion? Did he pore over King’s work for every mention of riots he could find and classify each according to tone? This seems unlikely, since he doesn’t mention any of King’s books or correspondence. But never mind. The truth, as far as he and his listeners are concerned, is that King’s words were too equivocal, and therefore he “encouraged” riots, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Others on the right have made a tradition of revisiting MLK, not all of them as breathless as Crowder. For his part, Dave Rubin made a short video last January praising King for understanding “what . . . some seem to have forgotten,” namely, the importance of free speech. After admonishing folks online for “us[ing] him for their own political purposes,” Rubin presents a part of King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech (definitely not for political purposes):
If I lived in China or even Russia or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they haven’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. . . . Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.
No doubt it was that last line (where the clip ends) that inspired Rubin to make this video. He doesn’t bother to explain the reference to “illegal injunctions” which, excised from its context, tells the audience nothing. Instead, Dave reminds us that we have “the tools” contained in the Bill of Rights “to free ourselves, and that’s what we’ve done consistently in America, expanded more freedom to more people,” which is “the American dream that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was always talking about. . . .”
This drivel is delivered quickly, almost parenthetically, because any reference to the meaning of King’s speech would instantly dissolve it. The “Mountaintop” speech was delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before King was assassinated. He was organizing in support of a sanitation workers’ strike, and the “illegal injunction” in question was issued by a federal court at the behest of city officials to prevent him from marching.2 The thrust of those lines, in other words, is not that America is great—much better than China—because look how free we are to protest, but that even freedoms guaranteed to every citizen can be circumvented by legal means to stifle dissent.
II.
A 2021 article in the New York Times examines the contemporary relevance of King’s struggles, mostly through the reflections of civil rights activists who knew, or were inspired by, him. Rutha Mae Harris, who marched with King, brings to mind the White backlash that reared itself on Jan. 6: “With the rhetoric of Trump, I knew that something would happen. This had been building up for four years.”
Bernard Lafayette strikes a similar chord: “You have to ask the question, ‘What are these people afraid of?’ Well, they are afraid they would lose power, they would lose control. . . . [T]hey’re really false fears, because no one is going to take anything away from them.”
The piece also touches more broadly on “today’s challenges of systemic racism, ecological devastation and a lack of access to health care,” without returning in any detail to the latter two. Actually, except for one passing reference in the subheading, the authors never tie King’s legacy to the Black Lives Matter movement or the mass demonstrations throughout the summer of 2020.
More significant, however, is that because it is limited almost entirely to the South (and Washington, D.C.), as these remembrances often are, the article misses an opportunity to recall the “ambivalence” of the industrial North in the fight against economic inequality, and the role of Northern technocracy in prosecuting the Vietnam War—both roundly criticized by King. He was unsparing in his assessment of White supporters and fellow travelers:
The allies who were with us in Selma will not all stay with us during this period. We’ve got to understand what is happening. Now they often call this the white backlash . . . It’s just a new name for an old phenomenon. The fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes. There has always been ambivalence.3
In a 2018 piece about the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Times’ art critic Holland Cotter does connect more recent activism—including BLM, Occupy Wall Street, MeToo, the battle for a living wage—to the sanitation workers’ strike and King’s plans for a Poor People’s Campaign. He thoughtfully invokes the imagery and symbols that colored King’s last days. By 1968 “[h]e was thinking global,” and emphasizing racism as part of “a disease complex that included capitalism, colonialism and militarism”—an amended version of King’s “giant triplets.”
An op-ed from that same year by Michael Eric Dyson, “We Forgot What Dr. King Believed In,” calls on religious leaders, Black and White, to shun political apathy and embrace King’s vision of Christianity with a “revolutionary edge.” He implores them to remember those who have been gunned down because their very presence constituted a threat to the police. “[W]e should,” he concludes, “as Dr. King did, bear the burdens of the less fortunate and rise again to serve humanity.”
A rather vague and airy ending. The solid waste workers marching in Memphis were not “less fortunate”—they were ruthlessly exploited. One of them, Cleophus Smith, recalls making so little that he qualified for nutritional assistance despite working full time.4 The real people struggling against a capricious and unsustainable economic system are not waiting on the Gradgrinds of the world to find a heart.
For all their strengths, what all of these writers fail to mention is that the future King envisioned, whatever its dimensions, was almost certainly a post-capitalist one. (Cotter comes closest in ranking capitalism with colonialism.) His later writings suggest that he supported some version of democratic socialism, but he eschewed rigid doctrinal considerations in favor of a studied, pragmatic approach to politics. King understood that moral imperatives must be measured against the situation on the ground, that “no revolution can take place without a methodology suited to the circumstances of the period.”5 Nevertheless, his view of our peculiar system of exploitation was as incisive as it is relevant:
This revolution of values must go beyond traditional capitalism and Communism. We must honestly admit that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few. . . . The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered.6
To the Marxist conception of the “withering away of the state,” he posited that “while the state lasts, it is an end in itself. Man is only a means to that end,” concluding that capitalism (on the U.S. model) and communism (on the Soviet model) “each represent[ed] a partial truth”:
Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is . . . a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.
When he wrote these words—halfway between the start of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall—King had been straddling the two worlds of his Atlanta home and the slums on the West Side of Chicago. Living among some of Chicago’s poorest residents, he saw firsthand how their resources had been siphoned by a capitalist class acting as an imperial force in its own country. Small wonder that for him, the destruction of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was connected to the misery at home. To combat, and finally reverse, this drainage of wealth, King favored a “guaranteed income” which “must be pegged to the median income of society, not at the lowest levels of income.” Furthermore, this universal standard “must be dynamic; it must gradually increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline”7—which is precisely what happened in the ensuing decades: as productivity has increased, wages have remained stagnant,8 resulting in an even greater share of wealth to be repaid. In other words, the solutions he proposed have only become more urgent.
Reparations form a large part of the emancipatory project King was working toward. Those who would commandeer his words to urge forgetfulness and toleration, as opposed to restitution, I would direct to the numerous explicit references to reparations in his books and speeches:
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. . . . Yet a price could be placed on unpaid wages. . . . The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.9
It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. . . . A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.10
It didn't cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters. It didn't cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote. But now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.11
If one point is made clear in these passages (from Why We Can’t Wait, Where Do We Go from Here, and a speech at the Victory Baptist Church, respectively), it is that material exigencies cannot be divorced from their psychological and emotional import. Drawing analogies to both the Marshall Plan and the “Freedom Budget” of the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, MLK stressed that improvements in people’s living and working conditions have motivational power beyond their apparent benefits. A shock of courage and (even temporary) relief from want can spur them on to demand more permanent changes.
He was after all more practical than theoretical, and in keeping, recognized that every effort must be made to improve people’s lives in the near-term (hence the focus on higher wages and better working conditions instead of, say, collective ownership), that is, to attenuate the worst effects of the system in place. It’s simply a misreading to assume that he saw these improvements as an end in themselves, or that “go[ing] beyond traditional capitalism and Communism” wouldn’t mean the development of a new system of social and economic structures—one that does not proceed from the profit motive.
In his far-reaching analysis How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney explains why he chose to describe his subject as “underdeveloped” rather than “developing.” The latter would seem to suggest that all nations proceed along a straight course, albeit at different rates. Moreover, it
creates the impression that all the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are escaping from a state of economic backwardness relative to the industrial nations of the world, and that they are emancipating themselves from the relationship of exploitation. That is certainly not true, and many underdeveloped countries . . . are becoming more underdeveloped in comparison with the world’s great powers, because their exploitation by the metropoles is becoming intensified in new ways.12
The term “underdeveloped” raises the question of what forces are responsible for a nation’s cultural and economic immaturity. By referring to a country as “developing” we may conceal the responsible parties from view, or worse, make them the agents of the progress the word implies. King, who was greatly inspired by the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, never counseled us to treat the symptoms without examining the cause. We shouldn’t pretend not to know how schools, libraries, hospitals, infrastructure—in short, entire communities—in this country were underdeveloped. Nor should we accept this state of affairs as inevitable and unchangeable.
King was not fearless. He was not indestructible. He combined immense physical courage with a commitment to clear seeing. Our task is not only to defend his legacy but to apply it.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classics, 2000), 101-102.
Ted Conover, “The Strike That Brought MLK to Memphis,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/revisiting-sanitation-workers-strike-180967512/.
King, “America’s Chief Moral Dilemma,” University of California, Berkeley, recorded May 17, 1967, transcript of speech, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/martin-luther-king-hungry-club-forum/552533/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share.
Ora DeKornfeld, Emma Cott and Eric Maierson, “How Dr. King Changed a Sanitation Worker’s Life,” January 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/learning/film-club-how-dr-king-changed-a-sanitation-workers-life.html.
King, Why We Can’t Wait, 27.
King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2010), 197.
Ibid., 73.
Dean Baker, “CORRECTION: This is What Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace With Productivity,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 21, 2020, https://cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-kept-pace-with-productivity/.
King, Why We Can’t Wait, 170.
King, Where Do We Go from Here, 95.
Insaaf Blog, “Martin Luther King, Jr. on Income Inequality and Redistribution of Wealth + James Baldwin,” uploaded January 20, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgwtd4X_qFM&t=29s.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Verso, 2018), 16-17.