Contending with King
As the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. approaches, the nation’s attention will be ineluctably drawn, once again, to the words and teachings of an American who altered the course of history. However, unlike the corporate-sponsored celebrations that mark King’s birth – or the ones that take place during Black History Month – the focus this time around will be on the work and words of a veteran activist, drawn to Memphis in the early months of 1968 in an attempt to confront the debilitating racial and economic inequality that dogged the lives of the city’s sanitation workers.
Perhaps, as we reflect on King’s death, we will – at least temporarily –move away from the pop culture caricature of King that’s come to characterize our collective memory of him, and actually seek to understand his responses to the complex dilemmas that bedeviled American society in his lifetime and beyond.
Historian Tim Tyson writes that in the years after the assassination we worked hard to turn King into a “black Santa Claus.” This version of King is a raceless, non-confrontational action figure that can be, Tyson continues, “filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion may dictate.” In an increasingly conflict-averse society, we’ve grown comfortable with this new rendition of the Good Doctor – King 2.0. This King is meek. This King turns the other cheek. This King has dreams. Over time, we’ve become much less comfortable with the black southern preacher and fierce social critic who, for most of his public life, stood against some of the most powerful forces in American society.
“The church,” King wrote in 1963, “must be the guide and critic of the state.” If religious leadership failed in this effort, the church would be reduced to “an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.” This belief that the church played a central role in the transformation of society placed him on a moral and political trajectory that frequently confounded allies and convicted the ambivalent. Most significantly, it placed him at odds with the Johnson Administration on its two central issues, the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam. By 1966, King had come to see Johnson’s domestic war as piecemeal and under funded. In a time of soaring prosperity, it was absurd, King declared, to spend billions of dollars on travel to the moon while poor and working class Americans suffered under unspeakable conditions. Johnson’s War on Poverty did accomplish the task of illuminating the intractability of poverty. For King however, it also highlighted the unwillingness on the part of liberal politicians to confront the issue in more foundational ways. The seeds of this analysis would bear fruit in the Poor People’s March, King’s effort to place the issue of poverty front and center in the American conscience, and to challenge the country to make the necessary political and economic adjustments to address the matter. “True compassion”, King wrote in 1968, “understands that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
In 1967, a year to the day of his death, King delivered a major speech against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in New York City. To King, it was morally inconsistent to simultaneously condemn state sanctioned violence within the United States while ignoring state sanctioned violence abroad. The United States, he intoned in that historic speech was “the largest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Moreover, the war highlighted America’s hostile relationship with its poor and minority citizens, who were dying at dramatically higher rates than their numbers in the country merited. King’s political and spiritual instincts led him to a momentous conclusion – that the war represented an immoral, racist, imperialist endeavor that stained the soul of country. For King, the choice – though difficult – was crystal clear: the moral and political crusade he waged in the United States was built upon an alter of redemptive nonviolence; this reality demanded that he speak out against the war. And so he did; and when he spoke, he did so as a child of God and brother to the Vietnamese.
It was a position that placed him in uncharted political territory and had serious implications. Despite the fact that he’d recently received the Nobel Peace Prize, and had long espoused the international nature of the struggle for equal rights in the United States, pundits, politicians and activists virulently chastised King, a mere “civil rights leader”, for having the audacity to express an opinion on an issue not unfurling on the streets of Selma or Los Angeles. He faced intense resistance from almost every corner of his professional life. The board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference – the organization he helped create – expressed its opposition to the effort. His closest advisors and political allies urged him to stick to civil rights, and warned that an unwarranted foray into foreign policy could jeopardize everything they’d worked for over the past decade.
By the time he arrived in Memphis, King’s opposition to the war – now in full bloom – had rendered him persona non grata at Johnson’s White House. Surrogates for President Johnson declared that King had neither the authority nor the competence to speak about foreign affairs. His opposition to the war severely damaged his relationships with other national leaders within the civil rights movement as well. Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, questioned King’s loyalty to his country. Whitney Young of the National Urban League accused King and other anti-war activists of intentionally undermining the War on Poverty with their anti-war stance. National publications were hardly more kind. The New York Times called his anti-war position a “serious tactical mistake”, while newspapers across the South reaffirmed – with renewed vigor – that King’s recent statements confirmed his suspected communist sympathies. The Washington Post ran an editorial titled “What on Earth can Dr. King be thinking?”
Simply put, King thought that unchecked racism, militarism and poverty posed a direct threat to the existence of the human race. It was this perspective that drew him to Memphis, to support a group of men whose relationship with their employer seemed as if it had been ripped from the pages of a previous century. Called to work with a plantation bell, paid starvation wages and fired on a whim, sanitation workers represented the nearest thing to an “untouchable” class in the city. But they were also increasingly fed up with the city’s antebellum treatment. After they decided to stand and fight for better wages, the right to organize and their very manhood, they asked King to join them, and he did. So, in March of 1968, he brought publicity and star power to their movement. He helped to nationalize their plight.
Of course, King brought a lot of things with him to Memphis for what would be his final campaign. He brought the titanic pressures of national leadership, pathological harassment by the FBI and the specter of his own mortality. He attracted Black Power advocates who openly mocked his leadership and attempted to consign nonviolent direct action to a bygone era. But more importantly, he brought with him a bedrock assurance that the universe was morally ordered, and that there was in fact a deep, abiding relationship between power, justice and love. King, the hard-nosed political realist, also brought with him the realization that coercion represented one of the crucial variables in the calculus of liberation. He knew, in his bones, that Frederick Douglass was right about the fact that power conceded nothing without a demand. He brought the knowledge that every ounce of freedom won in his lifetime was the product of prayerful, deliberative struggle. He brought an enduring, ever-deepening confidence in the power of redemptive nonviolence to transform the human condition. He brought with him the prophetic hope that America would one day live up to the high principles it set for itself at the Founding and in the wake of Civil War. History, King believed, charted an upward path.
Forty years ago this Friday, the nation’s pre-eminent moral voice fell silent for the last time. As in years past, we will run the risk of celebrating the man by reducing him to a few familiar sound bites, perhaps a video or two. However, as we reflect on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy this weekend, let us remember him in his context. Let’s confront the uncomfortable and perpetually uncompleted journeys he dared us all to take. Have we kept each other accountable for our mutual betterment? Have we done everything we can to make our democracy as vibrant and inclusive as possible? Do our houses of worship speak truth to power, or have they become the “irrelevant social clubs” that King warned us they could become?
Finally, let us remember the beautifully complex, conflicted and hopeful young man whose full potential – like that of our country – had yet to be fully realized.
posted by The Detective at
7:19 PM
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