Martin Luther King: A Revolutionary, Not A Saint

“When I say poor, I don’t just mean black people.”

–Martin Luther King Jr.

“The true enemy is war itself.”

–Martin Luther King Jr.

For thirteen years he lived and worked with the knowledge that a violent death awaited him, that it might come at any moment from a knife thrust out of a crowd, a sudden gunshot, a bomb tearing him to pieces. His wife was plagued with nightmares about it.

Reminders were frequent: a shotgun blast through his front door, the bombing of his home, a dozen sticks of dynamite found smoldering on his porch, a razor-sharp Japanese letter-opener plunged into his chest by a crazy woman, and, of course, the regular late-night phone threats that began with, “Nigger . . . .”

Prayer and a deep Christian faith dissipated his paralyzing fear, giving him the strength to act. His eloquence, soaring idealism, and amazing composure under relentless pressure inspired millions to act with him, leading to the fall of Jim Crow, and contributing to the collapse of public support for the Vietnam War, the most criminal military intervention in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, the public image of Dr. King handed down to us by our mind-managers bears only the faintest resemblance to the impassioned rebel he was in real life. These days Dr. King tends to be remembered as a reformist, African-American preacher who went to college to better himself, believed in God and his fellow man, and won a Nobel Prize for Peace, along with the admiration of both whites and blacks for his decency and non-violent reminders of the nation’s essential goodness. Lost completely are his feverish intensity, tactical brilliance, and anguished incomprehension of a society permeated by racism, exploitation, and deceit.

From the very beginning King was a political radical whose aspirations went far beyond reform, a Christian revolutionary who dedicated himself to creating a culture of social justice that would give substance to the freedom and equality the U.S. political system merely talked about. He opposed in principle “systems of oppression” like colonialism, imperialism, and segregation, and denounced capitalism for being “predicated on exploitation.” He saw racism not as a feudal anachronism of the Old South, but as anational problem implicating all Americans. He found all those isms incompatible with “the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.”

Though he had gone to school in the North and only with reluctance returned to the South, he was never naive about the informal apartheid that characterized life above the Mason-Dixon line. (No one had wanted to rent to him during his student years in Boston.) As a pastor, he regularly traveled to the North years before the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s, plugging into activist structures pushing back against racist exclusion and police brutality.

One such visit was to Los Angeles in the wake of the police killing of Ron Stokes outside a Muslim mosque in 1962 (an event usually associated only with Malcolm X), where King supported locals calling for the ousting of openly racist Police Chief William Parker,* expressed zero tolerance for police brutality, and talked of the need to build black power, by which he meant blacks organizing themselves into a force for real democracy.

The year after the Stokes killing he visited Los Angeles multiple times to protest segregation, and did so again right before the Watts rebellion (1965), when he declared that Los Angeles schools were as segregated as those in Birmingham. In all, he made more than fifteen visits to the area prior to the black uprising, and followed up with another visit in the wake of that event, calling for a Civilian Complaint and Review Board to deal with police brutality, which proposal was angrily shot down by Mayor Sam Yorty, whose racial instincts weren’t all that different from Bull Connor’s.

King understood that blacks being manhandled by police was related to their being corralled into ghettos. Thus, he was deeply critical of California’s Proposition 14, passed in 1964 (supported by 75% of whites), which he called the “vote for ghettos” initiative, since it re-affirmed the practice of deeded covenants mandating that homes remain exclusively in the hands of white owners. Such deeds were common in the North, and King criticized Northern liberals for their hypocrisy in applauding the end of official segregation in the South while perpetuating an informal apartheid in the North.

When the Watts powder keg inevitably exploded, King was devastated by the destruction (thirty-four people were killed) and shocked at the attitude of residents, who cheered on the destruction of “their” communities.

“Burn, baby, burn,” they chanted, as store after store, building after building, was put to the torch and consumed by flames. In a sea of police roadblocks, broken plate glass, and strewn rubble, they cut the hoses of firemen battling the blaze and lobbed Molotov cocktails into the expanding inferno.

Though it may have looked like they were destroying their communities, in fact the residents were fighting for the resources to maintain them, and were, in any case, ironically conforming to the logic of their degraded capitalist environment: Looters loaded up cars with as much merchandise as they could carry off, surrounded by signs celebrating instant acquisition on easy terms.

According to Bayard Rustin, King was deeply affected by Watts, realizing more acutely than ever before the real depth of economic oppression, which overlapped with racism, but also went beyond it.  Having the right to sit at a lunch counter and order a hamburger, for example, meant little to those who lacked the money to pay for one.

With his usual amazing patience, King put himself to the task of explaining to those who thought that black grievances should have ended once civil rights legislation passed, that the urban uprisings in Harlem (1964), Watts (1965), and Newark and Detroit (1967), were caused by longstanding socially-sanctioned crimes committed against blacks, not by them. Building and housing codes were routinely violated to perpetuate slums, meager social allotments owed blacks were often slashed or denied them, and black civil rights didn’t even rise to a theoretical concern for police who brutalized them.

After seeing the devastation of Watts, King moved on to a fair housing campaign in Chicago with a renewed sense of urgency in 1966. He didn’t call the slums there “neglected areas,” nor did he describe its residents as “deprived” or “left behind,” code words the professional servant class uses to imply that mass poverty is somehow incidental to capitalism, when, in fact, it is characteristic of the system, since profit-takers are encouraged to “externalize” costs (i.e., make the public absorb them), among which mass poverty is especially prominent. King called the wretched Chicago ghettos a system of “internal colonialism,” comparing it to the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium. In charge of the system was Mayor Richard Daley and his corrupt regime, who loathed King for shining a public spotlight on their activities, at the same time finding it incomprehensible that he couldn’t be bought off.

Crazed mobs repeatedly turned out to scream racist obscenities and pelt Dr. King and his fellow marchers with bottles, rocks, cherry bombs, and lumps of coal. On a Sunday march a nun was struck in the head by a rock, and the crowd cheered when her wound began to bleed visibly. On a march through Marquette Park and Chicago Lawn Dr. King himself was felled by a fist-sized stone that slammed into his temple. A hurled knife missed him but struck another marcher. Stunned by the depravity, King confessed to reporters that he had “never seen – even in Mississippi and Alabama – mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.”

Except for Operation Breadbasket, most people involved in the Chicago campaign ended up writing it off as a failure. Nevertheless, King was impressive, even convincing gang members to lay down their arms and peacefully march for change, but the massive resources needed to end slums in Chicago were being allocated to obliterate Vietnam, not deal with the tragic legacy of slavery at home. Meanwhile, King’s sincerity and eloquence were as powerful as ever. On a trip to rural Mississippi he spoke so movingly that a five-year-old-girl started sobbing and repeating over and over, “I want to go with him.”

After Watts and Chicago, King publicly stated the need for revolution: “I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

More clearly than any other civil rights leader, King saw that racism abroad was related to racism at home, that freedom for American blacks was tied to self-determination for the Vietnamese people, then fighting to expel the United States from their country. He had already begun speaking out against the war starting in 1965, continuing to do so until his death, in spite of strong criticism from other leaders, a hostile press, and harassment by the FBI. When told he was alienating friends and supporters with his stance, King remained unmoved: “I am not a consensus leader.” “I don’t care who doesn’t like what I say about it.” “This madness must stop.”

He was especially gripped by the suffering of the children, but also protested that twice as many black soldiers as whites were dying as cannon fodder in an imperial war whose crimes rivaled those of the Nazis. Water and land were poisoned, harvests destroyed, and people tortured and murdered in staggering numbers, using funding that should have been allocated to ending poverty at home.

In his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Dr. King called out the U.S. for being, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and did not mince words about the form that violence was taking in Vietnam:

The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our latest weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicine and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? We have destroyed two of their most cherished institutions: the village and the family. We have inflicted twenty times as many casualties on them as have the Vietcong. We have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!

A year later he was cut-down by a bullet full in the face at the age of 39, leaving behind an astonishing list of achievements, all attained against the pressure of barbaric segregation in the South, horrendously complex racism in the North, a prolonged vilification campaign waged against him by the FBI, considerable jealousy on the part of other civil rights leaders, a savage imperial war that devoured the resources needed for social transformation, and a vengeful Lyndon Johnson.

In spite of such formidable obstacles, Dr. King reached more blacks, more Americans, and more citizens of the world, than any U.S. reform leader of the 20th century, and at a depth of understanding few leaders ever even entertain. Referring to King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, John C. Bennett, then president of the Union Theological Seminary, said that “there is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King.”

January 19 is the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. national holiday for Dr. King. This remembrance is a nice gesture, but if we are to truly honor him, we’ll have to establish the culture of social justice he struggled to create, in order to reign in a lawless U.S. government carrying us to utter destruction.

*Chief Parker explained the 1965 Watts uprising this way: “One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.” (italics added) Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America In The King Years 1965-68, (Simon and Schuster, p. 399)

Notes

MLK visits to Los Angeles, Theoharis interview

Racist housing covenants, see (Branch, p. 637)

Watts rebellion, description of . . . (Conot pps. 40, 99, 219, 239, 362, 364)

MLK can’t be bought . . . (Oates, p. 408)

Sobbing five-year-old girl wanting to go with MLK, (Oates, pps. 399-400)

MLK on Chicago mobs being most hate-filled he had ever seen, (Oates, p. 413)

MLK on the need for revolution .. . (Cone, p. 257)

MLK, “This madness must stop” . . .(Cone, p. 297)

MLK, “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” (Cone, p. 237)

“Beyond Vietnam” excerpt (Oates, p. 435)

John C. Bennett quote, (Cone, p. 294)

Sources

Jeanne Theoharis, MLK Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside The South, Counterpunch Radio, www.counterpunch.org

Conot, Robert E., Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness, (Bantam, 1967)

James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest – Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement,” (Harvard, 1993)

David J. Garrow, Bearing The Cross, (William Morrow, 1986)

Stephen B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound – The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., (Harper & Row, 1982)

James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America – A Dream or a Nightmare, (Orbis, 1991)

Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge – America In The King Years 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

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