Martin Luther King's Radical Legacy
by way of fnb@thebird.org
Ernest Hemingway once wrote that "the dignity ... of an iceberg is due to
only one eighth of it being above water," while the rest temains submerged,
unavailable to the naked eye. Something of the same might be said for
Martin Luther King Jr. Though there are a number of reasons why we should
all be grateful for the federal holiday each January honoring the birth of
King, we should also recognize that this event helps to promote a shallow
understanding of his true intellectual legacy, leading to a misconstrued
image of King that he scarcely could have endorsed himself.
The scores of politicians who spoke on Jan. 18 about the pressing need to
fulfill King's "Dream," for example, were generally endorsing a simplified,
static portrait of King. Meanwhile, we have been bombarded with a steady
stream of television commercials, advertisements and newspaper articles
that imply King was merely a liberal reformer, whose sole preoccupation was
civil rights. Where was the discussion of King's plans to transform the
structures of power and privilege in society? Who remembered King's call
for a "radical revolution" of American values? As historian Vincent Harding
has remarked, "It appears as if the price for the first national holiday
honoring a black man is the development of a massive case of national
amnesia."
Even before the advent of his public career, King pondered fundamental
economic changes in American society. "I imagine you already know that I am
much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic," a
23-year-old King wrote in a 1952 letter to Coretta Scott. If most Americans
don't know this, the federal govemment certainly did. Because of his
alleged ties to Communism, the FBI launched an extended campaign to smear
King, tapping his phones, sending him threatening mail and trying to
discredit him among journalists and potential donors and supporters.
Following King's famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington, FBI
Assistant Director Louis Sullivan charged that King had become (in a
curious pair of adjectives), "The most dangerous and effective Negro leader
in the country."
We further need to be reminded that King demanded a total restructuring of
our foreign policies, and-unlike Jesse Jackson and many other "leftists" of
our era-he would have had nothing but scorn for President Clinton's
criminal bombings of Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, King began
speaking out against U.S. militarism as early as 1965. Most symptomatic of
this, of course, was the "nightmarish conflict" in Vietnam, which he said
was "one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history
of the world."
In the last years of his life, King also began to focus greater attention
on entrenched patterns of exploitation. In these terms, integration did not
simply mean mixed lunch counters or diverse neighborhoods, but rather a
meaningful sharing of power and responsibility in all aspects of society.
Though it is true that King pined for a nation where people would be judged
"not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,"
few things are more deliberately cynical than the conjecture of
conservatives- from Ward Connerly to David Horowitz-who claim that King
would have opposed present-day affirmative action programs. In fact, the
opposite is true. In his 1964 book, Why We Can't Wait, King argued that
"among the vital jobs to be done, the nation ... must incorporate into its
planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps [the Negro] has
inherited from the past." Elsewhere, he cited both the federal Gl Bill and
India's program of "preferences" for the "untouchables" as worthy efforts
to make up for disadvantages that certain groups had faced.
King also spoke publicly against "systemic rather than superficial flaws"
in our economic system, questioning the basic tenets of capitalism and
calling for full employment, national health care and a guaranteed annual
wage. As a means to these ends, he envisioned a massive escalation of
nonviolent civil disobedience. Whereas much of his early work in the South
simply sought a recognition of general principles mirrored in the
Constitution, King planned for subsequent campaigns to be waged in
confrontation with the federal government. Nonviolence, he argued, "must be
adapted to urban conditions and urban moods.... There must be more than a
statement to the larger society, a force that interrupts its functioning at
some key point."
But above all, King called for a revolutionary re-examination of America's
character: a point that was lost on virtually all of the joumalists and
politicians who commemorated King this yeat Obviously, we should continue
to honor King's greatness on the third Monday of each January. But in the
future, we need to demand that these celebrations look beyond the popular,
sanitized images of King that are spooned out to us annually. As Stanford
historian Clayborne Carson has pointed out, "The historical King was far
too interesting to be encased in simple, didactic legends designed to
offend no one."
John C. McMillian is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Columbia
University. He has interned at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at
Stanford University.
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