How should we classify the political ideology of Martin Luther King, Jr.? King’s ideology, with respect to race relations, can be described as radical idealism. Given how much they have changed through the years, the terms liberal,conservative, and moderate are so loaded and so unclear that they can be tricky to apply, but King’s popular reputation as liberal is mostly accurate. King can be called “liberal” in a couple of senses: in the modern sense he was a proponent of radical egalitarian change, federal government intervention, global equality, human “brotherhood,” and income redistribution; he was liberal in the classical sense as a proponent of the Enlightenment, and for a certain free-thinking with regard to Church hierarchies. King can be called a “conservative” in that he was extremely religious, and supported many of his arguments with Christian theology, which modern Americans often view as a conservative trait. King’s ethics prohibited the violent disruption of the status quo, which could be called conservative, or, perhaps more aptly these days, moderate. Suffice to say, this is a man so singular in the force of his moral vision and courage that he transcends most labels. He is a national hero and inspiration, or should be, for people of all political stripes.
The following are notes on three works by King in A Testament of Hope (Harper One, 1990), with the question of an ideological or political label in mind:
From the I Have a Dream speech:
Despite being oft-characterized by black radicals as a message that is somehow soft, this speech includes threatening language aimed at the complacent North as well as the South: “A Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No we are not satisfied…” (218-219) King’s language was prophetic regarding the race riots that would sweep the nation: “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights…those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content, will have a rude awakening if this country returns to business as usual.” (218) King did use the speech to espouse integration and brotherhood, but did it in the context of a demand for radical change, one that was appreciative of the fervor of black nationalism: “The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people…“(218)
It is startling to think that this speech, which created such a powerful feeling of optimism, was followed a month later by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and the month after that by JFK’s assassination. What a hectic, tragic time it must have been to live through. Malcolm X’s statement that the “chickens came home to roost” on that day in November seems, in retrospect, apt. Those “chickens” still rule the roost.
From the Promised Land speech:
King had a powerful spirituality, but his admonition against an afterlife-focused religion verged on materialism, and he called the talk of “long white robes over yonder” (the common concept of heaven) symbolism, anathema to the views of any fundamentalist or Biblical literalist. (282)
“The masses of people are rising up.“(279) By listing as examples of uprisings South Africa, Kenya, NYC, and Memphis, Tennessee, King placed the struggle of US blacks on an international, revolutionary, anti-colonialist continuum, while his comparison of their position to the slaves in Egypt under Pharaoh sounds like that of a “fellow traveler”; “slaves get together… Now let us maintain unity.” (280-281) King’s assessment of the potential power that lay dormant in the black G.D.P. sounds almost like black nationalism, but in the moving final paragraphs of this speech, in which he accurately prophesized his death at the hands of “sick white brothers,” is remarkable in that he is unwilling to give up the rhetoric of human brotherhood, even while speaking of his most vicious enemies. (283, 286)
From Letter from the Birmingham Jail:
King makes a plea for more interracial cooperation here, and lauds those whites who have already committed to the cause as “too small in quantity, but…big in quality.” (298) But he also embraces the title of extremist; the letter’s closing remark, especially when read in context, is a rousing call for radical change, and King writes that if he displays “…patience with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.” (302) King’s call to direct action is, in itself, radical. His critique of laws as just and unjust as the basis for breaking the latter is a fairly liberal (in the broad sense) legal doctrine, that draws on a conservative (in the broad sense) view of ethics, one which is not relativistic or post-modern, but is grounded firmly in Western, Judeo-Christian, and classical thought. (293-295) The statement that “law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice” is a rebuke to the conservative ideal of order for its own sake. (295)
King’s vision of a transformed humanity, with regard to race relations and everything else, is difficult to classify, but as we use the terms today he falls most comfortably within the liberal tradition.
31. Civil Right No. 1: The Right to Vote (A Testament of Hope, page 182) An op-ed piece by MLK published in the Sunday, March 14, 1965, New York Times.
I chose to discuss this one because, though the main topic of the essay is voting rights in the South, a week after “Bloody Sunday,” King also addresses the topic of Sweet Land of Liberty (Sugrue): the bitter inequality that blacks faced in the North. King states in this essay that the South had “a stable pattern of community life that at least promised survival and a minimum of emotional security. This is more than is promised by the slums of New York, Chicago and other cities, which are already teeming with bitterness and constantly kept at boiling point by the misery of rats, filth, unemployment and de facto segregation.” (pg. 182) The Voting Rights Bill was on the table (According to the text, LBJ would give a TV address on the issue the following day), and King addressed the issue of the inordinate power that conservative, segregationist southern Senators had, in the direction of legislation: “Bills providing for the welfare of our nation, from Medicare to education, must run the gauntlet of southern power before they are enacted- and many never are.”
There was great upheaval in Selma, Alabama, surrounding the issue of voting rights, and the demographics of the participants showed that the civil rights movement was growing rapidly. According to King, in Birmingham (1963) the participants were “students and unemployed adults,” while, two years later in Selma, 40-50% of the total black population was mobilized in the fight to gain voting rights. King skewered the hypocrisy of the whites in Selma, quoting a misspelling (“vocher” for voucher) on the “literacy test” from the Selma registrar’s office.
The document is a strange thing to meditate upon. History will view these years as the peak of the American empire, and Americans’ average standard of living was perhaps the best of any population anywhere, ever. And yet, at recently as this, and as brightly as our star was shining, there was a large minority population denied the most basic democratic right:the right to vote.
All of the readings I had to do were interesting, and I was probably not the only one who found the experience of reading King’s statements, and their message of urgent and activist humanism and non-violence, collected together to be a powerful experience.
Policemen preparing to defend “states’ rights” in Selma, on March 7 1965, “Bloody Sunday.”
I’m not claiming this one (I can’t even read it ’cause I’ve used up all my free articles for the month), but this article in the New York Times today looks like a good one for our class, if somebody still needs a link.
Below is a link to a story that could be from many cities across America; this one happened in Bakersfield, CA a couple of weeks ago. The story is on the website of a local TV news station.
I used to live on MLK Blvd. (and Beacon) in Seattle and, for Seattle, it was a pretty tough corner. You could hit the dealers with a slingshot from my back porch, and big police busts were an everyday thing. In how many cities is “Martin Luther King Blvd”-named for a man of equality, integrity, and peace- a street associated with poverty, crime, and violence?
The article above, from the Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle, announces the upcoming commencement of the 1970 class at a Georgia college. The original ceremony was cancelled after race riots broke out in response to the killing of a black teenager in an Augusta jail. Georgia governor Lester Maddox sent in the National Guard, and the students did not join the riots. They apparently got the message from Kent State that protest would be remedied with bullets. Below is a link to a Randy Newman song that references Lester Maddox, and that has a very abrasive, humorous, and complex message about racial politics that is along the lines of Sugrue’s argument in Sweet Land of Liberty: That the North is also culpable in the oppression of blacks.
Racism, as Thomas Sugrue presents it, is not merely an irrational dislike of people who are “other.” It must be tied to and stem from the unconscious desire to maintain economic and political inequality.
Racism is a psychological construction used to justify inequality. White people are racist to the extent they have to be in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would accompany an honest accounting of the relative situation of black people. Sugrue, on page 509 of his book Sweet Land of Liberty (Random House, 2008), writes that “whites–whatever they personally thought of blacks–returned to their white neighborhoods, continued to send their children to segregated schools, and fought to maintain control over taxation, education, and land use in ways that were far more damaging to the cause of racial equality than any negative feelings they might harbor…” (509)
Sugrue shows that civil rights have been gained by the exercise of political force, and rarely by an elimination of “racist” attitudes that led to a voluntary leveling of the playing field. It seems to be human nature to hold on to any advantage. The problem is the inherent lack of force available to communities that are in the minority demographically and monetarily. That is why, I think, Sugrue shows such an affinity for the perspective of the relatively unknown civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph. To wed economic issues with racial issues seems to be the only realistic way forward for the civil rights movement. Sugrue disparages the idea of abandoning programs like affirmative action as a shift “rightward,” but in a nation where income inequality is at record levels and continues to grow the pragmatic decision to seek fairness for all, irrespective of color, would give black activists common cause with much of America.
As Sugrue points out, the push for “diversity” rather than equality has resulted in a token integration within the (ever-shrinking) American middle class. The push must be for equality, and it is going to be an ugly fight.
The story told in Sweet Land of Liberty is sad, indeed. I have included some pretty saxophone music with my post, if anyone is in the mood for spiritual consolation.
Still writing on Sugrue, check back later… but I wanted to make an announcement:
Democracy Now! (the radio program hosted by Amy Goodman) features Thomas Frank and Grace Lee Boggs (see Sugrue’s Index) on today’s show. Boggs is inspirational.
How did Malcolm’s attitudes towards white people change over time?
Malcolm’s early attitude toward whites is characterized by a wary coexistence that hardened into hatred. His father was killed by whites; three of his uncles were killed by whites; and Malcolm’s family were driven from their home by the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. (A. Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ballantine Books, 1987, pgs. 3-4) Even after moving to Lansing, Malcolm existed in a world of unofficial segregation and oppression in which blacks remained in positions of servitude and poverty. Malcolm’s time in prison and his conversion to the Nation of Islam did not soften his vision of white America.
Malcolm recalled having a conversation with an unnamed reporter sometime around 1963, in which the two men discussed Christianity in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The conversation seems to have been a surprise to Malcolm, as the white journalist spoke with him as a peer, as an intelligent man, and on a subject that was only marginally related to racial politics. (Haley, 346) So Malcolm’s conception of whites as “devils,” with no exceptions, seems to have softened even before his voyages abroad.
Malcolm’s experiences in the Middle East in 1964 abroad astonished him, as one would expect given his voracious, auto-didactic mind, and the trip caused a major shift in his thinking, as he experienced hospitality and spiritual kinship with many light-complexioned Muslims. He says of his realization at this time that he came to see humanity with “color-blind” eyes, and as a “brotherhood… all races, colors…together as one.” (ibid. 385-388) In Africa, Malcolm felt at home amidst the energetic nationalism and politics of the region, though his interactions with whites there were more mixed than they had been in the Mid-East. Though Malcolm expressed a certain kinship for some of the white Peace Corps volunteers he met in Africa, his disgust with the white businessmen who had come from abroad to exploit African natural resources was perhaps the more powerful impression. (403-405)
On his return, Malcolm proclaimed the change in mind he had undergone to an amazed press: “In the past, yes, I have been guilty of sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again.” (416)
What of his attitudes toward black people?
Malcolm’s attitudes toward black people remained more consistent than did those toward whites. From early on and throughout his life, Malcolm identified with the Black Nationalist viewpoint of his father, who’d been a follower of Marcus Garvey. (9) Malcolm thought that many black Americans were “complacent and misguided,” and despised any attempts, like his own youthful “conking,” to appear white; Malcolm thought the pride that light-skinned blacks took in their complexion indicated brainwashing. (7-8, 64) Even as a teenager Malcolm had a strong animosity for blacks who strove for middle-class acceptance, calling it a phony act. (70) After his conversion to Islam, Malcolm came to accept the teaching of W.D. Ford: that blacks were made in the image of God, and “were Gods themselves,” but he retained a scorn for integrationist blacks, “Gods” though they might be, preferring a political program of black self-reliance. (239)
Was Malcolm X a racist?
Sure he was, at times. His refusal, through most of his life, to allow that some white people were well-intentioned was a harsh stereotyping of hundreds of millions of people. That said, he’d as much justification as anyone in history to paint his anger with a broad brush: his family’s violent, racist, victimization by whites and his life experience as a black person in a thoroughly racist country gave him that. Later in his life, even before his conversion to color-blindness, Malcolm’s conception of whites had changed from anger to a strategic refusal to integrate, as he thought in the best interests of black Americans. Well before his public acknowledgement of it, Malcolm made Alex Haley aware of his feeling of kinship with whites who shared his ideology, as in the story of the sympathetic motorist that they encountered while driving together. (465) In the year before his death Malcolm made a total renunciation of racism, stating that the youth of all colors were America’s “hope,” and that “the rest of us have always been living a lie.” (460)
In my “conservative paper,” which answers a very similar question, I intend to argue in part that the triumph of conservatism has its roots in the internal contradictions caused by the Civil War, but I will leave that aside for now and try to focus on the time frame covered by Phillips-Fein in Invisible Hands.
The social reforms created in the New Deal suffered death by a thousand cuts, a process which began only shortly after they were enacted. In the wake of capitalism’s near-total collapse, and riding the wave of populist good-cheer that followed the Allied victory in WWII, American labor was in a very strong position by the late 40′s. This was untenable for the lords of American industry who, until recently, had been considered a sort of American aristocracy. These powerful men pooled their resources in a variety of organizations that shared the goal of spreading a “free market” ideology of deregulation, anti-unionism, and reduced tax/tariff rates through propaganda, lobbying, and electioneering. The cause was aided by the development of Neoliberal economics, a politically aggressive family of free-market theory that industrialists were happy to bankroll. With industry funding, Neoliberalism (developed primarily by dissident Austrians) flourished in America, particularly at the University of Chicago, which trained a generation of economists who went on to bring a plague of “austerity” to Latin America and other nations in the U.S./Nato sphere of influence.
Phillips-Fein shows how the seeds of the conservative political program that eventually became the consensus position in Washington (starting with Reagan’s presidency) were sown by the Goldwater campaign in 1964. The winning combination of American militarist triumphalism, coded (and sometimes overt) racism, and an angry critique of the federal government (over-taxation, over-regulation, etc.) did not win the White House for Goldwater, but it galvanized the conservative movement and pointed the way for Reagan. After Reagan, Neoliberal policies became the baseline, supplanted occasionally by the hyper-militarism of the neoconservatives, but never really threatened by the liberalism that had characterized mid-century American politics.
Invisible Hands was published in 2009, before the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission, a huge victory (in a string of victories) for the protagonists of the book, and possibly the final end of liberalism. As Philips-Fein writes, from the long view it is the New Deal era that appears to be the aberration. (269) The history of nations is filled with monarchies and oligarchies of different shapes and sizes. Rule by the well-connected few would seem to be the natural state of things in human society. Those of us of working age today were born lucky: to have caught the tail-end, however slender, of middle-class prosperity in America.
These tough looking policemen are guarding an invitation-only meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society!
It’s a tricky question, because the answer is that they’re not populist in any sense of the word, except in the sense that is alluded to in the question above, in which the word (“populist”) must be put in quotes. Walmart is popular, and it is cheap, but so is Mad Dog 20/20. Walmart is not beneficial to most Americans nor does it seek to act in their interests. By the end of To Serve God an Walmart, as we move through the 1990′s, even the pretense of patriotism is discarded in favor of a sweatshop internationalism. Walmart sells poorly made goods to an American working class (who continue to think of themselves as “middle class”) whose paychecks have been undercut by Walmart’s innovations in union-busting and use of foreign manufacturers. The company’s own employees are famously exploited, but these same employees are the basis for Moreton’s narrative, in which the workers, though underpaid and overworked, are made to feel valued. It is an angle that allows Moreton to claim a sort of even-handedness, and to avoid the appearance of a condescending attitude. It fits with what I take to be a current trend in historical research, in which even the subdued and exploited must be shown to be actors with the full powers of agency and will that are granted to all humans. I found the theme of gracious servitude to be an interesting perspective that ultimately rang false: an unfortunate distraction in an otherwise scathing and clearly considered analysis. Sometimes people don’t have agency. Sometimes they just get screwed. The source of much of the detail Moreton provided to prove the high-spiritedness of her servant-clerks was taken from the company newsletter: hardly the real voice of the workers. Other material was taken from interviews with a woman who eventually joined management in the home office: not a good representative sample. Happily, Moreton doesn’t seem to believe the meme herself, and the majority of the book explains how Sam Walton and Walmart nurtured the appearance of up-by-the-bootstraps entrepreneurialism and familial generosity, even as their well-connected company became an economy unto itself on the backs of poor people in several continents.
Moreton showed that Walmart’s has benefited from its position as economic alternative of last resort: as employer of Ozark farming families willing to work for pittance to keep their farms going (a pattern that has now been repeated throughout America). Farmers, like factory workers, are producers. With its rabid promotion of “globalization,” Walmart helped to destroy the ability of American producers to compete with third-world competitors, thereby freeing up a pool of laborers desperate for work. As economic educator to Central Americans, Walmart gave a mission and philosophy to students whose nations had been ravaged by exactly the kind of aggressive “opening” of markets that Walmart epitomizes.
If Walmart is populist, if it truly represents the desires and beliefs of the majority of Americans, then we are all in for a bitter taste of what the World Bankers like to call “austerity.” The rest of us might call it poverty.
