Monday, January 18, 2016
Martin
Luther King Jr.: One of the Nation's Great Democratic Socialists
Martin Luther King Jr Memorial at night in
Washington, DC. (Photo: Scott Abelman/flickr/cc)
As we celebrate his birthday, it is easy to
forget that Rev. Martin Luther King was a democratic socialist In 1964, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in
Oslo, he observed that the United States could learn much from Scandinavian
"democratic socialism." He often talked 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."
In holding these views, King followed in the
footsteps of many prominent, influential Americans whose views and activism
changed the country for the better. In the 1890s, a socialist Baptist minister,
Francis Bellamy, wrote "The Pledge of Allegiance" and a socialist
poet, Katherine Lee Bates, penned "America the Beautiful." King was
part of a proud tradition that includes such important 20th century figures as
Jane Addams, Eugene Debs, Florence Kelley, John Dewey, Upton Sinclair, Helen
Keller, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and
Walter Reuther.
Today, America's most prominent democratic
socialist is Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic Party's
presidential nomination. Like King, Sanders says that the U.S. should learn
from Sweden, Norway and Denmark -- countries with greater equality, a higher
standard of living for working families, better schools, free universities,
less poverty, a cleaner environment, higher voter turnout, stronger unions,
universal health insurance, and a much wider safety net. Sounds
anti-business? Forbes magazine ranked Denmark as the #1 country for
business. The United States ranked #18.
Concerns about the political influence of the
super-rich, the nation's widening economic divide, the predatory practices of
Wall Street banks, and stagnating wages, have made more and more Americans
willing to consider the idea seriously. A December 2011 Pew survey found that nearly
half of young voters under the age of 29, regardless of their political party
affiliation, viewed socialism positively. Since Sanders began running for
president and openly identified himself as a democratic socialist, the idea has
gotten more traction. A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted
November, discovered that 56 percent of Democratic primary voters nationally
said they felt positive about socialism as a governing philosophy, compared to
29 percent who had a negative view. A new poll found that 43 percent of likely
voters in the February 1 Democratic Iowa caucuses would use the word
"socialist" to describe themselves.
Regardless of how Americans identify
themselves ideologically, the majority embrace ideas that some might call
socialist. For example, 74% think corporations have too much influence; 73%
favor tougher regulation of Wall Street; 60% believe that "our economic
system unfairly favors the wealthy;" 85% want an overhaul of our campaign
finance system to reduce the influence of money in politics; 58% support
breaking up big banks; 79% think the wealthy don't pay their fair share of
taxes; 85% favor paid family leave; 80% of Democrats and half the public
support single-payer Medicare for all; 75% of Americans (including 53% of
Republicans) support an increase in the federal minimum wage to $12.50, while
63% favor a $15 minimum wage; well over 70% support workers' rights to
unionize; and 92% want a society with far less income disparity.
If these ideas seem "radical," it
is worth remembering that many things that today we take for granted -- Social
Security, the minimum wage, child labor laws, voting rights for women and
African Americans, Medicare, and laws protecting consumers from unsafe products
and protecting workers from unsafe workplaces -- were once considered radical,
too. Ideas that were once espoused by socialists and seemed radical have become
common sense.
It is easy to forget that, in his day, in his
own country, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a dangerous
troublemaker. 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 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared
with 33 percent who viewed him favorably.
Today King is viewed as something of an
American saint. A recent Gallup Poll discovered that 94 percent of Americans
viewed him in a positive light. His birthday is a national holiday. His name
adorns schools and street signs. In 1964, at age 35, he was the youngest person
to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Many Hollywood films -- most recently Ava DuVernay's
brilliant "Selma" -- explore different aspects of King's personal and
political life, but generally confirm his reputation as a courageous and
compassionate crusader for justice. Politicians, preachers, and professors from
across the political spectrum invoke King's name to justify their beliefs and
actions.
King was a radical. He challenged America's
class system and its racial caste system. 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. He opposed U.S. militarism
and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.
In his critique of American society and his
strategy for changing it, King pushed the country toward more democracy and
social justice.
If he were alive today, he would certainly be
standing with Walmart employees, fast food workers, and others fighting for a
living wage and the right to unionize. He would be in the forefront of the
battle for strong gun controls and to thwart the influence of the National
Rifle Association. He would protest the abuses of Wall Street banks, standing
side-by-side with homeowners facing foreclosure and crusading for tougher
regulations against lending rip-offs. He would be calling for dramatic cuts in
the military budget to reinvest public dollars in jobs, education and health
care.
It is hardly a stretch to envision King
marching with immigrants and their allies in support of comprehensive
immigration reform and a path to citizenship. He would surely be joining hands
with activists seeking to reduce racial profiling and the killing of young
black men by police. He would stand with activists organizing to end the mass
incarceration of young people. Like most Americans in his day, King was
seemingly homophobic, even though one of his closest advisors, Bayard Rustin,
was gay. But today, King would undoubtedly stand with advocates of LGBT rights
and same-sex marriage, just as he challenged state laws banning interracial
marriage.
Indeed, 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. Still, 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, a socialist, 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 pacifist organizers, socialist 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.
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 boycotts, 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. In his
famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written in 1963, King
outlined a 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 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
working-class 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 Lyndon B. 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. As early as October 1964, he called for a "gigantic Marshall
Plan" for the poor -- black and white. That's when he began to talk openly
about radical-but-practical solutions to America's problems, including some
version of 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:
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."
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,
democratic 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.
The campaign for a federal holiday in King's
honor, spearheaded by Detroit Congressman John Conyers, began soon after his
murder, but it did not come up for a vote in Congress until 1979, when it fell
five votes short of the number needed for passage. In 1981, with the help of
singer Stevie Wonder and other celebrities, supporters collected six million
signatures on a petition to Congress on behalf of a King holiday. Congress
finally passed legislation enacting the holiday in 1983, 15 years after King's
death. But even then, 90 members of the House (including
then-Congressmen John McCain of Arizona and Richard Shelby of Alabama, both now
in the Senate) voted against it. Senator Jesse Helms, a North Carolina
Republican, led an unsuccessful effort - supported by 21 other senators, including current Senator
Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) -- to block its passage in the Senate.
The holiday was first observed on January 20,
1986. In 1987, Arizona governor Evan Mecham rescinded King Day as his first act
in office, setting off a national boycott of the state. Some states (including
New Hampshire, which called it "Civil Rights Day" from 1991 to 1999)
insisted on calling the holiday by other names. In 2000, South Carolina became
the last state to make King Day a paid holiday for all state employees.
In his final speech in Memphis the night
before he was killed, King told the crowd about a bomb threat on his plane from
Atlanta that morning, saying he knew that his life was constantly in danger
because of his political activism.
"I
would like to live a long life. 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. But Dr. King is
still with us in spirit. The best way to honor his memory is to continue the
struggle for human dignity, workers' rights, racial equality, peace and social
justice.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished
Professor of Politics, and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy
Department, at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social
Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books, 2012). His other books
include: Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century(University
Press of Kansas, 3rd edition, 2014), and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University
of California Press, revised 2006). He writes regularly for the Los Angeles
Times, Common Dreams, The Nation, and Huffington Post.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore
Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph:
410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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