MLK: The Red Reverend

"We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with capitalism . . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism." -King, '67
 
 

You're probably familiar with Martin Luther King, Jr. The Baptist Reverend King. The civil rights activist King. The Nobel Peace prize winning King. That face you see on posters in your high school hallway in February (a school that might be named after him, and maybe you've got a break from school on MLK Day, too). The name on the street sign, perhaps, a sign you can find in just about every city in the US.

But are you familiar with the socialist Martin Luther King?

If you are anything like how I was a year ago, your answer is a big fat "Nope."

The first time I had heard about King's socialist beliefs was in a Democratic Socialists of America pamphlet. It stated that King, along with some other famous figures (like Albert Einstein), was a socialist. In bold text, just like that.

So I went searching the Web for more info. I used the search engines, and tried the DSA website, but came up empty. Convinced the DSA pamphlet was full of it, I gave up the search.

It wasn't until MLK Day did I hear about this again, when Prof. Michael Eric Dyson appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, with his new book, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. During the program, Dyson says one of the main points of his book is to show the radical side of MLK, a side that is often ignored and unknown. And a big part of that radicalism is MLK's desires for democratic socialism.

So I promised myself I'd find this book and use it to publish a webpage for folks like you :-)
Now I'll try to describe my findings to ya..... please forgive me for my poor writing skills! (I'll be quoting the book, mostly)

Less than a month before he died, King went to Memphis, Tennessee to publicize the plight of striking sanitation workers, most of whom were poor black men.

"It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income," King says. "One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker, if it is to survive. For the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn't do his job diseases are rampant."

"Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains," he says later. "Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths. It seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying 'Even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not.'"

Michael Dyson writes, "What is especially striking about [this] occasion is that King is documented in full transition from fighting segregation to opposing class oppression. King had retreated from focusing solely on race when he saw that blacks would continue to suffer if they lacked economic equality. As King told James Lawson, the shrewd civil rights leader who helped to spearhead the strike, he was drawn to Memphis as an irresistible testing ground for his national assault on poverty" (79).

"He said to me, 'Jim, you are doing in Memphis what I hope to do with the Poor People's Campaign,'" Lawson recalls. "'You've gotten into one of the tough issues, that is, workers who need good work, and decency and living wages, while they work.'" Lawson says that King "saw Memphis as pulling the movement in the right direction." King may have believed that, but few others in the civil rights movement did, including many in his own camp. King's Poor People's Campaign was a hard sell, perhaps because it forced those who were used to thinking about race to think also about class, while forcing those who puzzled over economic inequality to think about race. King sought to forge a coalition of the truly disadvantaged by bridging the many gaps between poor whites, blacks, and Latinos.

King was soon facing an unfamiliar problem. His own organization was putting up strong resistance to his "increasingly class-based analysis of racial suffering" (82).
 

Many of them believed, on the basis of their limited successes in Chicago and Cleveland, that blacks should develop strategies to increase their consumer power and to get a bigger piece of the existing economic pie. King, however, began to question the logic and the fairness of such an approach. Behind the muted successes of Chicago, King sensed the raging of a more powerful force than he had confronted in all the years of his civil rights struggles: structural economic inequality. While King's religion led him to side with the poor against the interests of the rich, he had yet to think in a sustained manner about the economic gulf between the have-gots and the have-nots. King saw that in the struggle to free Northern blacks, race mattered, but class mattered more. By 1964, King had already reached the conclusion that blacks faced "basic social and economic problems that require political reform." But the vicious nature of Northern ghetto poverty convinced King that the best hope for America was the redistribution of wealth.

 

The "dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will," King argued. These problems had kept blacks "confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness," King said.

The "Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring of the whole of American society." King believed he was now "raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth," he said, and that one should "question the capitalistic economy."

"King's stringent dissent on the question of economic equality alienated him from most of the few allies who remained," Dyson writes.

With his staff opposing his radical shift more and more, King was driven deeper into "a depression about the faint prospects of America's rediscovering its revolutionary roots" (83-84).

We must ignite "a restructuring of the very architecture of American society," King stated in 1966. And in his 1967 presidential address to the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference):
 

A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them, make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!"

 With increasing attacks on the social effectiveness of nonviolence and poor communities, King responded with a bolder initiative. A more forceful version of nonviolence, that he labeled "massive nonviolence," "aggressive nonviolence," even "nonviolent sabotage." It was an attempt, as Dyson writes, to "escalate his campaign to match the national escalation of racial violence."

King's nonviolence methods would go towards a new direction, saying it would now contain "disruptive dimensions." Dyson:
 

---

Protesters would engage in massive civil disobedience, tying up traffic, staging sit-ins in Congress and in government buildings, and shutting down business in the capital. The purpose of this massive, aggressive, disruptive, dislocating, sabotaging nonviolence was a protest "powerful enough, dramatic enough, morally appealing enough, so that people of goodwill, the churches, labor, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves begin to put pressure on congressmen to the point they can no longer elude our demands."

---

In '67, King described how massive nonviolence flowed from linking civil disobedience to the new urban contexts into which he attempted to extend its influence. King:
 

Nonviolence must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods. Non-violent protest must now mature to a new level, to correspond to a heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This high level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more than a statement to the larger society, there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point. . . To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive. It is a device of social action that is more difficult for a government to quell by superior force . . . It is militant and defiant, not destructive.

King was now telling the SCLC to "go for broke" in setting their moral and financial resources against the massive resources of the government. King was definitely showing a new side, a side that I never heard about in school or on TV, when he told his staff that they've "gone for broke before, not in the way we're going this time, because if necessary I'm going to stay in jail for six months--they aren't going to run me out of Washington."

King admitted to New York Times reporter Jose Yglesias, "In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle."
 

For more info on the Poor People's Campaign, see the Encarta Africana article I posted. It contains some more info on MLK's anti-capitalist sentiments, too.

In 1966, King said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had not improved the condition of poor blacks in either the North or South. Dyson:

These "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettoes, nor did they do much to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In fact, he argued, "the changes that came about during this period [1955-1965] were at best surface changes, they were not really substantive changes." In 1966, King acknowledged that the progress that had been made had been "limited mainly to the Negro middle class."

And in a speech to his staff in 1966, King described the ideological basis for his strengthened assault on poverty, economic injustice, and class inequality:

We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with capitalism . . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.

This statement is remarkable since King rarely allowed his positive response to democratic socialism to be recorded. His usual practice, according to one of his aides, was to demand that they "turn off the tape recorder" while he expounded on the virtues of "what he called democratic socialism, and he said, 'I can't say this publicly, and if you say I said it I'm not gonna admit to it." King "didn't believe that capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people," the aide said, "and that we might need to look at what was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism." Even in the speech that contains the passage cited above, King said he wasn't "going to allow anybody to put [him] in the bind of making me say everytime" that he wasn't a communist or a Marxist. Still, as democratic socialist Michael Harrington said, King was highly reluctant to name his radical position in public. King didn't want to arouse suspicion and thus compromise the achievement of economic and racial equality. "Dr. King had a genius for this," Harrington said. "How do you phrase the message so that you don't betray the message but you put it in terms which are understandable and accessible to people on the street?" Harrington claims that King "certainly wouldn't use radical phraseology in many cases for that reason." The great Marxist historian C.L.R. James recalls that King told him that while he believed in radical ideas, he couldn't "say such things from the pulpit." James say that King "wanted me to know that he understood and accepted, and in fact agreed with, the ideas that I was putting forward--ideas which were fundamentally Marxist-Leninist." James concluded that King was "a man whose ideas were as advanced as any of us on the Left."

In King's book, "Where Do We Go from Here?" he wrote that we should see "that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty" and that it "encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition," while communism "reduces men to a cog in the wheel of the state."
 

Even as King grew more politically radical, he never embraced communism. Still, he acknowledged that truth "is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical communism," that capitalism "fails to see the truth in collectivism," and that communism "fails to see the truth in individualism." For King, the "good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism" but "a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism" (Dyson 231).

Source: The Unfinished Agenda of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Michael Honey

In this article, Michael Honey highlights MLK's increasing radicalism and provides some great quotes:

Ultimate freedom, he declared, would require a world-wide movement. He wrote in 1967, "It is obvious that nonviolent movements for social change must internationalize, because of the interlocking nature of the problems they all face, and because otherwise those problems will breed war."

Yet, he cautioned, "We have hardly begun to build the skills and the strategy, or even the commitment, to planetize our movement for social justice."

Today the results of failing to attend to the agenda King laid out in 1968 are glaringly evident. King clearly saw the trends which have wracked the nation and the world since his death.: "It is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Now millions of people are being strangled in that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse."

    Well, here we are at the end, where I will try to form some kind of conclusion. OK, conclusion is a little too intelligent of a word to describe the nutty 19-yr-old-X-Files-JFK-watching conspiracy theories you're about to hear.

So here goes....

It was April 16, I was at my first protest ever. The IMF/World Bank protests in Washington, DC. The sun was setting, the day's activities were officially over, so it was time for me to leave the Ellipse (the oval-shaped patch of grass in front of the White House) and go for a tour of "our fair capital."

With my "Socialist Party, USA" t-shirt shining bright red in the DC sunset (well, sorta bright), I set off towards the Capitol building, wanting to see that stuff I saw on C-SPAN in person.

The Capitol was awfully far away, so I found the nearest bus stop and sat in the little booth, asked the lady already sitting there if she knew which bus I could take, then waited. And waited. Then waited some more.

Eventually an old guy and his friend came along, with protest signs resting on their shoulders. They asked if we knew whether or not the buses were running or not. After he was done with that he took a good look at my shirt, looked up at me and said something like "Socialist?! You're a socialist?!"  My eyes go wide and I'm mumbling out "Uhh.. yeah."

"You know, they kill socialists in this country." And me and the lady next to me laugh. But the old guy's not laughing. He's serious. And I'm kinda spooked for a moment.

"Advertising it like that. Sheesh." You're nuts! Or something like that. Then he left, and I left (walked to the Capitol).

I had never really thought about socialists who got killed in the US, although I had read a few pages of William Blum's "Killing Hope", enough to suspect that the US wasn't too kind to socialists overseas.

So when I first read about how MLK had started to embrace socialism, and how the Poor People's Campaign was the start of a new side of King, one who would use nonviolent "sabotage" to fight for his beliefs, I soon remembered what "that old guy" told me in Washington. "They kill socialists in this country."

Eek.

King was murdered on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn. Supporting striking garbage workers, Memphis was a "testing ground" for King's new emphasis on economic rights. As noted above, King hoped to use the experience in Memphis for his upcoming nation-wide Poor People's Campaign, slated to begin in that month, a campaign designed to agitate the government and society into "abolishing poverty." A large shift from King's focus on civil rights (things he considered to be mere "surface changes"). Had he survived, the PPC would have been his first major push for economic rights.

(The PPC did continue without him the next month, it recieved "lucrative funding" in response to King's death, but "the Poor People's Campaign has been called the last effort of the 1960s mass mobilizations of nonviolent resistance.")

And according to the Encarta Africana article linked on this page, President Johnson and the FBI "waged an outright campaign to derail the organizing process." There are no details on what they did, or why they did it, so I don't know what to think of that... I will guess that King's desire for "guaranteed annual income and full employment" was a bit too radical for LBJ, though.

In Dyson's notes (p 331), we have more info on Helms labelling King as a Marxist.
 

Helms's remark is based on supposed records in the possession of the FBI. As David Garrow writes, the FBI's "still 'Top Secret' quotation of King saying 'I am a Marxist' probably would be discounted by most observers as something King could never have said." But Garrow contends that it might not be surprising after all for King to make such a remark in the light of King's "distaste of the American economic order" dating back to the 1950s. Garrow says that in private "he made it clear to close friends that economically speaking he considered himself what he termed a Marxist" (Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., pp.213-213).

who, after King's "I Have a Dream" speech (which he termed "demagogic"), said that he was "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country"

The "most effective Negro leader", in the midst of the Cold War, becoming a socialist, and steadily revealing his socialist ideas to the public, and most importantly, or threatening (to capitalists), to the poor public.

Perhaps King, with so much popularity, would have been able to bring about a discussion on socialism in the US, where it's not just in the back pages of The Nation but discussed upfront in schools and TV. Maybe he would have brought the idea of class into the minds of Americans and got them to seriously think about it. Maybe the labor movement would not be in such a poor shape.

If he had been allowed to progress, to lead the Poor People's Campaign.... what would have happened?

Surely, one of the most prominent figures in American society coming out against capitalism would have  damaged US capitalist society quite a bit. In international affairs, in business..... if King had succeeded in organizing the poor and gaining radical economic rights, his efforts and criticisms against capitalism would have had dramatic impact, I believe, on the way much of America thought, and the policies it executed during the Cold War. I wonder how different the world would be if King had the chance to unveil "The True Martin Luther King."

But instead, you will see him in the TIME magazine special editions, your high school history books, and on MSNBC "Time & Again" shows on MLK Day. But you will not hear of his socialist side.

[Except, maybe, on PBS]

Ah, I meant to mention earlier that a jury last year (1999) decided MLK was a victim of a vast conspiracy, one that included members of the government, military, and Mafia. The King family strongly believes James Earl Ray, the man arrested and jailed for the murder of MLK, is innocent.

I believe most theories concerning the assassinations of the Kennedies and MLK mainly concern the victims' opposition (real or not) to the Vietnam War. King certainly opposed the war, but his potential to unite the lower class economic rights movement with that of the Anti-War movement (often seen as a middle-class thing), I think, would have been seen as yet another thorn in the backside of the 'Establishment'.
 

Dyson, Michael Eric. I Might Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: The Free Press, 2000.
 

 

Related Links------

  MLK: US on "wrong side of a world revolution"

(update Feb 21, 2001)

http://www.fair.org/media-beat/950104.html

[excerpt]
You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

Vietnam War speech, in MP3 WAV format
(added March 23, 01)

the speech has been broken into 5 MP3 WAVs. Each WAV is between 2-4 megs in size.

This speech was first delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- in it, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

1. Download MLK01mp3.wav
[Excerpt] "They quoted our declaration of independence in their document of freedom... President Truman said they were not ready for independence... we fell victim as a nation of that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for all of these years..."

2. Download MLK02mp3.wav
[Excerpt] "...the US came and started supporting a man named Diem, who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People were brutally murdered merely because they raised their voices against the brutal policies of Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States influence... And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It's a man by the name of General Ki (sp), who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occassion that the greatest hero of his life was Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and press generally won't tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told."

3. Download MLK03mp3.wav
[Excerpt] "This is a role our nation has taken. The role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the priveleges and pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side fo the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to 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, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies... True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look on uneasily upon the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West invest in huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say "this is not just". It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say "this is not just". Western arrogance of feeling it has everything to teach others, and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

4. Download MLK04mp3.wav
[excerpt] "These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort , complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. "

5. Download MLK05mp3.wav
[excerpt]

"I call on every man and woman of good will all over america today.. to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. Don't let anyone make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be, a sort of police man of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgement, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America 'You are too arrogant! If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power! And I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I am God.' "

(one form of this speech is in text format here)

  US Government assassinated MLK due to planned Poor People's Campaign

(update Mar 16, 2001)

http://www.webcom.com/ctka/mlkarticles.html

go back to RedROM Online

Martin Luther King socialist socialism