Speech for Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration

January 20, 2003

Bridgewater College

By Jim Josefson

Martin Luther King Jr. is today acknowledged as one of the great leaders of the 20^th century and honored with a national holiday because he represents for most people a particular conception of America and American values. This conception portrays America as a “melting pot” or great gumbo (pick your metaphor), a place where people of various creeds, colors and nations can put aside their differences and unite in a common nation with a common set of values centered on individualism, freedom, equality before the law, and democracy. I want to start by discussing this conception and question whether it accurately reflects the legacy and message of Martin King. Then I want to turn to consider elements of the life and thought of King that do not fit in to this national consensus on what King’s life meant, on what King stood for and stands for.

I’m encouraged to take this tact because of the recent controversy surrounding Senator Trent Lott’s comments that "if the rest of the country had followed our lead [in voting for the segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond in the 1948 presidential election] we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years." The debate about Lott’s comments seemed to turn on whether Senator Lott did in fact favor repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and returning legal segregation to state law. This strikes me as both unfair to Senator Lott and letting him off the hook way to easy. For surely, returning to segregation is not what Lott had in mind when he made the remark. Rather, the interesting part is to locate what Lott means by “all these problems over all these years”. What are these problems, or better who is the problem? Well the context of praising Senator Thurmond’s Dixiecrat campaign suggests that “these problems” are those brought on us by folks like Dr. King, those folks who stood for the opposite of what Thurmond stood for in 1948—advocates for racial equality. Lott’s “problems over all these years” is the problem of equality. Thus, Senator Lott’s comments suggest that even if segregation isn’t the answer to these problems, the effort to secure black equality, the mission and legacy of Dr. King, is the source of many of our national problems. This is a thesis that I would have liked to see being debated in this country, and it is a sad missed opportunity that it wasn’t. Instead, Lott’s fall represents the final seal on a national consensus that segregation was wrong, and I have to wonder: this is a tremendous legacy that we owe in large measure to Martin King, but is that really all he stood for? Formal legal equality? Or would he be here asking, “who or what is the problem- you or us?” And “do you really want to move on past the question of integration versus segregation- to addressing what does equality mean and if we don’t have it (which we obviously don’t) how do we get it?” If these are the questions King asked, then talking about King on his day just in terms of being for equal rights strikes me as a great betrayal. Remember that a Martin Luther King Day was something that took many years to get, and many prominent politicians opposed it- many are still around today. They did not oppose it because King stood for equal rights and the Dream of Children of all races holding hands and playing rin around the rosy, but because they thought King was a dangerous radical. I want to affirm tonight that they were right. Not about giving him his day, but about him being a dangerous radical. I want to remind us of the radicalism of Martin Luther King, Jr. tonight.

But before I turn to that theme, let me say a little about the integrationist King, the King of the melting pot. The King whose Dream was a society united by its embrace of diversity and democracy. The melting pot idea of America, of an America where people of various creeds, colors and nations can put aside their differences and unite in a common nation with a common set of values centered on individualism, freedom, equality before the law, and democracy is part of a firm consensus. Today it is hard to imagine an America for which this is not a consensus, and yet it is a very new idea. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which enforced desegregation of American public education, accommodations, and employment, is only 39 years old this year. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which mandated the registration and protected the voting of black voters by Federal Marshals is only 38 years old. And the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which ensured equal access to housing is only one year older than I am, a tender 33. Considering time for these acts to be implemented legal equality in America, regardless of race is younger than I am. Those of you who weren’t present at the birth of this new America, are at least involved in nursing her in what is only her infancy.

The results of this “new birth of freedom” were dramatic and relatively quick: between 1964 and 1975 the number of black voters increased from 2 million to 3.8 million. In Mississippi, black voter registration increased from 6.7% to 67.4%. By 1975 the number of black elected officials in the South had increased to 1,913, more than the rest of the nation put together. Further progress has been reached since then.[i] Add to this the fact that the Civil Rights Movement inspired other liberation movements for women, young people, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals and you can see how far we have come. And seeing how far we’ve come so recently should cause us to realize that our sacred conception of American democracy is not just our inheritance from the Founding Fathers of 1776 or 1789, nor our inheritance from the Great liberation struggle of the Civil War. Rather it is a legacy of those who fought, and in some cases died, for freedom in the 1950s and 1960s. If we appreciate this fact then we will come to realize that the leaders of these Movements are in a very real sense just as much if not more our Founding Fathers. As Martin Luther King Jr. was the foremost of these civil rights leaders, it is entirely appropriate to remember him on HIS DAY as a Founding Father of the first order, equal in rank to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. His legacy should be remembered in speech, and words, and granite and marble with theirs.

But let me now turn from the King of our political consensus to the dangerous King-- the King that was thought to be so dangerous that the FBI sought to undermine and discredit him for his entire career as a leader. To keep it real about Martin Luther King Jr., you need to see how his radical refounding of America as a country open to religious, ethnic and racial pluralism was based on a radical doctrine of Christian love, one that eventually led him in an even more radical direction that challenges the political consensus we often claim King represents.

The core of King’s radicalism, what made him especially dangerous, was his commitment to take seriously the injunction of Jesus Christ in John 13: 34-- “love one another”. For King, in Christianity all humanity is united in having equal status before God. This is expressed most powerfully in the Christian doctrine of salvation, the idea that God’s love for individual people, expressed through the crucifixion of Jesus, is both the model and price for a universal community of believers united by their love for God and one another. King thought it was his duty as a Christian to work to build this loving community, what he called the “beloved community” through social movements of non-violence. Thus non-violent civil disobedience to overturn segregation in the 1950s and 1960s was more to King than simply claiming the Constitution’s guarantees of equality under the law; it was a mass exercise of the ethic of love that would persuade all Americans to create a society governed not only by laws but by loving justice.[ii]

King’s commitment to the beloved community was especially important in an environment of conflict that bred rioting and Black Nationalism. King never appealed to a black identity or even a Christian identity but to a common human identity. Blacks, King argued, should develop race pride, but this sense of black identity was always that blacks were equal to or fundamentally the same as whites.[iii] For King black identity represented a distinct culture formed by the creative black response to American racism. But this identity had the status of a cultural tradition, like being a Jewish or Swedish American. One gets the sense that for King integration will be achieved when Kwanza has a similar status as St. Patrick’s Day. King’s commitment to human equality is best revealed by his difficulty understanding those within the civil rights movement like Stokely Carmichael (the late Kwame Ture) of SNCC, when they began to question non-violence and the equal status of whites within the movement. In Where Do We Go From Here?, King recounts Carmicheal’s defense of the slogan “Black Power” as an appeal to the kind of racial solidarity that had been successful for Jews or the Irish. King responded by claiming such solidarity was accomplished by other groups through working within the social and economic system to amass political and economic power, not just by asserting group power. For King, the assertion of black power in any positive sense amounted to the claim that blacks were worthy of equal rights and respect. He worried that Carmichael’s sense of black power flirted with a nihilistic assertion of force that amounted to a rejection of King’s ethic of love.[iv]

So if King represented a voice restraining Black nationalism and radicalism, what is so radical about him? First, King radically challenged the central idea of the political philosophy of the American status quo: the idea that social change should happen only incrementally through the activities of individuals pursuing their selfish interests in the marketplace and through their private dealings. This is still the essence of American conservativism: individualism and the marketplace of capitalism. King’s vision of the beloved community questioned this conservatism in a radical way by offering a communal ethic of love to replace competitive individualism. Furthermore, King strove for social change through communal social activism rather than individual action. He worked through organizations- the church, and civil rights organizations like SCLC to mobilize people into social action- in efforts to remake the American nation through reason and love. The idea that Americans could come together as citizens and together claim power from those who hold it is a kind of radicalism that could get you branded as a dangerous communist by J. Edgar Hoover. Perhaps it could today.

King never abandoned his dedication to non-violence and the beloved community despite extreme pressures from black nationalists and whites. But opposition to his vision of a beloved community from white racism further radicalized King. There was a national consensus by the mid 1960s (as there is now) to end formal legal segregation like the civil right movement fought in the South, but when King tried to go the further step of mobilizing people to combat barriers to substantive equality such as red-lining, discriminatory provision of city services, de facto segregation in slums and ghettos, more and better public housing, and better education for both children and adults (barriers to equality that exist even now) he met stiff resistance (as is still the case). When King went to Chicago as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1965 and 1966 the tactics of non-violent protests that had worked in the South seemed to do nothing but cause schism within the social movement and mobilize white resistance. In the end King had to sign a pact with Mayor Daley to end the Movement’s marches that King recognized did little to address the problem of inequality.

With this failure King became convinced the successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the South had only come (even with great difficulty) because they did not fundamentally cost the majority of white Americans anything. It was, after all, Southerners and not Northerners who be forced to deal with Blacks as equals and sit on busses and at lunch counters with them. Thus the end of desegregation left the underlying causes of black inequality undisturbed- the vast unequal distribution of wealth, income, and political power. But challenging this material inequality set King more at odds with the political status quo than ever. I think it is still at odds with it. King concluded that inequality was a direct product of the American capitalist system. As he said in November of 1966, “You can’t talk about ending slums without first seeing that profit must be taken out of the slums. You’re really getting on dangerous grounds because you are messing with folks then. You are messing with Wall Street. You are messing with the captains of industry.” Addressing the problems of black inequality thus required, for King, “a restructuring of the architecture of American society” along the lines of something like the Swedish model of democratic socialism. King wasn’t sure how this would look, but he did conclude the “God never intended for some of his children to live in inordinate superfluous wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty”.[v]

Thus the last acts of Kings career were radical acts of opposing the status quo in the name of pursuing racial equality and justice for all. For instance, King came out as a strong voice for non-violence in international affairs in his opposition to the Vietnam War. The last campaign of his SCLC was a national cross-race alliance to expose the conditions of poverty in America, called the “Poor People’s Campaign” that would culminate in the creation of a gathering of the poor from across America in a gerry-rigged shantytown in Washington, a tactic modeled on the Bonus Marchers campaign after WWI. The Poor People’s campaign would lobby congress, demonstrate and draw attention to the plight of America’s poor. King was only taking time out of this campaign to join another movement of the working poor, a campaign to create a sanitation workers’ union in Memphis Tennessee when he was tragically shot. The poor people’s march on Washington went ahead, but we tend to remember the King of the 1963 march, the King of the I have a dream speech, and not this one.

Thus a full picture of King has to see him as a radical committed to social justice and equality for all Americans. Thus even as we recognize tonight King’s tremendous accomplishment as one of our Founding Fathers, the leader to whom, more than anyone, we owe our current vision of America as dedicated to E. Pluribus Unum, the creation of one nation devoted to finding strength and unity through equality and diversity, we need to recognize that his Dream remains unfulfilled. Racial equality is still a problem. Now, I don’t think you have to agree with King’s vision of democratic socialism as the answer to this problem, but if you agree with Senator Lott’s imputation that the push for racial equality has brought more problems than it was worth, then we have a problem. And we have a problem if you don’t think equality and justice for all remains the signal goal of American democracy. Pursuing that goal was King’s Dream. Let us take his day as the opportunity to rededicate ourselves to achieving that dream. How will we do it? I don’t know but let me suggest the way forward is suggested by King’s radicalism: the love of a beloved community and the creation of social movements, organizing, to push for democratic social change.