On
January 11, 2022 President Joe Biden made an impassioned speech in
support of the Voting Rights Act and against the right-wing fascist
take-over. It was a critical speech in the fight between the
center-right Democrats and the arch rights fascist Republicans and
deserves our support. But, once again we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther
King’s birthday and fight to protect his revolutionary legacy
from Democratic Party white washers, including their cover-up of
their treachery against him when he was alive.
The
goal is to protect Dr. King’s historical legacy and explain Dr.
King’s independence from the Democratic Party, his lifelong
fight with the Democratic Party, and to call on “social justice
groups” who have become adjuncts the Democratic Party to have
the decency to look history squarely in the face. You don’t
have to agree with Dr. King’s independence from the Democratic
Party, his strong Black Liberation politics, his profound
internationalism, anti-imperialist, and pro-communism, but please do
not take the name of the Revolutionary Dr. King in vain or use him to
advance the neo-liberal, anti-Black Democratic agenda.
Joe
Biden, trying to invoke every possible image to his side, says,
“Will
you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? Do you want to be
on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the
side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of
Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
I
know that many of us who were taught by Dr. King, who marched with
him, CORE, SNCC, Malcolm X he Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
and yes, the Black Panther Party would respond,
“Joe
Biden. Do not use Dr. King to advance your objectives. You Democrats
spent your lives belittling him, defaming him, surveilling him,
character assassinating him, and contributing to his actual
assassination. And, in case you think we forgot, Bull Connor was a
Democrat, George Wallace as a Democrat, and Kennedy and Johnson
conciliated with them. They saw Dr. King as an adversary and when he
refused to advance their agenda, they turned J. Edgar Hoover and the
FBI on Dr. King whom they came to see as an enemy.
Every
year on Dr. King’s birthday, thanks to Jeffrey St. Clair and
Counterpunch, we publish my historical analytical article on Dr.
King’ revolutionary legacy - “All
Hail the Revolutionary King.”
And every year I write a new introduction to situate Dr. King’s
historical role in the specific time, place, and conditions of
today’s movement. Those of us who knew him and studied his work
know that had he been alive, and he is for many of us, he would
continue to be a strong force in challenging the two-party U.S.
Empire - and yes, the Biden-initiated wars against China and Russia.
A
short history of Democratic Party Attacks on Dr. King and the Black
Community
Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. had a complex and contentious relationship
with the Democratic Party as did all of us in the Civil Rights
Movement.
In
his letter 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail he called out white,
Democratic party “moderates.
I
must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely
disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the
regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block
in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s
Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more
devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a
negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace
which is the presence of justice
Dr.
King refused to capitulate to John Kennedy. He refused to acceded to
Kennedy’s demands on who he could choose as his allies and
advisers. In return, the Kennedy’s authorized J. Edgar Hoover
to wiretap him and put him under systematic surveillance with the
goal of discrediting and white-mailing him.
After
a meeting with Civil Rights Leaders at the White House in 1963,
President Kennedy took Dr. King into the Rose Garden for a private
chat. King, assuming the president was going to offer an off the
record set of concessions, was startled when Kennedy demanded he
break his relationship with Stanley Levison, Levison had been close
to the Communist Party but more than that, and partially because of
that, he was a brilliant strategist, tactician, and confidante for
King. He had initially been introduced to King by Bayard Rustin, a
Quaker, in New York City in 1956. Though King had offered to pay
Levison in exchange for his help, Levison refused on every occasion,
as he believed “the liberation struggle is the most positive
and rewarding area of work anyone could experience.”
The
FBI used the pretext of Levison’s ties to the CPUSA to initiate
wire taps in King’s offices and hotel rooms. FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover had long associated the civil rights movement with
communism, and he strongly expected that Levison would use or
manipulate King to stimulate political unrest within the United
States. In 2012, Tim Weiner wrote in his history of the FBI that
Hoover believed Levison had “indoctrinated King in Marxist
thought and subversive strategies”, and that King was “part
of Moscow’s grand design to subvert the United States of
America.”
It
took Robert Kennedy to give written approval to Hoover for
wiretapping of King’s phones to look for evidence in any areas
of King’s life they deemed worthy. The Bureau placed wiretaps
on Levison’s and King’s home and office phones, and
bugged King’s rooms in hotels as he traveled across the
country. As King’s prominence grew J. Edgar Hoover, under the
Democratic Kennedy and then Democratic Lyndon Johnson
administrations, moved to defame, degrade, and assassinate M.L. King
who they correctly identified as “the Black Messiah.”
But,
let’s not demonize Hoover out of context. From 1960 to King’s
death in 1968 J. Edgar Hoover worked for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson, both Democrats. On April 7, 1968, the day of King’s
assassination, Lyndon Johnson was still president, J. Edgar Hoover
was still the head of the F.B.I., and by then Johnson was also
working to isolate and discredit Dr. King.
The
James Baldwin/Bobby Kennedy Meeting 1963 - Kennedy is furious at the
challenge from Civil Rights Militants
Bobby
Kennedy, thinking he would co-opt the civil rights movement initiated
a meeting with James Baldwin to “listen to the Negroes
concerns.” Like in Invisible Man, he did not like what he heard
or see the Black people in front of him.
James
Baldwin brought a delegation of civil rights royalty. David Baldwin,
James Baldwin’s brother, Harry Belafonte, singer and activist,
Edwin Berry, director of the Chicago Urban League, Kenneth Clark,
psychologist, June Shagaloff, Education Director of the NAACP,
Lorraine Hansberry, playwright, Lena Horne, musician, Clarence
Benjamin Jones, advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Jerome Smith, Freedom Rider associated with the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) After Jerome Smith told Bobby Kennedy that Black
people would not fight in Cuba or anywhere else for the racist
States, and Lorraine Hansberry warned Kennedy he had to listen to the
new militant Black Voices, Kennedy put them all under surveillance.
(I would love to hear Clarence Jones tell this story in even great
detail.)
President
Biden is absolutely right to fight for a new Voting Rights Act. He is
absolutely wrong to invoke Dr. Martin Luther King’s name to
justify that support.
Dr.
King speaks out against the war in Vietnam and Democrats from Lyndon
Johnson to the local dog catcher turn against him with a vengeance.
On
April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day of his assassination on
April 4, 1968, Dr. King gave his historic “Vietnam: A Time to
End the Silence: speech at the Riverside Church in New York.
King’s
majestic beginning in which he confronts, publicly, his own
conscience, his own silence, his own sense of betrayal, the apathy of
conforming thought inside his bosom, he makes it clear it is an
“avocation of agony.” As you read his long philosophical
introduction to one of the great orations of all time - with great
admiration for his primary speechwriter, Vincent Harding, let me
translate what all of us understood at the time.
First
let’s read Dr. King in his own words.
I
come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my
conscience leaves me no other choice. I found myself in full accord
when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is
betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The
truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they
call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of
inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their
government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the
human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of
conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the
surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as
perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we
are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we
must move on.
Some
of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have
found that the calling to speak is often avocation of agony, but we
must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate
to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as
well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history
that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to
move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds
of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the
reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it
is, let us trace its movements, and pray that our own inner being may
be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way
beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over
the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have
called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart
of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why
are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you
joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights
don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the
cause of your people?” they ask. And when I hear them, though I
often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless
greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not
really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their
questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal
importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I
believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church - the church
in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate - leads clearly to
this sanctuary tonight.
The
major audience for this speech was urging everyone tied to the
Democratic Party to stand up to Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic
liberals who were carrying out the genocidal war in Vietnam.
What
is behind this painful introduction? Who exactly is telling him that
“peace and civil rights don’t mix? It was president
Lyndon Johnson who dropped his good old boy façade to tell
King in no uncertain terms that if King came out against his war in
Vietnam, Johnson would destroy him. And just as when Muhammad Ali
spoke out against the war in Vietnam, and the NAACP and every liberal
Democrat excoriated him, Dr. King was put through the most brutal
retaliation for his courage. The Democrats worked to marginalized
him. Democratic Party funders cut him off. The media treated him as a
subversive (which he was in his own way) and took away their false
mantle of him as a “moderate.”
The
brutal attacks on Dr. King, led by the Democratic Party, are exposed
in living color in Tavis Smiley’s important film, “Death
of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final
Year”
I
also witnessed the Democratic terror campaign first-hand. In 1964 and
1965 I was a field secretary for the East Coast regional office of
the Congress of Racial Equality and also worked closely with
President James Farmer in the national office. At the July 1965 CORE
National Convention, Ruth Turner of Cleveland CORE and Lincoln Lynch
of Long Island CORE, almost 2 years before King’s speech,
introduced a motion that CORE come out against the U.S. war in
Vietnam and urge Black people not to fight. James Farmer, an avowed
pacifist was terrified and told the delegates, in no uncertain terms,
that CORE depended on the support of the Democratic Party for civil
rights reforms and any effort to oppose the war would bring down
massive repression from the Democrats. At least he was honest. The
delegates still pushed on with their motion and Farmer had to exert
extra-parliamentary maneuvers to kill the motion. But most
importantly, I saw the absolute fear in Farmer’s visage and
while strongly disagreeing, understood his deep concerns as to the
cost to CORE as he knew it.
So,
President Biden. Thank you for introducing the new Voting Rights Act,
and thank you for taking on the fascist right, but please do not
invoke Dr. King’s name to support your cause. The Democratic
Party has his blood on its hand.
Bill
Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden worked to further destroy Dr.
King’s Legacy
In
1972, after the massive white backlash against the candidacy of
George McGovern, some of his supporters, such as Bill Clinton,
concluded, sadly, correctly, that the White Settler State would not
elect a decent civil rights/anti-war president. They initiated the
Democratic Leadership Council to move the Democratic Party to the
right, calling it the “center,” and to purge former
Kennedy and McGovern forces from leadership in the party. They
succeeded only too well. And way beyond George W. Bush’s
“racist dog whistle Willie Horton Campaign in 1988, by 1992,
Clinton and Gore ran against Black men and women - calling the former
“super-predators” and the latter “welfare cheats.”
In
1994, they passed The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
commonly referred to as the 1994 Crime Bill, the Clinton Crime Bill,
or the Biden Crime Law - the largest crime bill in the history of the
United States with 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in
funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for “prevention
program” designed by the police forces. Senator Joe Biden of
Delaware drafted the Senate version of the legislation in cooperation
with the National Association of Police Organizations.
In
1996 Bill and Hillary Clinton championed the Temporary Assistance for
Needy Families Act that, under the guise of “Welfare Reform”
and ended financial support for millions of low-income women and
children. The rhetoric around both was racist and punitive. (The
elaboration of these argument can be found in “How to stop the
Clinton Assault” by Eric Mann and Lian Hurst Mann in Z
Magazine, September 1997, and the Strategy Center’s political
publication AhoraNow no. 3 (October 1997).
So,
as we celebrate Dr. King’s revolutionary legacy, I leave you
with the statements of then Senator now President Joe Biden on how to
protect the civil rights of low-income Black communities speaking in
support of the Crime Bill that he managed.
We
have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part
because of its neglect, created…they are beyond the pale many
of those people, beyond the pale. And it’s a sad commentary on
society. We have no choice but to take them out of society….a
cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of
wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure,
without any conscience developing because they literally …
because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have
not had an opportunity….we should focus on them now….if
we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the
predators 15 years from now.
“The
consensus is we must take back the streets. It doesn’t matter
whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or
my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents,
it doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth.
It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that
enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It
doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of
society. The end result is they’re about to knock my mother on
the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on
my sons.”
And
continues…
“I
don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don’t
care why someone is antisocial. I don’t care why they’ve
become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the
rest of society.”
So,
President Biden. I support your aggressive introduction of a new
Voting Rights Bill. But please do not invoke the name of Dr. Martin
Luther King to advance that cause. For you and the Democrats tortured
him, surveilled him, slandered him, tried to drive him to suicide,
encouraged others to kill him, and now have worked to whitewash his
memory. Worse, you are major contributors to the mass incarceration,
impoverishment, houselessness, and yes, disenfranchisement of the
Black people you know call on to support your voting rights bill.
And
for those social justice activists and organizers today who believe
that the Democratic Party is the road to salvation, I urge you to at
least read this history and expositions of the real Revolutionary
King and ask yourself which side are you on?
All
Hail the Revolutionary King
In
2022 and Beyond
The
annual King Day celebrations provide a great opportunity to defend
Dr. King’s revolutionary legacy against The System’s
efforts to white wash and degrade his frontal challenge to its
crimes. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of the Civil Rights
and Black Liberation Movement, a fierce internationalist,
anti-imperialist, and Pan Africanist, a Black militant, pro-communist
socialist, and part of The Movement that was far to the left of and
in opposition to the Democratic Party. And for some militant young
people who have imbibed the slanders of the system, using phrases
like, “This is not your grandfather’s civil rights
movement” I urge you to study Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
because it will take a miracle to reconstruct The Movement that he
and millions of us built. But that is the challenge today!
In
that there is no such thing as History but only the struggle over
historical interpretation, I, along with many others, want to
reinforce the historical view of Dr. King as a great leader in the
Black Revolutionary Tradition whose work should help shape our
organizing today.
Dr.
King saw “the Negro revolution” as part of a Third World
and world revolution.
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the
world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution
of values…For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the
existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little
change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got
to have a radical reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution
of values.”
Dr.
Clayborne Carson, Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research
and Education Institute at Stanford University, in his King Papers,
related the following story.
Before
leaving Ghana, King welcomed a visit from English clergyman and
anti-colonial activist Michael Scott, during which the two men
compared the freedom struggles in Africa and the United States. King
reportedly expressed admiration for the bus boycott then taking place
in Johannesburg, South Africa, and remarked that there was “no
basic difference between colonialism and racial segregation …
at bottom both segregation in American and colonialism in Africa were
based on the same thing - white supremacy and contempt for life.”
Dr
King supported the Black Power movement and saw himself as a tendency
within it.
He marched with Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks on the March
against Fear in Mississippi June 1966. While initially taken aback by
their cries of Black Power, he soon elaborated his own views as part
of the Black Power continuum. “Now there is a kind of concrete,
real Black power that I believe in … certainly if Black power
means the amassing of political and economic power in order to gain
our just and legitimate goals, then we all believe in that.”
Dr.
King sided with the people of Vietnam including the Vietnamese
Communists
against the U.S. invasion. In his Beyond
Vietnam
speech, written by and with his close comrade, Vincent Harding, his
anti-colonial support for the legitimacy of the Vietnamese Communist
cause was clear.
The
Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a
combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist
revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they
quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document
of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to
support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our
government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready”
for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western
arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.
With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government
seeking self-determination, and a government that had been
established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love)
but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For
the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the
most important needs in their lives. For nine years following 1945 we
denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine
years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to
recolonize Vietnam.
Dr.
King was deeply appreciative of the Black communist traditions of
W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. He
was well aware of the irony and significance that Dr. DuBois died, in
Ghana, an exile from the United States and a Communist, on the very
day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
Dr.
King observed,
We
cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing that he was a radical
all of his life. Some people would like to mute the fact that he was
a genius who became a Communist in his later years. It is worth
noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly recognized the support of Karl
Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In
contemporary life the English-speaking world has no difficulty with
the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the
twentieth century and a Communist or that Pablo Neruda is generally
considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the
Chilean Senate as a Communist…Our irrational, obsessive,
anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as
if it was a model of scientific thinking
King
did not merely mention the great contributions of Communists from Du
Bois, Casey, Neruda and Ho Chi Minh; he situated himself in that
tradition not as a member but clearly as a friend and admirer.
Dr.
King’s non-violence was aggressive and militant reflected in
non-violent direct action.
Of
course, Dr. King had his own unique views inside the civil rights
movement and Black united front. His views on non-violence were real
and deeply held. He also saw non-violence as a tactic to prevent a
massive violent backlash from racist whites. King tried to position
his demonstrations in ways to get the largest amount of white liberal
and international support and to pressure the national Democratic
Party that was tied at the hip to the racist Dixiecrats. His belief
in non-violence deeply held, but was also tied to the theory and
practice of militant, aggressive, Non-Violent Direct Action.
When
I worked with CORE and allied with SNCC in 1964-1965 they were known
as the Black militants, and yet both organizations saw themselves, at
the time, as non-violent. But that did not prevent and in fact
encouraged Black people to march into the registrar of elections in
Southern cities and refuse to leave, Black students to occupy lunch
counters and refusing to leave, Black and white people marching at
the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma confronting an army of armed police
and white racists, or Black people in the north marching into elected
officials’ offices and occupying them, yelling, chanting,
singing, and confronting. Everyone we challenged in “the white
power structure” saw militant, non-violent direct action as a
big threat and retaliated accordingly. No one at the time praised Dr.
King for his “moderation.” They saw angry Black people
and saw Dr. King as a threat, which he certainly was. and saw his
non-violence and “urgency of now” as a political force to
be crushed not co-opted.
Dr.
King fought the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and the Black
Democratic Establishment. When
Dr. King brought his movement to Chicago the Democratic Party Black
establishment refused to support him, sided with the racist Mayor
Daley, and told him to “go down south where you belong.”
Many of them refused to join his mass and militant marches for open
housing and an end to police brutality. In response, Dr. King called
out the Black political establishment.
“The
majority of Black political leaders do not ascend to prominence on
the shoulders of mass support … most are still selected by
white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and
inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of [Blacks] nurtures
a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader.”
On
this day honoring his birthday, let’s take a deeper look at his
political thought and revolutionary legacy.
Dr.
King understood that the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement
was from the outset a battle against the system itself.
King
understood the intersection of radical reforms and social revolution
and was always working to understand the time, place, conditions and
balance of forces that would shape his rhetoric and tactical plan.
King was one of the greatest and most effective reformers of all and
yet, in confronting the system’s intransigence his own
revolutionary outlook kept evolving. King’s prominence began in
1955, in his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the same year
as the murder of Emmett Till and the Bandung Conference of
Non-Aligned Nations–to begin what turned out to be “the
Two Decades of the Sixties” that did not end until the defeat
of the United States in Vietnam in 1975. Despite the U.S. Supreme
Court decision to overturn school segregation in the case of Brown
vs. Board of Education in 1954, Montgomery in 1955, the great
Greensboro sit-ins of 1960, the exciting work of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Congress of Racial Equality
Freedom Rides of 1961 the conditions of Black people in the United
States remained at criminal levels. By 1963 white Democratic Party
terror in the South and Democratic Party racism and brutality in the
ghettos of the North had generated a great deal of militancy,
organizing, and consciousness but little change in the system. At the
great March on Washington in August 1963 King’s Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, Urban League, and
A. Phillip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters took
place amid air of hope–but also great impatience and militancy.
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (a phrase that was
not in its initial draft) was in fact a revolutionary indictment of
U.S. society.
“One
hundred years later [after the formal abolition of slavery] the Negro
still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is
still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of
discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely
island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material
prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing
in the corners of American society and finds himself in
exile in his own land.
So, we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition
“In
a sense we’ve come to our nation’s Capital to cash a
check.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of
the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were
signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white
men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has
defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color
are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America
has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back
marked “insufficient funds.
“But
we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse
to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of
opportunity of this nation. So, we have come to cash this check–a
check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the
security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to
remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to
engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug
of gradualism.”
King
is imploring, cajoling, but what his words make clear, threatening
U.S. society and trying to mobilize Black rebellion. When he says
“crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of
segregation” he is making it clear that slavery is in fact
still in place. He describes the United States as a society that
offers the Negro bad checks and broken promises. When he says, “We
refuse to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt” this is code
for “we know you are morally bankrupt but Black people are here
to demand, as the Staple Singers demanded, ‘When will we be
paid for the work we’ve done’.”
King’s
formulation of “the fierce urgency of now and the tranquilizing
drug of gradualism” was a frontal assault on the President
Kennedy and the Democrats cry for “patience” in face of
injustice. King countered with the spirit of Freedom Now–the
cry of Black militants in South Africa, South Carolina and the South
Bronx–and supported by a growing number of white supporters of
the civil rights movement. In fact, “Now” was one of the
revolutionary slogans of its time. And President Kennedy and the
whole world were listening.
One
of King’s revolutionary observations– that is still
painfully relevant today–was, “the Negro is still
languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself in
exile in his own land.”
In
1964 I was recruited by organizers of the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee to join “the civil rights revolution.”
By the time I got to CORE in Harlem and the Northeast my mentors were
staying up all night debating what exactly that revolution would look
like. While the struggle focused on democratic rights and full
equality many SNCC and CORE leaders were talking about some form of
Black nation, Black Power, Black militancy, Black separatism–not
as a way of “getting away” from the system but as part of
a plan to challenge it–and for some, overthrow it. Clearly
influenced by Malcolm X but also the African liberation movements
people were talking about a challenge to U.S. capitalism and at least
talking about some type of pro-socialist system. It was not all that
clear or delineated but the concepts of full equality, full
democratic rights, Black rights, self-determination, radical reform
and revolution were far more interrelated than counterposed–and
all of them involved Black people in the leadership of a multi-racial
movement–either through integration or separation. In that
context, I am arguing that Dr. King was a Black revolutionary
nationalist, perhaps of a more moderate nature, but he was a student
of world history and was impacted by the revolutionary ideas of the
times. For Dr. King, as early as 1963, to tell the president of the
United States that Black people in the U.S. are “exiles in
their own land” was clearly a call for some form of both full
equality and Black self-determination and far away from the “more
perfect union” myth that the system was selling–with few
buyers.
King
was a victim of capitalist state violence, surveillance,
psychological, character, and actual assassination.
The
story of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to destroy ML King and
force him into a nervous breakdown and suicide is not tangential but
central to King’s revolutionary history–and the
surveillance and police state we live under today. And yet, another
element of the revolutionary history of Dr. King that is being
whitewashed is his actual assassination was by the system itself.
Part of this cover-up is to destroy the memory of the work of Coretta
Scott King in exposing the actual assassination of Dr. King.
In
his “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech the very
night before he was murdered Dr. King was very aware of what he felt
was his possible and imminent assassination.
“Like
anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its
place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do
God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.
And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I
may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we,
as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So, I’m happy,
tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing
any man. Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
“
And
while his words are brave, every time I hear that talk I hear a
mortal man not fully at peace, nor should he have been, with his
mortality–but trying to comfort and reassure Black people that
“we as a people” will find liberation–rather than
asking them to protect him–which he knew they could not.
On
December 8, 1999, (21 years after his death) after the King family
and allies presented 70 witnesses in a civil trial, twelve jurors in
Memphis, Tennessee reached a unanimous verdict after about an hour of
deliberations that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a
result of a conspiracy.
In
a press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta
Scott King welcomed the verdict.
“There
is abundant evidence of a major high-level conspiracy in the
assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil
court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I
wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that
justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is
not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for
America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to
know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of
jury deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive
evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr.
Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal
government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my
husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified
someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray
was set up to take the blame. I want to make it clear that my family
has no interest in retribution. Instead, our sole concern has been
that the full truth of the assassination has been revealed and
adjudicated in a court of law… My husband once said, “The
moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
To-day, almost 32 years after my husband and the father of my four
children was assassinated, I feel that the jury’s verdict
clearly affirms this principle. With this faith, we can begin the
21st century and the new millennium with a new spirit of hope and
healing.”
Sadly,
the police/surveillance/counter-insurgency state is stronger than
ever–but at least there is growing public challenge to its
hegemony. Understanding the revolutionary story of Dr. King and the
system’s decision to bring him down is essential if we want to
understand and make history in the present.
King
was from the outset a Black militant and revolutionary who advocated
non-violent direct action but saw “the Negro revolution”
as the overriding objective.
While
Dr. King strongly argued for non-violence as both a tactical and
ethical perspective he also supported the right of Black people to
armed self-defense and allied with the advocates of armed
self-defense and even armed struggle in the Black movement.
At
a time of the most rampant and systematic police violence the
system’s armed requirement that Black people are “non-violent”
is intellectually and morally lethal. It flies in the face of the
long-standing tradition of armed self-defense in the Black community
and the urgency to defend that tradition today. Worse, to use Dr.
King against that basic right is the height of cynicism and
historical distortion.
Clay
Carson’s In
Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s,
helps shed light on this complex relationship. While many young
organizers were critical of Dr. King SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael
explained best their appreciation of his profound impact on the Black
masses.
“People
loved King. I’ve seen people in the South climb over each other
just to say, “I touched him, I touched him.” I’m
even talking about the young…These were the people we were
working with and I had to follow in his footsteps when I went in
there. The people didn’t know what was SNCC. They just said,
“You one of Dr. King’s men?” “Yes, Ma’am
I am.”
Carson
explains the pivotal role of “militant and self-reliant local
black residents who owned weapons and were willing to defend
themselves when attacked. Black rallies in the county were often
protected by armed guards sometimes affiliated with the
Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice”
Many
SNCC organizers, disagreeing with King’s focus on non-violence,
explained, “We are not King or SCLC. They don’t do the
work the kind of work that we do nor do they live in the areas we
live in. They don’t drive the highways at night”
…Carmichael recalled that the discussion ended when he asked
those carrying weapons to place them on the table. Nearly all the
black organizers working in the Deep South were armed.
But
again, the system wants to act like the battle between King on the
one hand, and SNCC and the Black militants on the other, was a
morality play or an ideological war. It wasn’t. It was an
intellectual, strategic, and yes, ethical struggle among equals and
King was both open minded and introspective about the limits of his
non-violent advocacy–and as such, people had respect for his
own principles and rationale.
In
1965, James Farmer, the director of CORE, a truly dedicated pacifist,
told a group of us at a mass meeting, “I am completely
non-violent but I want to thank our brothers from the Deacons for
Defense (who were both standing guard and yes, getting a standing
ovation from the organizers) whose arms allow me to be non-violent.”
My read of history is King felt similarly.
And
even more importantly, King well understood that his “non-violence”
could be used by the system as a justification for state violence and
of course the system’s need to destroy the Black united front.
In his speech, “Beyond Vietnam” on April 4, 1967 King
addressed frontally his most principled conversations with the angry
youth of the urban ghettos. He stated,
“As
I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I
have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve
their problem. I have tried to offer my deepest compassion while
maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully
through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightfully so, “What
about Vietnam? ” Their questions hit home and I knew I could
never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in
the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
Note
that King does not try to raise a moral critique of those who would
use Molotov cocktails and rifles in response to the economic and
armed violence of the state. And by making clear he considered its
advocates “the oppressed” he supported the morality, if
not the tactics, of their cause. Instead, he simply argued that he
did not feel it would “solve their problem” and even
then, qualified his own advocacy of non-violence to make the case
that “social change comes most
meaningfully”
but not exclusively from non-violence. He admitted it was a
legitimate debate.
Martin
Luther King Jr., SNCC, CORE, and Malcolm X represented at the time
the “left” of the Black united front and worked to find
strategic and tactical unity with the NAACP and Urban League–which
made the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Bill, and the Voting
Rights Bill possible. While King had many contradictions with the
young Black militants he understood them and they him as strategic
allies against a system of white supremacist capitalism.
SNCC,
Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and M.L. King were on the frontlines of the
movement against the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam.
While
SNCC and Malcolm were among the first to speak out frontally against
the war as early as 1965, by April 1967 both King and Muhammad Ali
took enormous risks to frontally challenge the war on moral grounds
and to argue that Black people in particular had no interest in
supporting the war.
In
his monumental Beyond
Vietnam
speech. Dr. King argued in support of Vietnamese self-determination
and rejected the view that the U.S. had any legitimate interests in
Vietnam.
Reading
primary documents is essential for the revolutionary
historian/strategist/tactician and organizer. In reading and
re-reading Beyond
Vietnam
I still hang on its every word.
King
called out U.S. war crimes against the Vietnamese
people making the analogy that the United States feared the
most–comparisons with Nazi Germany. He asked, what do the
Vietnamese people “think when we test our latest weapons on
them just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in
the concentration camps of Europe.”
“They
were led by Ho Chi Minh” and were creating “a
revolutionary government seeking self-determination.” He
describes Ho as saved only by “his sense of humor and irony…
when he hears the most powerful nation in the world speaking of
aggression as it drops thousands bombs on a nation eight thousand
miles from its shores.” (Communists with a sense of humor and
irony–perhaps the most revolutionary insight of all.)
*
Curtail the U.S. build up in Thailand and Laos
This
was tantamount to calling for immediate U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.
It recognized the victory of the National Liberation Front and argued
for what would later become a critical component of Black people’s
demands against the U.S. government - “reparations.”
The
story of the system’s attacks on Dr. King once he spoke out
against the war in Vietnam and his courage in the face of this
assault is another chapter of Dr. King’s revolutionary
contribution to U.S. and world history. One important version of that
story is Tavis Smiley’s documentary, Death
of a King: Dr. Martin Luther King’s Final Year.
Dr.
King brought a powerful and frontal indictment of the system of white
supremacist, racist, capitalism. He appreciated the ideas of others
and worked to build a Black and multi-racial united front against
what he called “racism, poverty, and militarism.” He was
willing to confront “the cowardice” inside his own bosom
and modeled how all of us have to put our bodies, souls and lives on
the line. He rejected gradualism and demanded “Freedom Now.”
He advocated non-violence but defended the right of those who
disagreed with him to armed self-defense. He rejected U.S.
chauvinism, called for a militant internationalism, and challenged
the U.S. Empire at home and abroad. He was independent of and yes,
willing to challenge and confront the Democratic Party. He was and is
a great contributor to the endless struggle for human and planetary
liberation.
It
is time to celebrate the Revolutionary King on the anniversary of his
birthday. We thank Stevie Wonder, who spoke for all of us, when he
wrote,
I
just never understood
How a man who died for good
Could not
have a day that would
Be set aside for his recognition Because
it should never be
Just because some cannot see
The dream
as clear as he
that they should make it become an illusion
And
we all know everything
That he stood for time will bring
For
in peace our hearts will sing
Thanks to Martin Luther King
Happy
birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday
Happy
birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday. Happy
birthday to you
