Dr. King’s Forgotten Warnings About “the Rise of a Fascist State in America”
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As Americans gather next Monday to celebrate the legacy of the great martyred civil rights and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a time of fascist rule in the United States, it is important to remember seven interrelated parts of King’s thought and activism that have been largely forgotten and deleted:
+1. The Dr. King who in 1963 (“Letter From a Birmingham Jail”) wrote that the primary obstacle to overcoming American racial oppression wasn’t the open racism of segregation’s brutal enforcers but the tepid incrementalism of white moderates who counseled excessive patience and discouraged the mass direct action required to overthrow the Jim Crow regime.
+2. The King who spoke out against American imperialism, most particularly against the US War on Vietnam, and who said (on April 4, 1967, in New York City’s Riverside Church) that a society that spent more money on military empire than on programs of social uplift was “approaching spiritual death.”
+3. The King who said that the defeat of de jure segregation and racist voter disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South needed to be understood as an elementary prelude to the overcoming of deeply entrenched racism, de facto segregation, and economic inequality across the entire nation.
+4. The King who placed the primary blame for the US race riots of 1965-67 on a “white power structure…seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” and a “white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” that told Black people “they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”
+5. The King who denounced what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism, and who said that the “real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters was “the radical reconstruction of society itself” – the King who argued that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations.” ( “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King told the journalist David Halberstam April 1967. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”)
+6. The King who said that poor Black, white, and brown masses “must organize a revolution” that would be “more than a statement to the larger society” and more than periodic “street marches” – a movement that would employ regular “mass civil disobedience” to “dislocate the functioning of a society.” The “storm .. rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added, “will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…”
+7. Last not but not least, the officially forgotten King omits his warnings on the “FASCISM” he expected to rise to power in the United States if it failed to undertake this revolution. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community (1967), King offered a sobering take on the white legal backlash to the racial progress achieved by the struggle for Black equality. Many white Americans, King wrote, “have declared that democracy isn’t worth having if it involves [racial] equality…[their] goal is the total reversal of all reforms with the reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism” whereby the law is wielded to guarantee white supremacy.
How haunting it is to re-read those words five years after January 6, when the fascist leader Donald Trump and his neo-Confederate backers tried to overthrow an election they viewed as illegitimate largely because its outcome depended on nonwhite voters and as the Trump47 fascist regime including the US Supreme Court’s rolls back one anti-racist civil and voting rights victory after another.
After his final national sermon in Washington DC 58 years ago, five days before his execution (which took place exactly one year to the day after he spoke out against the US War on Vietnam in Riverside Church in New York City), King stepped outside the National Cathedral and said that, on its current trajectory, the United States would become a “fascist state”:
“I am convinced we cannot stand two more summers like last,” King said during a post-sermon press conference, referring to the violent racial conflagrations that took place in US cities (most lethally in Detroit and Newark) in 1967. He predicted that more such violence would “bring only a rightist takeover of the government and eventually a fascist state in America….But I have to admit,” King added, “that the conditions that brought the violence into being last summer are still notoriously with us.”
That last sentence is important. Consistent with the enumerated points above (see especially #4), King did not blame the violence on American streets on Black rioters; he blamed it on “the triple evils that are interrelated,” that is on the racism, economic/class exploitation, and imperialism that reflected the perverse functioning and structures of a society that needed to be transformed by a great revolution “for the just distribution of the earth’s fruits.”
King’s April 4th 1968 extrajudicial racist execution triggered a Black uprising that may have helped fuel the 1968 presidential victory of the proto-fascistic war criminal Richard Nixon, who ran a white-supremacist “law and order” campaign and launched a vicious repression campaign targeting Blacks, the New Left, and antiwar protesters.
Fifty-eight years later, we are in the middle of the “rightist takeover of the government” that King prophesied – a coup driven largely by white racist backlash. We are on the whole too passively (see point #1 above) witnessing the attempted full-on consolidation of “a fascist state in America” under the command of Donald Trump (the genocidal racist son of a Queens Klansman) with Trump’s fellow arch-racist Hitler fan Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller running much of the sick show, and with the racist RepubliNazis JD Vance and Marco Rubio fighting in the wings to claim Mein Trumpf’s mantle. King’s “triple evils” must be expanded to (at least) five to include militant misogynist patriarchy and capitalogenic ecocide and these five evils must be understood as a malignant simultaneous equations system that has given rise to a fascist regime atop the most lethal superpower in world history — a supremely dangerous development that poses a grave existential menace to all humanity.
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