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MLK Failed, Make Way For MLK

MLK Failed, Make Way For MLK

Last updated on: January 17, 2017 at 1:23 am by Tom Swiss

MLK Failed, Make Way For MLK 2017-01-17T01:23:41-04:00 Tom Swiss

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The weekend before the federal observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, one of the top stories on the Washington Post was the release of a video showing police in a Chicago suburb brutally assaulting a black man they suspected of stealing a car — his own car. Unsurprisingly (at least those those of us following this issue), police say the thugs with badges who committed the attack were “in compliance with our procedures”.

As we consider how we live in a country where state violence against African-Americans is commonplace, and how the incoming President of the United States relied on the support of white nationalist dingbats during his campaign, it may be time to admit that the sort of civil rights advocacy that Martin Luther King was known for has failed to bring about racial equality.

So I’d like to talk about a different civil rights leader.

I want to talk about the socialist who understood the intersectionality of race and class, and who rather than getting stuck in identity politics worked across the color line for “a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life”; the strident anti-war activist who understood that the United States government was often a force for violence and evil, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”; the man who advocated peaceful protest but never denied the right of self-defense, who wrote that “When the Negro uses force in self-defense, he does not forfeit support — he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects.”[Cobb, 112]

I’m talking, of course, about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons

But this MLK is not the safely hagiographied character of our self-congratulatory history books, not the one from the story about how “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up and then the white folks saw the light and saved the day” (as Julian Bond put it). Not the one invoked to often by those in power and privilege as a sort of soporific to keep the rabble from rising up.

They portray King as a some sort of magician, who single-handedly won the civil rights struggle — as one Baltimore slam poet put it, if you have three black men in a history book, they are Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King, and Martin Luther King. It’s convenient for the powerful to deny the effect of mass action, and focus on leaders — then they only need to keep leaders from arising. And to discourage the oppressed from protecting themselves, they portray King as an idealist who completely opposed the use of force in all circumstances, ignoring his own history of gun ownership, his understanding of the difference between armed protest and carrying arms in self-defense[Cobb, 225-226], and his willingness to work with armed groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

They certainly don’t talk about his anti-capitalism; while you will hear “I Have A Dream” every MLK Day, you will never hear these lines from his final speech to the SCLC: “One day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?… When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” You will not hear about his advocacy of democratic socialism, or about his plan for a “Poor People’s Campaign” to occupy the National Mall and demand economic justice.

And his opposition to American aggression in Vietnam is an absolutely forbidden topic. His words are sadly just as true and relevant today, we just need to substitute in our current military adventures:

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

This is the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Martin Luther King, Jr. we need to remember and commemorate; not just a civil rights activist but a man who could see and explicate the universals of human experience and defend the dignity of all. And it is the MLK that the powerful — including, ironically, our war criminal first African-American President — cannot abide.

Thus the annual emphasis on “service” each year. Certainly volunteering for a day to serve your fellow humans who are in need is a fine thing, but King called for us to look at the whole structure of society and fix it so that it would not keep people in need. I am reminded of Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara’s famous observation, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”

So if you have the day off and choose to devote it to helping the poor, that’s all well and good. Just make sure to honor Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. by spending some time thinking about why they are poor. Because understanding the deliberate structure of poverty is the key to understanding how racism is used by those in power to keep people apart, and what we must do to work for a just and peaceful world.

References to Cobb are to Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

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