Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 30: Why time doesn't solve social and political problems

"We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right." - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963)

For the last of this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, I've picked an incident that illustrates a narrative strategy used in supporting slavery that proved very enduring.

It comes from William Cost Johnson, who in 1840 was a Whig Congressman from Maryland, an Upper South slave state. William Freehling in The Road to Disunion, Vol 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990) writes about Johnson's position in one part of the debate about the "gag rule," which Congress adopted to decline formal consideration of antislavery petitions from constituents at that time (specifically, the petitions were tabled indefinitely):

Johnson charged abolitionists with delaying "abolition in Maryland at least a century." Without outside agitation, inside reformers might "have gradually and quietly terminated" the temporary evil. He could not say how much longer Africans would now be "held in servitude." But he could say that black savages, arriving in America "little superior to the orangutan," had "become civilized, humanized, and christianized" under· the Domestic Institution. "Philanthropists" were sending back to the Dark Continent "a changed being, with a knowledge of law, moral, and religious duty." Someday, returning ex-slaves may "change the nature of their own wild race at home, and make all Africa a land of civil and religious liberty."

If you protest against a social evil, you only make it worse!

Over a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a contemporary version of this argument (Letter from a Birmingham Jail 04/16/1963). That letter was " was written in response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South." (Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'Letter From Birmingham Jail' The Atlantic 04/16/2013). King wrote:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." ...

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative. ...

Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation. ...

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. ...

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. ...

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. [my emphasis]

After the Civil War, the Lost Cause defenders of past slavery argued in retrospect that if the "fanatical" Abolitionists had not pushed to end slavery, the magic force of time would have ended slavery peacefully and perhaps even sooner. That was nonsense, of course.

For those who feel some stake in an existing order that is oppressive, or are deeply committed to maintaining their indifference, demands for change will always come too soon.

Freehling also notes that Johnson was nominally an opponent to slavery, favoring the gradual emancipation approach to end slavery in the State of Maryland, by state action. But he was also very much a defender of the pro-slavery states' rights position. And, like the gradual emancipation in earlier years, around the time of the 1920 Missouri Compromise we previously discussed, he was also a supporter of colonization, i.e., getting even free blacks out of Maryland and (presumably) all of the US. In the 1840 Congressional debate from which he is quoted above, Johnson was arguing in favor of a more strict gag rule against antislavery petitions.

And the pro- and antislavery narratives were evolving quickly. And as we've seen in earlier posts, the Missouri crisis of 1819-20 marked an important turning point in that evolution. Thomas Jefferson's long-held gradual emancipation position in 1820 could still represent a serious antislavery position, however inadequate it was. In 1840, it looked a lot different. Although it may well be that William Cost Johnson sincerely opposed slavery in Maryland just as he sincerely wanted no black people remaining there.

It's also worth noting that slavery was abolished in Maryland was abolished in 1864, when it had been a pro-Union slave state up until that time in the Civil War. Like the other states where slavery was still legal in 1840, it took the Civil War to abolish it.

That gradual emancipation that Johnson claimed in 1840 would inevitably come in time never came. As King put it, "time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. ... Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation."

Martin Luther King, Jr. on economic inequality

This clip from The Young Turks, Why Conservatives Hate This Fact About MLK 01/20/2014, talks about the present-day implications of what Martin Luther King, Jr. had to say on economic inequality:

Tags: inequality, martin luther king jr., militarism, white racism

MLK Day 2014

For MLK Day, this is the famous Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam of 04/30/2014

The text is available from Pacifica Radio and UC Berkeley.

The fight against militarism contains. As does the fight for voting rights. Ben Mankiewicz reports for The Young Turks in The Fight For Voting Rights Continues 01/20/2014:

Joan Walsh writes about how important it is to get beyond the goody-two-shoes image of King that has become standard for the mainstream media in The radical MLK we need today Salon 01/20/2014:

King and [Nelson] Mandela had much in common, but one thing stands out this week: As they were lionized globally, both were deradicalized, pasteurized and homogenized, made safe for mass consumption. Each was in favor of a radical redistribution of global wealth. Each crusaded against poverty and inequality and war. Both did it with an equanimity and ebullience and capacity to forgive and love their enemies that made it easy to canonize them in a secular way. White people love being given the benefit of the doubt and/or being forgiven. I speak from experience. ...

King was always a radical, but at the end of his life, he was something of an outcast, criticized by liberals, the left and the right.

Forget about the right, for now: King crossed some Democrats and labor leaders when he turned against the Vietnam War in 1967, after his unparalleled Riverside Church speech. He knew the war was not only wrong, but was making Johnson’s alleged “War on Poverty” fiscally impossible. Meanwhile a growing black power movement mocked King’s commitment to nonviolence and integration. Even some close allies in the civil rights movement blanched when he joined Marion Wright Edelman and other organizers to start a Poor People's Campaign later that year – a movement of black, white, Latino, American Indian and Asian people mired in poverty, to fight the war and get the help they deserved. They were to march on Washington and set up a camp there in April 1968, the month King was assassinated.

Of course, to anyone reasonably in touch with reality, President Obama is anything but a radical. But Joan uses his recent rhetorical stress on income inequality to frame her point:

We are ready for the radical King now. President Obama, perhaps belatedly, has declared income inequality "the defining issue of our time." Even poverty seems back on the agenda. The man who may be doing the most to advance these issues right now isn’t a politician or a rabble rouser; it’s Pope Francis, who’s been hailed by everyone from Obama to Paul Ryan (Ryan gets him wrong) as helping us make the issue of poverty central to our politics. “If Dr. King were alive today, he would be in Rome visiting Pope Francis holding a joint press conference to summoning the world to aid the poor eradicate poverty,” Clarence Jones says. The president promises he’s going to the Vatican to meet the new pope, and that's a start.

Tags: inequality, martin luther king jr., militarism, white racism

Obama and white racism in America

The symbolism of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, who is preparing to blow up a bunch of Syrians to demonstrates his macho Credibility, celebrating the anti-militarist protester and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech yesterday was jarring enough.

He added to the incongruity by saying this:

And then, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us claiming to push for change lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways, as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support -- as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself.

I apparently wasn't the only who for whom that passage sounded like Obama throwing something is as a sop to the people who hate his guts and always will. He just can't seem to help himself.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's generally an Obama loyalist, writes in On the Death of Dreams Atlantic Online 08/29/2013:

Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. ... Barack Obama believes that these people have a point. [my emphasis]

Coates is actually going beyond seeing it as a sop to white racists. He thinks Obama actually believes in this posture.

Chauncey DeVega in Why? Barack Obama Decides to Publicly Scold Black Americans (Again) During His March on Washington Anniversary Speech WARN 08/29/2013 makes a similar point, "Barack Obama is in his second and final term. He does not need to worry about being reelected."

In other words, he doesn't have any particular reason to be saying stuff like this, and on an occasion like yesterday's, if he doesn't actually believe it. DeVega:

History is his most important audience now.

Will President Obama be remembered as the country’s first Black President? Or alternatively, will Obama be remembered as a President who happened to be black? This is a subtle distinction; it is also very important as we attempt to locate Barack Obama relative to the long Black Freedom Struggle and the Civil Rights Movement.

Barack Obama's speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s "I have a Dream Speech" would seem to suggest that he is more comfortable with the second title. Ultimately, Barack Obama's public scolding of Black Americans is not being done for some short-term political goal, i.e. to win a presidential election by having an obligatory for Democratic candidates "Sister Souljah" moment. Given his habit of publicly calling out black folks' perceived and imagined cultural and moral failings, on some level, Obama must believe such things to be true. [my emphasis]

The long-deceased Nobel Peace Prize winner King, on the other hand, was willing to challenge white racism directly. From his speech that has been idolized and trivialized as the "I Have A Dream Speech," he said:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This; is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality - 1963 is not an end but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

Even in a short excerpt like this, the radical - and radical is the right word - difference between Obama's and MLK's perspective is evident. Obama often used the phrase "the fierce urgency of now" in his 2008 campaign for the Presidency. But it didn't seem to have much more content for him than voting for his election.

And think of the people to whom Obama was conceding by throwing in his churlish, scolding paragraph against black people yesterday, the FOX News addicts and the Rush Limbaugh fans. How did they or their equivalents at the time react in 1963 to a line like, "Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual"?

Easy to answer: the same way they react to Obama today, no matter how mildly and "bipartisan" the way he expresses things. But King was willing to get in their face and call them on their nonsense. Obama is more inclined to conciliate them by repeating it.

Also from King's 1963 speech:

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of onr nation until the bright days of justice emerge.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression ...

I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification ...

By contrast, Obama speaks in the way Chauncey DeVega describes:

... while Obama wants action on the part of black folks to improve themselves, there is no equivalent demand that white people take responsibility for white racism.

The President's March on Washington anniversary speech is a crystallization of the price of admission Barack Obama paid in order to become the country’s first black Chief Executive.

For example, Obama talks in broad and inclusive ways about the racial progress made in America, while continuing to remind the public of the work that remains — all the while not proposing any race specific solutions to these problems.

Obama avoids talking about the particular struggles and concerns of the African-American community because in his own words, he is "the president of all Americans."

And the country’s first black president publicly scolds African-Americans, with the sum effect being to legitimate a narrative and logic that black and brown folks somehow share in the responsibility for how white racism, both structural and inter-personal, has negatively impacted people of color's life chances.

Tags: barack obama, civil rights movement, martin luther king jr., syria, white racism

Segregation 2.0 and income inequality

"While outright race-based segregation in schools was banned, in reality, educational segregation has worsened in recent decades, as Gary Orfield and other scholars have documented." Joseph Stiglitz, How Dr. King Shaped My Work in Economics New York Times 08/27/2013

The end of officially-sponsored school segregation in the South was a milestone in the dismantling of the Segregation 1.0 (Jim Crow) system. Formally racially segregated schools were official institutions promoting, teaching and literally embodying the separation of the races. It was the Brown v. Board of Education decision on segregated public schools that put Segregation 1.0 into its long, final defensive phase. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was more central, because denial of the vote to African-American citizens was the real political core of the segregation system. But the end of school segregation forced whites in the South, and somewhat later in other sections of the country, to confront the changed realities in their lived experience in a new way.

I'm modest about my ability to declare new eras as having begun. But whether Segregation 2.0 is beginning, impending or already a well-established reality, it's here for the United States. The Segregation Five of the Roberts Supreme Court have gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The Republicans are escalating rapidly on voter suppression measures. Some of the rulings of the Supreme Court in recent years have may have effectively eliminated the practical force of the Brown decision. And, as Stiglitz points out, de facto racial segregation of schools in on the rise.

As he and others have been careful to point out, the famous "I Have A Dream" march whose anniversary we've been celebrating was called the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." Martin Luther King was intensely aware that class injustice was intimately connected with racial discrimination and put that reality at the center of his message.

Stiglitz in his piece talks about how his involvement in the civil rights movement lead him to become an economist and to specialize in problems of distribution:

It was because I hoped that something could be done about these and the other problems I had seen so vividly growing up in Gary, Ind. — poverty, episodic and persistent unemployment, unending discrimination against African-Americans — that I decided to become an economist, veering away from my earlier intention to go into theoretical physics. I soon discovered I had joined a strange tribe. While there were a few scholars (including several of my teachers) who cared deeply about the issues that had led me to the field, most were unconcerned about inequality; the dominant school worshiped at the feet of (a misunderstood) Adam Smith, at the miracle of the efficiency of the market economy. I thought that if this was the best of all possible worlds, I wanted to construct and live in another world.

In that odd world of economics, unemployment (if it existed) was the fault of workers. One Chicago School economist, the Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr., would later write: "Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution." Another Nobel laureate of the Chicago School, Gary S. Becker, would attempt to show how in truly competitive labor markets discrimination couldn’t exist. While I and others wrote multiple papers explaining the sophistry in the argument, his was an argument that fell on receptive ears.

Like so many looking back over the past 50 years, I cannot but be struck by the gap between our aspirations then and what we have accomplished.

Rick Perlstein has been quoted several places I've seen for his perceptive comment on the neutralizing of King's image by turning him into a plastic saint: "Frankly, Martin Luther King had to be forgotten before he could be remembered." (See Joan Walsh, The right's outrageous MLK ignorance Salon 08/28/2013)

Fortunately, like with other leaders that played an important role in pushing democracy forward, trying to redefine them into harmless, vaguely inspirational figures is a tricky business. Some people growing up hearing their conservative families and the political leaders they follow talk about King's "content of their character" speech with the present-day conservative spin will actually look one of these days to understand more of what King was about. They will be surprised to see what the plaster saint of conservative mythology who was opposed to any and all laws to prevent racial discrimination actually had to say!

But the world doesn't stand still. And Segregation 2.0 is just as much a plague against democracy as the 1.0 Jim Crow version was.

Joan Walsh has a moment of liberal guilt about comparing Obama as President to King as civil rights leader. But then she goes ahead and does it anyway:

I admit, during this commemorative week, I've come to think it's wrong for white people in particular to deploy King as a weapon against our first black president. It simplifies the context in which both men have had to struggle, against staggering odds. It cheapens them, and us – especially on this day. History will no doubt compare them, but historians will have more information and more wisdom than we have today. Obama is the president, of everyone, charged with advancing liberty and justice as well as keeping us safe. He has disappointed me, profoundly at times, but I will not find him wanting, at least not today.

Still, were he alive, I have no doubt but that King would still be marching. He got a holiday after he was silenced; had he never been silenced, I'm not so sure he'd have gotten a holiday, because he would have kept pushing us, all of us, to live up to our highest ideals.

I actually think the comparison between the two Nobel Peace Prize winners is especially relevant right now. The living one is getting ready to launch an act of undeclared war against Syria, a country that has not attacked the United States. The long-decreased one was a very sharp critic of American militarism in general and its Vietnam War manifestation in particular.

Here's the living Nobel Peace Prize winner on Wednesday, Obama at March Anniversary: Goals of Economic Opportunity Have Fallen Short 08/28/2013:

Here is the other Nobel Peace Prize winner talking about the Vietnam War, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. - April 4, 1967 - Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence [Full Speech]:

Tags: civil rights movement, martin luther king jr., syria, vietnam war, white racism

MLK in 1965

Martin Luther King Jr. on NBC's Meet the Press in 1965:

This 1965 interview with Martin Luther King, Jr. is a reminder that TV journalism was once journalism. And also a warning not picture the 1960s as some Golden Age of TV journalism. It's pretty obvious that the questions were more focused on the elements of excitement and fashionable Washington Beltway topics than on policy substance. But the Beltway priorities in topics were more sensible than what we see today.

With David Gregory on 2031's version of Meet the Press, they would have given King about half the screen time. And Dancin' Dave would have questioned him about the latest rumor about an affair he might be having, proceeded to ask him to speculate on the effect his movement would have on the next Presidential election horse race, played some "gotcha" clip of him saying something five years before that sounds superficially different from what he's saying now, and closed by asking him to speculate on how gangsta rap might be affecting African-American youth.

The thing that strikes me in particular is that King was able to define what were radical political tactics in the then-existing context in terms that were accessible to the average person. He used inclusive religious language, for instance, talking about the moral order. And he was willing to challenge the apathy and jibe the moral conscience of white citizens in Alabama who did have the right to vote and who were mostly sitting back in approval as George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan were running wild.

The right to vote was a central concern for him in this interview, though he insisted that other situations like "police brutality" were as degrading and humiliating to black citizens as denial of the right to vote.

He stressed the need to fight poverty with public policy.

James Kilpatrick, a staunch defender of segregation, is one of journalists interviewing King. Also included is Tom Wicker, who despite a liberal reputation certainly seemed to be asking probing questions requiring King to defend his positions.

King describes his Ghandian concept of defying unjust laws, including the willing to accept the legal penalty for violating an unjust law in order to appeal to the conscience of the nation. He refers to the Boston Tea Party as a prime example of civil disobedience - which I would not, involved the deliberate destruction of property. (Without getting into it further here, I agree with Daniel Ellsberg that Edward Snowden was right to leave the country in his case. Snowden was not practicing Ghandian civil disobedience, he was leaking vital information about government wrongdoing.)

It's notable that King also recognizes that the court system can be a key weapon of oppression and illegality. He uses the term "reign of terror" to describe the conditions under George Wallace's gubernatorial administration in Alabama at the time. And he calls Alabama "a society that has refused to protect life and the right to vote."

At around 22:30, he says, Realism impels me to admit, however, that when there is justice and the pursuit of justice, violence disappears. And where there is injustice and frustration, the potentialities for violence are greater."

King was not an advocate of political violence. But he also didn't shrink from discussing the realities of violence, including violence generating by brutal social conditions imposed on entire communities, at that time.

In a helpful article that JSTOR has apparently made generally available, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" in Context: Ceremonial Protest and African
American Jeremiad College English 62:1 (Sept 1999), Elizabeth Vander Lei and Keith Miller discuss King's use of the rhetorical device of the jeremiad in his most famous speech:

In a jeremiad, the speaker adopts the stance of a prophet-outcast, evoking Old and New Testament prophets such as Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist. These prophets went into the wilderness to discern God's voice and returned to communicate that message to the rest of the community. In African American jeremiads, the speaker signals this position of alienation through metaphor and scriptural allusion rather than through social isolation.

The rhetorical structure of African American jeremiads is threefold: a consideration of the freedom promises in America's founding documents, a detailed criticism of America's failure to fulfill this promise, and a prophecy that America will achieve its promised greatness and enjoy unparalleled happiness.

King was experienced in using religious language that was inclusive and inspiring, including Biblical references that were presumably somewhat more familiar to the average American in 1963 than today. And he could make moral appeals situated in familiar patriotic and American historical symbolism.

King was a protester. He was trying to make people uncomfortable, to challenge them to see their daily reality in a new way. But this wasn't just some generic personality quirk. He was protesting the institutions of white racism. He wanted to make people uncomfortable about the denial of rights to black Americans. He wanted to challenge people to see that poverty was a problem for all of society, not just for the people directly affected at a given moment.

Vander Lei and Miller also write:

The first structural element of a jeremiad, a consideration of the freedom promises in America's founding documents, relies on standard citations from these documents, the so-called sacred texts of American civil religion: the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Long before the Emancipation Proclamation, African American abolitionists claimed the bright American promise by soaking their discourse in the Bible and by citing the Declaration of Independence (especially the phrase "all men are created equal"), a document which they sometimes conflated with the Constitution. For example, in 1813 African American James Forten cited Thomas Jefferson's affirmation that "all men are created equal" to argue the equality of all races, including "the Peruvian and the Laplander, the white man and the African". Leading white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in the first issue of The Liberator, contended that this phrase called for the immediate end to slavery. In fact, upon analyzing a large sample of abolitionist rhetoric, Celeste Condit and John Lucaites discovered that one-third of the documents they examined referred directly to the promises contained in the Declaration of Independence.

This is why I use Andrew Jackson at this blog as a symbol of progressive democracy. Not because he right on all his major policies; his Indian policy was bad by the standards of his own time. But because he was an important symbol for the movement of Jacksonian democracy that expanded democracy, strengthened national unity on the basis of a commitment to democracy, and developed new forms of grassroots political organizing that benefited labor, Abolitionists and Native American activists, often going far beyond the measures that Jackson himself championed.

And this is why that I not only want to see history done right, in both its professional and amateur versions, but I also want to make sure that we distinguish the constructive, democratic, progressive aspects of what actually happened in real history from the backward, reactionary and destructive aspects.

Symbolic celebrations and applications of historical imagery are not the same as writing history. But they are a very real and important part of politics and how Americans understand our national identity, however vague a concept that may be. I'm not willing to leave the progressive aspects of American history to be distorted, denied or forgotten by conservatives and reactionaries. The Christian Right does not "own" American history and neither does the Republican Party. (These days I suppose it's redundant to distinguish the Christian Right and the Republicans.)

As we see in the interview above, the real existing Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to speak in moral and patriotic terms that effectively framed his issues and were easily accessible to his American listeners of all races. And, yes, he was willing to make some white people angry and to shame them over segregation and white racism.

Tags: civil rights movement, martin luther king jr., white racism

Martin Luther King, Jr. copyrights

Here are a couple of pieces that talk about the controversies over legal rights to historical material relating to Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Rebecca Burns, Interview: Bernice King (includes introductory article) Atlanta Magazine (Aug 2013)

Lauren Williams, I Have a Copyright: The Problem With MLK's Speech Mother Jones 08/23/2013

Burns:

The copyright enterprise — the estate King Inc., and Intellectual Properties Management, which licenses King’s works and image — has been managed for years by Dexter, the younger son, a sometime actor and producer who lives in Los Angeles. While most Americans may believe MLK belongs to history, the tangible stuff he left behind—books, recordings, letters, and indeed his very likeness—remains the property of his heirs. For instance, the family holds the copyright to King's "I Have a Dream" speech through 2038; if a news outlet wants to rebroadcast the speech in its entirety, the fee is at least $1,700. The King monument, a thirty-foot sculpture of the preacher carved out of granite in Washington, D.C., cost private benefactors and taxpayers $120 million; a portion of the cost — $800,000 — went to Intellectual Properties Management for the license to MLK’s crossed-arm likeness and to inscribe his quotes on the statue’s base.

Bernice, King's daughter who is also a minister, has this to say in the interview about her parents:

My father was one of the most hated men in America in 1968 when he was assassinated, and now you can look around forty-five years later and he is one of the most loved men in the world. And you could say that different things contributed to that, but I think the main factor was the steadfastness and devotion and dedication and sacrificial commitment of my mother to carry on his work after his assassination.

Williams writes on the copyright controversies:

Due to the well-known lawsuits against news organizations and other smaller legal scuffles, King's children have a reputation for maintaining a level of control over their father's legacy that is rigorous at best and avaricious at worst. Critics, including civil rights icon Julian Bond, bristle over the fact that "I Have a Dream" is kept under strict watch in the name of controlling King's image at the same time it's licensed by rich companies for use in TV commercials, including a 2010 Mercedes-Benz spot, an Alcatel ad, and a particularly galling 2001 Cingular Wireless campaign that also included quotes from Kermit the Frog and Homer Simpson.

Representatives from the King family did not respond to requests for comment, but in the 2007 book Children of the Movement, King's son, Martin Luther King III, denied that he and his siblings are trying to profit from their father's image and said that there are numerous licensing requests that they reject. But they are forever haunted by comparisons to their dad, who eschewed personal wealth. "My father gave away everything," he said. "He didn't worry about money. People expect us to be like him." But the issue for copyright reform advocates, historians, and journalists is not so much whether the King family is making money, but how to negotiate the general sense that the works and image of King have such an educational and historical resonance - particularly on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington-—-that it seems preposterous that the copyright on his speech is so strictly enforced.

Tags: martin luther king jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Vietnam War

MLK, Jr.: "A man of conscience cannot be a consensus leader." (From Part 2 below) The civil rights leader was not a devotee of what we now know as High Broderism, the worship of bipartisanship and "moderation" as the highest values in public life - especially when it means liberals going along with conservatives.

The third part of this three-part set of videos has King talking about his philosophy of militant nonviolence. His approach was pacifist, not passive.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



King definitely did not see his mission as one to comfort the comfortable.

Tags: martin luther king jr., vietnam war

MLK, Jr.: Discomforting the comfortable since 1956

Bob Somerby started making his case in his 09/03/2010 Daily Howler for the conservative idea that today's liberals oppose what civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., stood for.And he follows the standard highbrow conservative approach in doing so: taking some conciliatory statement or action by King with minimal information about the situation in which it took place, and compare that unfavorably to some present-day liberal's polemic against rightwingers.

Dan Warren has written a book called If It Takes All Summer : Martin Luther King, the KKK, and States Rights in St. Augustine, 1964 (2008) Warren was the Florida state attorney for that area at the time the events he describes took place.

The city had agreed to desegregation of business. But in response, the Ku Klux Klan was out picketing and:

Gangs of whites began roaming the city, harassing and assaulting blacks they found abroad after dark. Manucy was heard to brag that the tactics were working, and fired by this initial success, he and his cohorts began pressuring other businesses to deny blacks service, threatening them with their picket brigades if they refused.

Warren relates telling a reporter, referring to King, "You must not create a crisis without assuming responsibility for its consequences." He explains to King's plans to which he was referring:

I had said the same thing to King when we first met and at that time he had replied, "Civil disobedience has been recognized since the Boston Tea Party." I countered this position by saying "this is not the eighteenth century. We’ve come a long way since then." At least I thought we had, but the debate on how to end segregation had been going on in this country since the Civil War with violence as a constant companion. I wasn't sure we had advanced very far since then. I expressed my hope that the situation in St. Augustine could be peacefully resolved, but it was not to be. On the seventeenth, King threatened massive new demonstrations within a week if civic leaders did not take steps to "end the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. ... We’re not going to let the Ku Klux Klan run St. Augustine. If it can be solved by negotiation, good; but if it means we must once more put on our walking shoes, we will do it that way. We are determined to be free ... even if it means physical death." King did not follow through with the promise to take to the streets again. But the violence continued. On the eighteenth and nineteenth, it broke out again as roaming groups of whites attacked blacks. King expressed his frustration over this turn of events in an interview with Mabel Norris Chesley of the News-Journal: "I pray that I shall never have to demonstrate in St. Augustine again. I have been at this thing since Birmingham, and I would like to get out from under the tension." (p. 163; my emphasis)

Some basic observations, which Beck apologists like Somerby and Republicans who want to claim King's name in defense of present-day segregationism essentially have to ignore.

One is that King was fighting against white racism. Yes, as a Christian and as an American he opposed black racism against whites, as well. But black racism was not the biggest issue with which he had to deal among African-Americans: it was fear, intimidation, apathy, cynicism - in other words, all the attitudes that produced passivity in the face of white racism and white racist violence.

King's Christian religious language and his commitment to Ghandian pacifism can easily be misused by people like Beck and Somerby, because it gives them something to cherry-pick to point fingers at those who are objecting explicitly to white racism today and politics based on white racism. It's essential to understand what made King a figure of admiration even to African-Americans like Malcolm X, who explicitly preached the necessary of violence in fighting white racism (though he didn't actually engage in violence against whites). King's pacifism was not passive. He wasn't preaching nonviolence to encourage non-resistance. On the contrary. His nonviolent strategy was to challenge white racism, put an end to segregation, and fight for better opportunities for the poor of all races.

Secondly, King did not refrain from calling out the perpetrators of racist actions. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are focused on smearing Obama as a racist against white people. Speaking out against white racism is not something they do, much less putting their lives on the line confronting violent white extremists as King as those who protested with him did. Notice King's statement bolded above. He explicitly called out the Klan for "terrorism." He wasn't fretting about hurting their delicate feelings. He wasn't tiptoeing around the ugly reality for fear that some poorly-informed white people might feel offended or threatened by what he said. In fact, he wasn't basing his actions and words on the assumption that he should persuade a majority of the white people in town that he was right.

King's approach was to challenge the conscience of whites, to tell them that in supporting segregation they were doing something wrong, something in violation of their own professed patriotic and Christian values. He wasn't trying to comfort the comfortable, he was trying to discomfort them. And it certainly irritated, outraged, offended, and even enraged supporters of segregation. How discomforted? Warren:

In an ominous turn of events, those testing the power of the civil rights law attempted to be served at twenty-eight businesses open to the public and were turned away from twenty-three. It was apparent that many establishments in St. Augustine would not comply with the law. Klan marauders continued to stalk blacks at night, and on July 18, four blacks were beaten as they walked along U.S. 1. Later, a car was overturned outside the emergency room of the local hospital. A young black had driven to the hospital to be treated for injuries resulting from an attack. He had been escorted by officers through a crowd of angry whites gathered outside the hospital; when the police left, his car had been vandalized.

But Somerby and Beck are correct in one sense in saying King would have had real difference with liberals today. Because he had real difficulties with liberals of his own time. As Warren puts it:

The pressure on King must have been great, for now an additional problem began to threaten his movement. Civil rights leaders from around the country called upon him to back off, fearing the civil disobedience campaign was hurting the Democrats’ chances in the 1964 elections. Senator Barry Goldwater, soon to be the Republican presidential nominee, was using the antagonism toward the new civil rights legislation to curry favor in the South. Segregationists were gaining in popularity as the impact of the new law began to be felt. King was at his wit’s end. According to Mabel Chesley, he told her, "If you know of any other channels we can explore to bring this thing to an end, please let me know. If anyone can reach the power structure and persuade it to call off the Klan, we will welcome it." There were few in the power structure who could call off the Klan and none who were willing to do so.

The moratorium called by King did not sit well with local civil rights leaders in St. Augustine. Hayling, speaking only for himself, was quoted as saying, "Dr. King cannot tell us what to do on the local level. We will not give up our gains and go away and hide our heads. This is one of the few places in the United States where there is a citywide effort to buck the civil rights laws. We brought Dr. King into the movement in St. Augustine. This was delivered to him on a silver platter." Others in the civil rights movement also challenged King’s call to curtail mass demonstrations. At a meeting of six of the nation’s civil rights leaders, unanimous agreement could not be reached on whether to curtail demonstrations until after the national election. John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and James Farmer, national director of the Congress for Racial Equality, refused to go along with the moratorium.

One could cherry-pick and incident like this and say, see, King opposed the hotheads in his own movement! But this was a question of different judgments of a situation among allies. King didn't stop favoring integration and opposing the Klan. He didn't try to pretty up what the Klan and white mobs were doing.

It's worth noting that this is the same John Lewis who, as a Congressman in 2010, was heckled by Tea Party demonstrators in front of the Capitol opposing the health care reform bill by chanting "nigger, nigger, nigger." Conservatives tried to deny it occurred because it wasn't caught on video. Bob Somerby in his 03/29/2010 Howler seemed to be echoing such arguments (see the final paragraph). In the following day's column, he attacked someone who compared the Tea Partiers behavior to segregationists of the 1950s. In his Friday column that week, we defended his Tea Party crush Pam Stout against comments by Digby pointing out that she associated herself with rightwing political extremists.

It's ridiculous for Glenn Beck to try to make Martin Luther King into an icon of White Power racism. It's equally ridiculous for Bob Somerby to try to turn him into an advocate for passivity in the face of white racism, xenophobia and far-right agitation for violence.

Dan Warren, for his part, is "shrill" about our more recent situation:

In 1967, I resigned as state attorney, gave up my quest to run for Congress, and reentered private practice. During the ensuing years I devoted all my energies to defending those charged with crimes and providing for a growing family that eventually numbered seven children. St. Augustine always remained in my mind, and as the years passed, I became convinced that racism was not dead; it was very much alive in our legal and social institutions. To me, repressive and hypocritical laws designed to fight the nation’s so-called war on drugs are directly related to new forms of racism, which are evident in the disparity in the sentences given black offenders. Racism is also apparent in racial profiling by law enforcement. [my emphasis]

By Bob Somerby's standards, this marks Warren as a bigoted, hate-filled librul who loves to sneer at Southern whites. Even though he is a native-born Southern white man himself.

Tags: martin luther king jr., white racism

Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Pretty much the opposite of Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor", scheduled on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the same place, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, takes place tomorrow. Part of Beck's schtick with this rally is place himself and his fellow segregationists in the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ben Dimiero in Martin Luther King would have been on Glenn Beck's chalkboard Media Matters 08/25/2010 explains why the comparison is historically, politically and morally absurd.

He references a 1958 article in which King talked broadly about his philosophical views, including Communism, of which his opponent accused him of being an adherent: My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence Fellowship 09/01/1958, an excerpt from his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958). That's main what I talk about in this post. (Warning: this post is LONG and WONKY)

But I also wanted to mention that Beck's trying to claim he's following in the legacy of King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s is the kind of double-reverse historical revisionism that has always been a standard part of segregationist ideology and propaganda. We aren't prejudiced against the Negroes, the segregationists said (polite version using "Negroes"), it's the Negroes who are prejudiced against us white folks. Segregation isn't to make an advantage for whites at the expense of Negroes, it's to help the Negroes; no one will be hurt worse than them by ending it. It's not us good Christian white folks promoting racial hate against the Negroes, it's the Negro Commonist civil rights fanatics promoting hate against us. And so on.

The same individuals and groups could also argue in straight up racial terms that whites were just inherently superior to blacks. As we've seen with Bush idolaters during the previous administration and in the last year with Republican and Tea Party fanatics, authoritarian-minded people can hold the most screaming contradictions in their opinions, without either their belief system or their emotional commitment to it being notably damaged.

What we seeing now with Beck, Limbaugh, Laura Schlesinger and the Tea Party zealots is pretty 1950s-style Southern segregationism, superficially adapted to the 2000s.

Now, on to the thoughts of King, who was in active opposition to those segregationists in 1958. He relates his perspective on racism and economic conditions as having developed early:

I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice. Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort,I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me. During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father’s wishes - he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions - in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. [my emphasis]

The wording is important. King didn't describe racism as only a function or side-effect of inequality and economic injustice. But he describes his view as being that "the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice."

He writes that the Social Gospel writer Walter Rauschenbusch made a big impression on him, particularly in regard to the notion that Christian Gospel had to be concerned with the broader social conditions of people in their physical lives, not just for their individual souls. But he criticized Rauschenbusch on this point: "he came perilously close to identifying the Kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system - a tendency which should never befall the Church."

I especially noticed King's attention to German philosophers of the 19th century. He describes a course with one of the professors that particularly influenced him, Edgar Brightman, this way:

Although the course was mainly a study of Hegel's monumental work,
Phenomenology of Mind, I spent my spare time reading his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. There were points in Hegel's philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His contention that "truth is the whole" led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.

This is notable in several ways. One, having read two of those three books, I can say for sure they aren't light reading. He took philosophy pretty seriously if he was reading Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right on the side. Plus, it suggests he had a seriously geeky side. (On the day Glenn Beck reads Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, the oceans will evaporate. Or, at least what's left of Beck's sanity will do so.)

Having more than little of such a side myself, I'm willing to unpack this sentence a bit: "His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle." Hegel did understand the world in general as behaving according to a dialectical process which required dialectical thinking to understand. He also had a dialectical method, and orthodox Marxists would later say that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took Hegel's formal logic and his dialectical method. The influence of Hegel on Marx's thought actually become a serious issue in Soviet and Eastern European science and philosophy in the postwar period. I'm guessing that King wasn't particularly aware of that at the time but it's an interesting question. I posted about Hegel's philosophy on 12/30/2009 in Review of Klassische deutsche Philosophie (10): Hegel.

King's critical but open-minded attitude toward Hegel is interesting in another regard. After the Second World War, Anglo-American evaluations of Germany often fell into what is known as the "From Luther to Hitler" line of thinking, which essentially viewed all major philosophical and social trends in Germany since the 16th century onward as somehow precursors to Hitler's National Socialism (Nazism). Hegel figures in that view as a "totalitarian" thinker. In the textbook of my otherwise excellent undergraduate political theory course, an excerpt of Hegel's work was paired with one by Mussolini.

This attitude toward Hegel's work actually began before the Second World War. The first one had inclined the Anglo-American world to take a rather dim view of all things German, and the rise of Hitler to power encouraged it. But that attitude toward Hegel's philosophy was always cracked. And King recognized this in the 1950s, in spite of the prevailing academic atmosphere against Hegel. His comment also suggests that he found much to admire in Hegel's view of historical development as the long-term realization of freedom.

Nietzsche is a philosopher whose reputation in the Anglo-Saxon world suffered excessively from the "From Luther to Hitler" school of thought. In Nietzsche's case, it's a little easier to understand. Because he wrote in a way that was easy to quote out of context to give his words a distorted meaning. But Nietzsche was definitely no proto-Nazi. His bitterest polemics were directed against the anti-Semites of his time, the real proto-Nazis. But King's reason for criticizing what he understood of Nietzsche's philosophy is interesting in itself:

During this period I had about despaired of the power of love in solving social problems. Perhaps my faith in love was temporarily shaken by the philosophy of Nietzsche. I had been reading parts of The Genealogy of Morals and the whole of The Will to Power. Nietzsche's glorification of power-in his theory all life expressed the will to power - was an outgrowth of his contempt for ordinary morals. He attacked the whole of the Hebraic-Christian morality - with its virtues of piety and humility, its other worldliness and its attitude toward suffering - as the glorification of weakness, as making virtues out of necessity and impotence. He looked to the development of a superman who would surpass man as man surpassed the ape.

King didn't select his Nietzsche books as well as he did the Hegel ones. The Genealogy of Morals is an expansion and explanation of Beyond Good and Evil. The Will to Power was published posthumously and is only a Nietzsche book in a limited sense. Nietzsche's executor was his sister, who was a proto-Nazi. And she put together The Will to Power by cutting and pasting material from Nietzsche, selected to emphasize authoritarian schemes.

But King rejected what he understood poorly from Nietzsche on the grounds, "He attacked the whole of the Hebraic-Christian morality - with its virtues of piety and humility, its other worldliness and its attitude toward suffering - as the glorification of weakness, as making virtues out of necessity and impotence." In other words, he saw Nietzsche as rejecting Christian virtues wholesale, virtues which King defended. And he also rejected what he understood as a racialist theme in Nietzsche's concept of the "superman."

I've posted a couple of reviews of books on Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity in two parts, on 10/25/2009 and 10/29/2009. He actually had a sophisticated view of the development of Jewish and Christian moral concepts. And understood more sympathetically, I would even argue that King made very good use of the "slave morality" aspects of Christianity, the idea that Christian morality fundamentally represented the viewpoint of slaves in opposition to their masters. The notion that Christianity has what Latin American Catholics would later call a "preferential option for the poor" fit well with King's understanding of Christianity. The two had more in common in their views of the Christian religion than King realized.

In that article, King also discusses the influence of the pacifists A.J. Muste and Mohatmas Gandhi. What I find more interesting, continuing with the German philosophy theme, were his comments on Karl Marx. He says he read Marx's Capital (he names it by the German title Das Kapital) and The Communist Manifesto. How much King knew about the political situation in Germany and other parts of Europe leading up to the democratic Revolutions of 1848, the year the Manifesto was published, I don't know. But his discussion in that article isn't focused on whether Marx in developing his theory of surplus value correctly used the work of English political economist David Ricardo.

King was already nationally known in 1958, and he was very well aware that he had to be careful in addressing anything to do with Communism. On the other hand, since he was being accused of it - the segregationists always said the civil rights movement was a Communist plot - he also couldn't avoid addressing it. He leads with what he rejects. Although he refers to "the thinking of Marx and Lenin" in general, this is more addressed to his current understanding of Soviet Communism in the Cold War context:

First[,] I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality - a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.

In this, King showed more affinity with Hegel than with Marx. The theory of dialectical materialism, i.e., Marxism (Engels invented the term after Marx's death), as interpreted by orthodox Communism, was a materialist philosophy that rejected the notion of God. And while the practice of religion was banned in the Soviet bloc in 1958, believers and church members were discriminated against in serious ways.

Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything - force, violence, murder, lying - is a justifiable means to the "millennial" end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the mean.

This was a conventional Christian critique of Communism, based on the idea that without the notion of God, there was no firm foundation for a moral order for humanity.

Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxist would argue that the state is an "interim" reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that end. And if any man's so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.

While this may also sound like a conventional criticism, it would have been made the hair on many a conservative anti-Communists head stand up. Because in his description, he is criticizing the restriction of individual freedom of conscience and the intellect - not the public ownership of the means of production which Marx advocated and the Soviets practiced. This doesn't mean that King advocated nationalization of all industry and banking, he didn't and never did. But here he states a priority that would set an Ayn Rand fan to sputtering and gagging, now as in 1958.

Not incidentally, this criticism of the restriction of personal freedoms and meaningful political expression in the former Communist countries is almost universally accepted today, at least in theory, even by the "postcommunist" left parties in Europe.

But he did have this to say about Marxism in relation to "social justice", something Glenn Beck explicitly denounces:

Yet, in spite of the fact that my response to communism was and is negative, and I considered it basically evil, there were points at which I found it challenging. The late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, referred to communism as a Christian heresy. By this he meant that communism had laid hold of certain truths which are essential parts of the Christian view of things, but that it had bound up with them concepts and practices which no Christian could ever accept or profess. Communism challenged the late Archbishop and it should challenge every Christian - as it challenged me - to a growing concern about social justice.

With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice. The Christian ought always to be challenged by any protest against unfair treatment of the poor, for Christianity is itself such a protest, nowhere expressed more eloquently than in Jesus's words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor: he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."[my emphasis]

This was a statement of a Christian worldview that rejected what he understood at the basic Communist worldview. But it was also the statement of a man who wasn't going to be deterred from demanding just and necessary reforms by people labeling him a Communist.

And the following was obviously carefully worded. But it also indicated a willingness to entertain a radical criticism of capitalism as practiced in 1958, which in the United States was arguably a more sensibly regulated system than it is today:

In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers-from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial “yes” and a partial “no.” In so far as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous “no”; but in so far as he pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness in the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian churches, I responded with a definite “yes.”

My reading of Marx also convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise, and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.

That thesis-synthesis-antithesis triad is a crummy way to try to conceive Hegel's or Marx's dialectics. But it was and still is a conventional and familiar way to do so, so his readers would have recognized the reference.

Finally, his view of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology is notable:

In spite of the fact that I found many things to be desired in Niebuhr’s philosophy, there were several points at which he constructively influenced my thinking. Niebuhr’s great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. These elements in Niebuhr’s thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man’s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil. [my emphasis]

Tags: hegel, martin luther king jr., karl marx, marxism, niebuhr, nietzsche

Speech comparison

Martin Luther King, Jr., I've Been to the Mountaintop, Memphis, 04/03/1968:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, 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. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. [my emphasis]

President-elect Barack Obama, Hope of a Better Day Chicago, 11/04/2008:

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.

But, but, the Big Pundits all say Obama was trying to lower our expectations!

Tags: barack obama, martin+luther+king+jr.

"The Sixties": King and urban disorders in the 1960s

(I drafted this in early April but failed to post it then.)

The nightmares of our "culture warriors" are still haunted by the urban riots of the 1960s. They're even more terrifying than their visions about gay sex or abortion. Even many people who weren't even around or too young to notice at the time have inherited the fear from their parents and political mentors. And there was a riot in Los Angeles in 1992 that reminded everyone of what had happened and maybe could happen again.

The period of those riots were kicked off by the Watts riot of 1965. The time line is important, because in the "culture war" view of the 1960s, including the somewhat more urbane version favored by the Bobos, the early 1960s were a time of respectable and respectful dissent by well-mannered Negroes (the normal term then), while the later 1960s was marked by wild-eyed radicals who were totally irresponsible and destructive and dangerous.

In this version, Martin Luther King, Jr. functions as an icon of respectability against which in practice virtually all activists black leaders of that time and this are seen as distinctly suspect. One currently popular shorthand for that view is "Jeremiah Wright", or "Obama's Wright problem".

Often this view is used to justify in effect shrugging off the current dilemmas facing African Americans and other ethnic minorities in majority-white America. The African American columnist Eugene Robinson is not a Bobo exactly. But he articulates one common aspect of this view in Two Black Americas Washington Post 04/08/08:

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed - mostly for the better - and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized. ...

For those who haven't made it into the middle class, however, things are different. Inner-city communities were hollowed out - a process accelerated by the riots that followed King's death - and left fallow for decades. Middle-class professionals fled, businesses closed, schools disintegrated, family structures fell apart. Drugs and crime were symptoms of the general rot; the gentrification of recent years has just shifted the pathology from one part of the city to another, or perhaps to a close-in suburb, sweeping it into a corner.

The African American poor are a smaller segment than they were 40 years ago, but arguably they are further from full participation in society than they were in King's era. It's not that they have no interest in climbing the ladder, it's that too many rungs are missing.
(my emphasis)

The situation of African Americans since 1968 has changed "mostly for the better", he writes soothingly (at least for white readers). Was this man vacationing on Mars during Hurricane Katrina?

But even Robinson's cautious mention of real, persistent, chronic problems for a large percentage of American blacks would be too much for good Christian Republican white folks these days. Although most of them won't be shaken too badly by the metaphorical idea that "too many rungs" are missing on the ladder leading to middle-class prosperity.

But start talking about more serious enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and spending considerably more money on the kinds of "middle class" basic services that black and other resident of our cities' poorest neighborhoods - effective law enforcement, top-quality schools, safe parks and playgrounds, well-stocked libraries, after-school programs for kids, drug treatment programs, job-training and even public-employment programs - that will send the Bobos to sputtering about the tax burden on our much-put-upon wealthy citizens. And the Christianists to war about how welfare subsidies "bad morals" among young women, whose whole sex is a source of much torment to them anyway. And the blowhards of OxyContin radio will blather endlessly about welfare queens and fraud and lazy poor people.

Certainly there has been progress in this area in the last 40 years. Many legal and practical barriers have been removed that blocked blacks from jobs and education. Despite the segregationist voter-suppression tactics that have now become standard operating procedure for the Republican Party, black voters in the South are enfranchised. The dismantling of the legal "de jure" segregation system in the South is a big achievement. The era of blacks being charged for crimes by all-white law enforcement, prosecuted by a white prosecutor before a white judge, and their fate being decided by an all-white juries is gone. Decades of anti-discrimination laws have persuaded most corporations to incorporate affirmative action hiring practices, more scrupulously practiced by some companies than by others.

The Bobos use their phony image of a tame Martin Luther King to justify ignoring the real problems around race that still exist. So do some liberals. But King's life and career as civil rights leader overlaps the period of 1960s riots by more than two years, if we take the Watts riot as a starting point. King was committed to addressing the issues facing urban black communities outside the South, as well.

Robinson's comment that the process of the decline of community institutions and common culture ties in black areas of big cities - I'm assuming that's what he means by hollowing-out - was "accelerated by the riots that followed King's death". While it's a sensible statement as far as it goes, the urban riots were a bigger phenomenon that an angry reaction to King's death.

It's also worth observing that urban blacks outside the South must have felt in some way that King represented their interests for there to be such a reaction after his murder. Those post-assassination riots were "overdetermined", as the psychologists say. But that was surely a significant factor, just as the event of his assassination became the flash-point that set off that historic round of disorders.

Tags: 1968, martin luther king jr., racism, violence

King's legacy: Scary stuff (for good Christian Republican white folks, anyway)

Berkeley Barb cover 07-19-1968 featuring Black Panther leader Huey Newton and the caption "I Have A Nightmare"

Kai Wright wrote a piece on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his death, Dr. King, Forgotten Radical, that makes a similar point to that I've been making in some of my recent posts. Wright focuses on the ways in which the critical, Christian-prophetic edge has been excised from the publicly-celebrated views of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This article is also a reminder that the Bobos' view of King as a nice pleasant man who would never go so far as to make respectable white folks angry, is a rank distortion of his life and of real history:

Today, we hear little about the ideas that experience provoked for King: His deathbed blueprint for changing America's caste systems included a three-pronged attack on racism, poverty, and war.

It's that last charge, to fight war-making, that got him in the most trouble during his time and that gets most readily ignored today. Despite grenades of criticism from his fellow civil-rights leaders, his erstwhile ally in the president, and the press, King declared he had no choice but to stand up against the Vietnam War. But what's striking is the still red-hot relevance of his reasoning, a perspective also likely to be left out of the dreamy platitudes delivered on days like today.

Wright also gets at a topic that I discussed recently, about how King's position and attitudes need to be understood in the context of the related but very different situations in the South versus in major urban areas outside the South:

America began perverting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message in the spring of 1963. Truthfully, you could put the date just about anywhere along the earlier timeline of his brief public life, too. But I mark it at the Birmingham movement's climax, right about when Northern whites needed a more distant, less personally threatening change-maker to juxtapose with the black rabble rousers clambering into their own backyards. That's when Time politely dubbed him the "Negroes' inspirational leader," as Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff point out in their excellent book Race Beat.

Up until then, King had been eyed as a hasty radical out to push Southern communities past their breaking point - which was a far more accurate understanding of the man's mission.

But King did not ignore or forget those different situations in the North, either:

The bloom started to wear off King's media rose when he turned his attention to Northern racism. The central defense Southern segregationists offered when thrust on the national stage was that their Jim Crow was no more of a brute than the North's. King agreed, and in announcing his organization's move into Chicago, he called the North's urban ghettos "a system of internal colonialism not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium." And he named names, pointing to racist unions as one of a dozen institutions conspiring to strip-mine black communities. So much for "inspirational." But then, like now, nobody wanted to hear such talk - only the black press paid any attention.

I agree with the historical view that says King's assassination was a key factor in blunting the effectiveness of what was in 1968 frequently called the black freedom movement or even the black liberation movement. (I would hate to see "liberation" reduced in the American political vocabulary to a cynical term for wars of aggression, e.g., the "liberation" of Iraq). It deprived the movement of its most prominent leader and increased in a qualitative way the cynicism among African-Americans about whether American whites were open to a more free society and more responsive government at all levels.

But King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were not the beginning and the end of the civil rights/black freedom movement. As Wright's quote above indicates, there were activists and leaders in urban black communities who were dealing with different circumstances and taking different approaches than King and the SCLC even in 1963. The Bobo construction that there was some radical break between a "good" movement in the early 1960s versus a "bad", scary movement in the late 1960s is bogus ideology.

Wright quotes King making a point that I don't think you will see Bobo making unless he's trying to remind his white readers how scary and dangerous angry black people are:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. (my emphasis)

I'm not interested in seeing a revival of the kind of sectarian polemics, pointless adventurism and stale rhetoric that was unfortunately a characteristic of many of the groups that styled themselves as "revolutionary" in those days. We get more than enough sectarian polemics, pointless adventurism and stale rhetoric from the Republican Party and the Christian Right.

But the dominant reactionary ideology of today's authoritarian Republican Party is heavily derived from conservative reaction to the social conflicts of the 1960s. And that reactionary ideology is very much based on white racism, materialism, and militarism. There's no reason we should allow the Republican Party and the attached Bobos of the press interpret the history of 1960s or any other period through the lens of their warped ideology. Much less to take the "culture war" premises of that ideology at face value.

If the base of the Democratic Party can keep at it long enough, we may eventually get leaders of our party who will actually challenge white racism, materialism and militarism by name. Then a generation after that, maybe our Establishment reporters and Big Pundits won't gag on the words, either.

In our present situation, we have leading liberal pundits like Frank Rich who swoon in horror at the thought some Democrat might call St. John "100 Years War" McCain a "crazed militarist". Not that he named any actual Democrat of note who actually applied that label to the bold Maverick.

And we have our likely Presidential standard-bearer responding to Republican demands that he denounce a heretic who dared to use the word "warmonger" to describe the Straight Talker, meekly consenting and allowing his campaign to put out an official statement saying, "John McCain is not a warmonger and should not be described as such."

What would happen if the Democratic Presidential candidate pointed to the Maverick's supporters who proudly carry on the tradition of Southern segregation merged with the worst of Norther white bigotry and said those supporters were motivated by "racism"? Obama's campaign kinda-sorta did that with the Clintons, though not not very shrewdly and not very accurately. Will they be willing to confront the issue head-in in its Republican incarnation?

And what if Obama or Clinton singled out McCain's declared foreign policy which is little more than a war policy, and pointed out his long history of treating foreign policy problems as primarily military problems, and highlighted his support for the world-historic boondoggle now labeled "missile defense", and called that package what it is, "militarism"? Joe Lieberman would faint away with the vapors. But it might also focus many voters' attention on how genuinely "crazed" it is for the United States to be spending half or more of the military budgets of the entire world. Poor Frank Rich would go into shock, though.

And what might be the result if the Democratic Presidential candidate made a big deal out of the Maverick's support for massive tax subsidies for the very wealthy, and his firmly-joined-at-the-hip relationship with K Street lobbyists, and called them examples of shameless pandering to "materialism"? Would that really be so radical? After all, during the Cold War it was a stock talking point that Our Side's religious consciousness was superior to the cold "materialism" of the godless Communists. And, embarassing as it no doubt is to our televangelists, Jesus and the Christian Bible roundly condemned materialism. Aren't the Democrats supposed to be showing off how open they are to "people of faith", our current weird euphemism for "religious people"?

Chances for such developments look small, at the moment. Because if the Democrats did they, why, they might remind people of Really Scary Black People like Martin Luther King Jeremiah Wright.

Tags: mccain

Moyers on Martin and Lyndon

Bill Moyers discussed Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., in his
Bill Moyers essay of 01/18/08 on his weekly Journal show. For all his faults, Johnson really cared about the needs of ordinary people. And acted on it. The video includes Johnson's famous "We shall overcome" moment, a phrase from an old hymn that civil rights activists frequently sang in an arrangement by Pete Seeger.



Moyer's conclusion of the essay:

Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment — "we shall overcome" — Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too — reminding us that a president matters, and so do we.

Tags: bill moyers, civil rights movement, lyndon johnson, martin luther king jr.