MLK Day: Contending with King

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, onceagain, to the words and teachings of an American who altered the courseof history.

However, unlike the corporate-sponsored celebrations thatmark King's birth - or the ones that take place during Black HistoryMonth - the focus this time around will be on the work and words of aveteran activist, drawn to Memphis in the early months of 1968 in anattempt to confront the debilitating racial and economic inequalitythat dogged the lives of the city's sanitation workers.

Perhaps, as wereflect on King's death, we will - at least temporarily - move away fromthe pop culture caricature of King that's come to characterize ourcollective memory of him, and actually seek to understand his responsesto the complex dilemmas that bedeviled American society in his lifetimeand beyond.

Historian Tim Tyson writes that in the years after theassassination we worked hard to turn King into a "black Santa Claus."This version of King is a raceless, non-confrontational action figurethat can be, Tyson continues, "filled with whatever generic good wishesthe 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 Kinghas dreams. Over time, we've become much less comfortable with theblack southern preacher and fierce social critic who, for most of hispublic life, stood against some of the most powerful forces in Americansociety.

"The church," King wrote in 1963, "must be the guide and critic ofthe state." If religious leadership failed in this effort, the churchwould be reduced to "an irrelevant social club without moral orspiritual authority." This belief that the church played a central rolein the transformation of society placed him on a moral and politicaltrajectory that frequently confounded allies and convicted theambivalent.

Most significantly, it placed him at odds with the JohnsonAdministration on its two central issues, the War on Poverty and thewar in Vietnam. By 1966, King had come to see Johnson's domestic war aspiecemeal and under funded. In a time of soaring prosperity, it wasabsurd, King declared, to spend billions of dollars on travel to themoon while poor and working class Americans suffered under unspeakableconditions.

Johnson's War on Poverty did accomplish the task ofilluminating the intractability of poverty. For King however, it alsohighlighted the unwillingness on the part of liberal politicians toconfront the issue in more foundational ways. The seeds of thisanalysis would bear fruit in the Poor People's March, King's effort toplace the issue of poverty front and center in the American conscience,and to challenge the country to make the necessary political andeconomic adjustments to address the matter. "True compassion", Kingwrote in 1968, "understands that an edifice which produces beggarsneeds restructuring."

In 1967, a year to the day of his death, King delivered a majorspeech against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in New York City. ToKing, it was morally inconsistent to simultaneously condemn statesanctioned violence within the United States while ignoring statesanctioned violence abroad.

The United States, he intoned in thathistoric speech was "the largest purveyor of violence in the worldtoday." Moreover, the war highlighted America's hostile relationshipwith its poor and minority citizens, who were dying at dramaticallyhigher rates than their numbers in the country merited.

King'spolitical and spiritual instincts led him to a momentous conclusion -that the war represented an immoral, racist, imperialist endeavor thatstained the soul of country. For King, the choice - though difficult -was crystal clear: the moral and political crusade he waged in theUnited States was built upon an alter of redemptive nonviolence; thisreality demanded that he speak out against the war. And so he did; andwhen he spoke, he did so as a child of God and brother to theVietnamese.

It was a position that placed him in uncharted political territoryand had serious implications. Despite the fact that he'd recentlyreceived the Nobel Peace Prize, and had long espoused the internationalnature of the struggle for equal rights in the United States, pundits,politicians and activists virulently chastised King, a mere "civilrights leader", for having the audacity to express an opinion on anissue not unfurling on the streets of Selma or Los Angeles.

He facedintense resistance from almost every corner of his professional life.The board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - theorganization he helped create - expressed its opposition to the effort.His closest advisors and political allies urged him to stick to civilrights, and warned that an unwarranted foray into foreign policy couldjeopardize 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'sWhite House. Surrogates for President Johnson declared that King hadneither the authority nor the competence to speak about foreignaffairs.

His opposition to the war severely damaged his relationshipswith other national leaders within the civil rights movement as well.Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, questioned King's loyalty to hiscountry. Whitney Young of the National Urban League accused King andother anti-war activists of intentionally undermining the War onPoverty with their anti-war stance. National publications were hardlymore kind.

The New York Times called his anti-war position a "serioustactical mistake", while newspapers across the South reaffirmed - withrenewed vigor - that King's recent statements confirmed his suspectedcommunist sympathies. The Washington Post ran an editorial titled "Whaton Earth can Dr. King be thinking?"

Simply put, King thought that unchecked racism, militarism andpoverty posed a direct threat to the existence of the human race. Itwas this perspective that drew him to Memphis, to support a group ofmen whose relationship with their employer seemed as if it had beenripped from the pages of a previous century.

Called to work with aplantation bell, paid starvation wages and fired on a whim, sanitationworkers represented the nearest thing to an "untouchable" class in thecity. But they were also increasingly fed up with the city's antebellumtreatment. After they decided to stand and fight for better wages, theright 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 powerto their movement. He helped to nationalize their plight.

Of course, King brought a lot of things with him to Memphis forwhat would be his final campaign. He brought the titanic pressures ofnational leadership, pathological harassment by the FBI and the specterof his own mortality. He attracted Black Power advocates who openlymocked his leadership and attempted to consign nonviolent direct actionto a bygone era.

But more importantly, he brought with him a bedrockassurance that the universe was morally ordered, and that there was infact a deep, abiding relationship between power, justice and love.King, the hard-nosed political realist, also brought with him therealization that coercion represented one of the crucial variables inthe calculus of liberation.

He knew, in his bones, that FrederickDouglass was right about the fact that power conceded nothing without ademand. He brought the knowledge that every ounce of freedom won in hislifetime was the product of prayerful, deliberative struggle. Hebrought an enduring, ever-deepening confidence in the power ofredemptive nonviolence to transform the human condition.

He broughtwith him the prophetic hope that America would one day live up to thehigh principles it set for itself at the Founding and in the wake ofCivil War. History, King believed, charted an upward path.

Forty years ago this Friday, the nation's pre-eminent moral voicefell silent for the last time. As in years past, we will run the riskof 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'sconfront the uncomfortable and perpetually uncompleted journeys hedared us all to take. Have we kept each other accountable for ourmutual betterment? Have we done everything we can to make our democracyas vibrant and inclusive as possible? Do our houses of worship speaktruth to power, or have they become the "irrelevant social clubs" thatKing warned us they could become?

Finally, let us remember the beautifully complex, conflicted andhopeful young man whose full potential - like that of our country - hadyet to be fully realized.