NOTE: The following essay by Charles McKinney, professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis and former board member of the Institute for Southern Studies, appeared on the website of The Jamestown Project in 2008, but the themes it raises are as important as ever.
CONTENDING WITH KING
By Charles W. McKinney, Jr., The Jamestown Project
As the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr. approaches, the nation’s attention will be ineluctably drawn, once
again, to the words and teachings of an American who altered the course
of history.
However, unlike the corporate-sponsored celebrations that
mark King’s birth – or the ones that take place during Black History
Month – the focus this time around will be on the work and words of a
veteran activist, drawn to Memphis in the early months of 1968 in an
attempt to confront the debilitating racial and economic inequality
that dogged the lives of the city’s sanitation workers.
Perhaps, as we
reflect on King’s death, we will – at least temporarily – move away from
the pop culture caricature of King that’s come to characterize our
collective memory of him, and actually seek to understand his responses
to the complex dilemmas that bedeviled American society in his lifetime
and beyond.
Historian Tim Tyson writes that in the years after the
assassination we worked hard to turn King into a “black Santa Claus.”
This version of King is a raceless, non-confrontational action figure
that can be, Tyson continues, “filled with whatever generic good wishes
the occasion may dictate.”
In an increasingly conflict-averse society,
we’ve grown comfortable with this new rendition of the Good Doctor –
King 2.0. This King is meek. This King turns the other cheek. This King
has dreams. Over time, we’ve become much less comfortable with the
black southern preacher and fierce social critic who, for most of his
public life, stood against some of the most powerful forces in American
society.
“The church,” King wrote in 1963, “must be the guide and critic of
the state.” If religious leadership failed in this effort, the church
would be reduced to “an irrelevant social club without moral or
spiritual authority.” This belief that the church played a central role
in the transformation of society placed him on a moral and political
trajectory that frequently confounded allies and convicted the
ambivalent.
Most significantly, it placed him at odds with the Johnson
Administration on its two central issues, the War on Poverty and the
war in Vietnam. By 1966, King had come to see Johnson’s domestic war as
piecemeal and under funded. In a time of soaring prosperity, it was
absurd, King declared, to spend billions of dollars on travel to the
moon while poor and working class Americans suffered under unspeakable
conditions.
Johnson’s War on Poverty did accomplish the task of
illuminating the intractability of poverty. For King however, it also
highlighted the unwillingness on the part of liberal politicians to
confront the issue in more foundational ways. The seeds of this
analysis would bear fruit in the Poor People’s March, King’s effort to
place the issue of poverty front and center in the American conscience,
and to challenge the country to make the necessary political and
economic adjustments to address the matter. “True compassion”, King
wrote in 1968, “understands that an edifice which produces beggars
needs restructuring.”
In 1967, a year to the day of his death, King delivered a major
speech against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in New York City. To
King, it was morally inconsistent to simultaneously condemn state
sanctioned violence within the United States while ignoring state
sanctioned violence abroad.
The United States, he intoned in that
historic speech was “the largest purveyor of violence in the world
today.” Moreover, the war highlighted America’s hostile relationship
with its poor and minority citizens, who were dying at dramatically
higher rates than their numbers in the country merited.
King’s
political and spiritual instincts led him to a momentous conclusion –
that the war represented an immoral, racist, imperialist endeavor that
stained the soul of country. For King, the choice – though difficult –
was crystal clear: the moral and political crusade he waged in the
United States was built upon an alter of redemptive nonviolence; this
reality demanded that he speak out against the war. And so he did; and
when he spoke, he did so as a child of God and brother to the
Vietnamese.
It was a position that placed him in uncharted political territory
and had serious implications. Despite the fact that he’d recently
received the Nobel Peace Prize, and had long espoused the international
nature of the struggle for equal rights in the United States, pundits,
politicians and activists virulently chastised King, a mere “civil
rights leader”, for having the audacity to express an opinion on an
issue not unfurling on the streets of Selma or Los Angeles.
He faced
intense resistance from almost every corner of his professional life.
The board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference – the
organization he helped create – expressed its opposition to the effort.
His closest advisors and political allies urged him to stick to civil
rights, and warned that an unwarranted foray into foreign policy could
jeopardize everything they’d worked for over the past decade.
By the time he arrived in Memphis, King’s opposition to the war –
now in full bloom – had rendered him persona non grata at Johnson’s
White House. Surrogates for President Johnson declared that King had
neither the authority nor the competence to speak about foreign
affairs.
His opposition to the war severely damaged his relationships
with other national leaders within the civil rights movement as well.
Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, questioned King’s loyalty to his
country. Whitney Young of the National Urban League accused King and
other anti-war activists of intentionally undermining the War on
Poverty with their anti-war stance. National publications were hardly
more kind.
The New York Times called his anti-war position a “serious
tactical mistake”, while newspapers across the South reaffirmed – with
renewed vigor – that King’s recent statements confirmed his suspected
communist sympathies. The Washington Post ran an editorial titled “What
on Earth can Dr. King be thinking?”
Simply put, King thought that unchecked racism, militarism and
poverty posed a direct threat to the existence of the human race. It
was this perspective that drew him to Memphis, to support a group of
men whose relationship with their employer seemed as if it had been
ripped from the pages of a previous century.
Called to work with a
plantation bell, paid starvation wages and fired on a whim, sanitation
workers represented the nearest thing to an “untouchable” class in the
city. But they were also increasingly fed up with the city’s antebellum
treatment. After they decided to stand and fight for better wages, the
right to organize and their very manhood, they asked King to join them,
and he did. So, in March of 1968, he brought publicity and star power
to their movement. He helped to nationalize their plight.
Of course, King brought a lot of things with him to Memphis for
what would be his final campaign. He brought the titanic pressures of
national leadership, pathological harassment by the FBI and the specter
of his own mortality. He attracted Black Power advocates who openly
mocked his leadership and attempted to consign nonviolent direct action
to a bygone era.
But more importantly, he brought with him a bedrock
assurance that the universe was morally ordered, and that there was in
fact a deep, abiding relationship between power, justice and love.
King, the hard-nosed political realist, also brought with him the
realization that coercion represented one of the crucial variables in
the calculus of liberation.
He knew, in his bones, that Frederick
Douglass was right about the fact that power conceded nothing without a
demand. He brought the knowledge that every ounce of freedom won in his
lifetime was the product of prayerful, deliberative struggle. He
brought an enduring, ever-deepening confidence in the power of
redemptive nonviolence to transform the human condition.
He brought
with him the prophetic hope that America would one day live up to the
high principles it set for itself at the Founding and in the wake of
Civil War. History, King believed, charted an upward path.
Forty years ago this Friday, the nation’s pre-eminent moral voice
fell silent for the last time. As in years past, we will run the risk
of celebrating the man by reducing him to a few familiar sound bites,
perhaps a video or two.
However, as we reflect on Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s legacy this weekend, let us remember him in his context. Let’s
confront the uncomfortable and perpetually uncompleted journeys he
dared us all to take. Have we kept each other accountable for our
mutual betterment? Have we done everything we can to make our democracy
as vibrant and inclusive as possible? Do our houses of worship speak
truth to power, or have they become the “irrelevant social clubs” that
King warned us they could become?
Finally, let us remember the beautifully complex, conflicted and
hopeful young man whose full potential – like that of our country – had
yet to be fully realized.
Gov. Pat Quinn today joined Assistant U.S. Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) to speak at “Beyond Transportation: The Economic Impact of Rail in Illinois.”
Unsurprisingly, Internet connection speeds continue to grow worldwide as proven by the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai, the distributed computing and content delivery provider. The data is based on the connections to the Akamai network from various countries and cities, so it’s not a comprehensive view, but … (
