From Civil Rights to Human Rights

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice

Thomas F. Jackson

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812200003
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Martin Luther King, Jr., is widely celebrated as an American civil rights hero. Yet King's nonviolent opposition to racism, militarism, and economic injustice had deeper roots and more radical implications than is commonly appreciated, Thomas F. Jackson argues in this searching reinterpretation of King's public ministry. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, King was influenced by and in turn reshaped the political cultures of the black freedom movement and democratic left. His vision of unfettered human rights drew on the diverse tenets of the African American social gospel, socialism, left-New Deal liberalism, Gandhian philosophy, and Popular Front internationalism.King's early leadership reached beyond southern desegregation and voting rights. As the freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s confronted poverty and economic reprisals, King championed trade union rights, equal job opportunities, metropolitan integration, and full employment. When the civil rights and antipoverty policies of the Johnson administration failed to deliver on the movement's goals of economic freedom for all, King demanded that the federal government guarantee jobs, income, and local power for poor people. When the Vietnam war stalled domestic liberalism, King called on the nation to abandon imperialism and become a global force for multiracial democracy and economic justice.Drawing widely on published and unpublished archival sources, Jackson explains the contexts and meanings of King's increasingly open call for "a radical redistribution of political and economic power" in American cities, the nation, and the world. The mid-1960s ghetto uprisings were in fact revolts against unemployment, powerlessness, police violence, and institutionalized racism, King argued. His final dream, a Poor People's March on Washington, aimed to mobilize Americans across racial and class lines to reverse a national cycle of urban conflict, political backlash, and policy retrenchment. King's vision of economic democracy and international human rights remains a powerful inspiration for those committed to ending racism and poverty in our time.

Chapter 1

Pilgrimage to Christian Socialism

Martin Luther King’s family and mentors immersed him in a river of collective memory stretching back to slave times. His father escaped the exploitative sharecropping system in 1918, becoming a prosperous minister in Atlanta by the time Martin was born in 1929. But poverty was still a near neighbor. Why were so many people “standing in bread lines,” King, Jr. asked in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression. By his teen years he knew that the “inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.” It was the source of his “anti-capitalistic feelings,” he recounted in a 1950 autobiographical essay. The family’s security could not hide “tragic poverty” all around him, evident in the hunger and tattered clothing of his playmates. His grandfather’s Ebenezer Baptist Church was also a community center providing food, clothing, medicine, and childcare for wage-earning mothers. “Whosoever carries the word must make the word flesh,” its pastor, A. D. Williams, preached.¹

King scaled heights of achievement in both black and white society. But he remained acutely aware of his roots in the collective strivings of ordinary African Americans. King met Howard Thurman in 1953 during his final year studying for a Ph.D. at the School of Theology at Boston University (BU). Thurman had traveled far from his own poor rural roots, graduating from Morehouse College and Rochester Theological Seminary and becoming dean of BU’s Marsh Chapel that year. King had read Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, in which Jesus is portrayed as a “poor Jew” and a social revolutionary. In chapel King sat shaking “his head in amazement at Thurman’s deep wisdom,” his roommate Philip Lenud recalled. King adopted Thurman’s description of slavery as a “low, dirty and inhuman business.” How had slaves built spiritual defenses against fear, humiliation, and violence? Thurman recalled his grandmother tell of an open-air gathering of slaves who had assembled to hear a sermon. In a “triumphant climax,” the slave minister exhorted them, they were neither “niggers” nor “slaves” but “God’s children!” “Something welled up within them,” King later preached, as they sang, “I got shoes, you got shoes, all of God’s children got shoes.” It was not simply a sermon of Reassurance. The social gospel promised shoes on earth, not just freedom in the hereafter.²

King described his “pilgrimage to nonviolence” in 1958, surveying his nonviolent inspirations and theological development. King never wrote of his parallel pilgrimage to democratic socialism, which is understandable given the repressive anticommunist climate of the 1950s.³ But the seeds of his mature socialism are clearly visible in his youth and education. King emulated his father and grandfather’s social gospel ministries. As King learned Baptist preaching, important mentors—Benjamin Mays, Walter Chivers, George Davis, and Howard Thurman—fostered King’s commitment to racial and economic equality. King read nineteenth-century critics of capitalism—Walter Rauschenbusch, Edward Bellamy, and Karl Marx—at the same time that he developed a repertoire of sermonic set pieces borrowing from now obscure Protestant preachers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Eugene Austin, and Robert McCracken. In ways not fully appreciated, Reinhold Niebuhr’s socialist writings guided King’s understanding of political and economic power, class conflict, and class alliances, as much as Niebuhr shaped King’s theology.

History and Heritage

King, Jr. inherited a determination to fight economic and racial injustice from his family and community. We should not identify his or his father’s values too closely with their “bourgeois” class positions. They both witnessed poverty firsthand, envisioned collective political action to overcome it, and disdained acquisitiveness and class pretensions among Atlanta’s black “bourgeoisie.” King, Sr.’s memoir, Daddy King, vividly recalls the dilemmas of resistance and repression, despair and endurance that poor rural black folk faced after Reconstruction. Toiling in a rock quarry as a young man, his father, James King, lost part of his right hand in an explosion. His employer fired him without compensation. He returned to sharecropping, but landowners regularly cheated him when they “settled up” the cotton crop. James King was treated as “an object instead of a man,” Daddy King (called “Mike”) recalled. He respected his father’s hard work and occasional defiance of white authority. But ultimately he judged him harshly for growing “old on somebody else’s land,” a broken, bitter, alcoholic man. In contrast, King, Jr. later wrote, Daddy King resisted segregation’s “brutalities at first hand.” Compelled to work the fields, Mike attended school only three months a year. Whites saw him “first as a worker” and only then as a child. As a naïve twelve-year-old, Mike protested when a landlord defrauded his father of money due him from the sale of some cottonseed. The landlord publicly branded James King a troublemaker and evicted the family. One breach of Jim Crow economic subordination elicited harsh reprisals. King, Jr. learned from the history of his family and people. Emancipation freed blacks from “physical slavery,” he later testified, but they gained no “land to make that freedom meaningful.”⁴

Survival, dignity, and resistance were grounded in communal life and in “the redeeming value of sharing,” King, Sr. learned. His mother Delia King worked in cotton fields and kitchens to keep her family together, drawing Mike into church as a place of refuge and renewal. Delia taught Mike that making money carried an unacceptable price if it threatened personal safety, kin or family. He got a job heaving coal into locomotive engines at age fourteen—perilous work that nevertheless stoked his dreams of rescuing his family from poverty. The racially segmented southern labor market was harsh and unforgiving. Mike observed how bosses favored white workers in assigning extra work, as they in turn pandered to the bosses and denounced each other as labor agitators. It was the end of his childhood, he wrote. Delia King tracked down Mike and rebuked his boss for hiring her underage son. She also refused $500 in wages owed Mike, protesting that she would accept nothing that would allow anybody to exploit her child. Mike could not even reap the bitter fruit of his own exploitation.⁵

Mike King moved to Atlanta in 1918 with little money or education. Established middle-class blacks scorned his “rough, country” roots as he trained as a young preacher in the 1920s. He considered the elitism of Atlanta’s black bourgeoisie to be as bad as white racism. But the turn-of-the-century Negro and mulatto upper class, whose status derived from serving elite whites, had to accommodate a new class of professionals and entrepreneurs who rose with the expanding Negro market—insurance men, realtors, businessmen, professors, and, of course, ministers. Mindful of their origins, many genuinely aspired to become “race men.” They admired both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, mixing strategies of race uplift through business enterprise and protest for equal citizenship rights. One of these, Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, the father of Mike’s future wife, Alberta, took Mike King under his wing. “Change is coming whether the white man can handle it or not,” he told Mike in 1920. Williams had arrived in 1893 from rural Georgia, filling Ebenezer Baptist Church with migrants swelling the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. Ministering to the poor and working class, he preached that every minister should be “an advocate for justice” all week long, not just on Sunday. President of the Atlanta NAACP from 1917 to 1920, Williams agitated for voting rights and equal educational funding; he helped found Booker T. Washington High School, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s alma mater. King, Jr. grew up comfortably among ambitious people whose class consciousness was leavened by humble origins and a strong sense of racial solidarity and determination to fight the injustices of caste.⁶

King, Sr. rose quickly in black Atlanta, graduating from Morehouse College in 1930, marrying Alberta Williams, and inheriting the Ebenezer pulpit in 1931. Martin admired his father’s political fight to equalize teachers’ salaries and his protests of Jim Crow elevators in the courthouse. Ministers, unlike teachers, were comparatively immune from white reprisals, King, Sr. recognized, and had special obligations. In 1935, he led several hundred protesters downtown, demanding the ballot. Whites looked on dumbfounded; white newspapers never covered black protests. King, Jr. grew critical of his father’s success ethic but admired his politics. He also seems to have picked up Daddy King’s disdain for “slick businessmen” who profited from housing segregation and the low wages they paid black workers. “The poor, black and white, were taught to hate each other,” King, Sr. recalled. “Businessmen made money from both.” Martin clearly carried forward his father’s conviction that “the masses had to take part in social change.” Daddy King organized consumer boycotts targeting a “vital part of our city’s life—its economy.”⁷

Auburn Avenue gave King, Jr. a “deeply religious” identity, and both parents actively discouraged feelings of class superiority in their children. King recalled growing up in neither a crime-ridden “slum district” nor a refuge of the “upper class.” This picture of frugal, middle-class solidity is at some variance with Daddy King’s own claim to have been “the best paid Negro minister in Atlanta.” But the black class structure was overpopulated at the bottom and fluid at the top, and nowhere near as stratified as white society. The Kings were not so far from humble origins to consider assuming aristocratic airs. King, Jr. wrote with pride of his father’s scrupulous “saving and budgeting.” Daddy King did not “live beyond his means” or show off his wealth. Early in their marriage, Martin cooked pigs’ ears for Coretta Scott King. Being his “father’s son,” she recalled, he liked them because they were “good” and “cheap.”⁸

“Before Black people in Atlanta had access to City Hall—much less occupied it,” Martin’s sister Christine King Farris recalled, “Dad was a voice for the voiceless … above all else, a man.” Daddy King once rebuked a policeman for calling him “boy” as Martin watched in awe. “Manhood” meant confronting racism in the public sphere, demanding equal respect, treatment, and representation, speaking truth where others might fear or be unable to speak for themselves. Provisioning and protecting the private sphere created an intertwined meaning of manhood. Within the home, King, Sr. considered his authority paramount. But like her mother, Jennie Celeste Williams, Alberta Williams King was not caged in the private sphere: active in Ebenezer Baptist Church, she directed the choir, frequently taking it on the road. Martin later mentioned only his mother’s domestic roles, but in the context of racial oppression, black norms of middle-class motherhood differed from whites’. Strong men’s characters contained “antitheses strongly marked,” King often said. He acquired “the sweet gentleness of my mother and the strong, hard, rough, courage of my father.” Alberta King in her “natural” sphere lavished “motherly cares” central to children’s secure character development. When her children faced racism, she explained its history “as a social condition rather than a natural order,” bolstering their sense of dignity and desert. When as young adults they showed off their fancy cars in the front of the house, she commanded them to move the cars out back, admonishing that “this is a sin because we’re supposed to be serving the people.” In this context, Martin learned to respect women first as mothers and culture carriers, and then as activists. King, Sr. exercised final authority over family decisions; Martin could not remember one family argument. His father’s model of unquestioned authority surely influenced his leadership style. Many in SCLC recalled that King avoided heated debate, delegating strong antithetical positions to staff and reserving final decisions for himself. King’s limits in appreciating women’s leadership and issues must be understood against this background.⁹

King’s father and grandfather shared commitments to economic reform and religious as well as secular ideals of social obligation to the poorest Americans. King, Sr. preached in 1940 to a Baptist association, quoting Jesus as he had quoted the prophet Isaiah in Luke 4:18: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Blacks facing severe discrimination and disproportionate unemployment had not yet begun to benefit substantially from the economic recovery driven by World War II defense production. Ministers must speak for the “broken-hearted, poor, unemployed, the captive, the blind, and the bruised,” King, Sr. preached. “How can people be happy without jobs, food, shelter and clothes?” His son’s last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church demanded he be eulogized as a servant of the bruised and captive poor, not as a Nobel Prize winner. Deciding on the ministry in 1947, King credited his father’s example and an “inescapable urge to serve humanity” that seized him in 1944. In January of that year, Franklin Roosevelt promised an “economic bill of rights” that would extend rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to include human rights to jobs, decent homes, medical care, old age security, collective bargaining, and living family wages.¹⁰ In the age of radio and fireside chats (and soon television), how would the ministerial imperative to preach to and “speak for the poor” translate into mass politics? Would the voiceless poor recognize their own aspirations in King’s words?

King, Jr. adopted this expansive notion of rights appropriate to a high-consumption society and a nation at war with racist “warfare states.” As a high school senior in 1944, Martin won his way to the state finals of a speech competition sponsored by the Black Elks. His oration, “The Negro and the Constitution,” pushed the limits of New Deal liberalism, weaving a powerful criticism of racial inequality into King’s own evocation of social and economic rights. How could America achieve an “enlightened democracy” when Negroes remained uneducated and “ill-nourished,” suffering from diseases that spread across all “color lines”? How could the nation remain whole while forcing people “into unsocial attitudes and crime”? How could America prosper with a whole people “so ill-paid that it cannot buy goods”? Victory over fascism abroad demanded “free opportunity” and victory over racism at home, King argued, echoing discourse of the wartime black Double V campaign. Invidious walls of caste blocked African American class and status achievement. The “finest Negro” lived at the mercy of the “meanest” white. Whites exalted a few Negroes and slapped down the rest “to keep us in ‘our places.’ ” Tokenism was the norm. “Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar,” he stated. King spoke from experience. He had grown up acutely conscious of his exclusion from white schools, downtown stores, and theaters; he recalled seeing episodes of police and Ku Klux Klan violence on Atlanta’s streets. And Jim Crow tainted even his teenage triumph. After tasting honor at the all-black competition, King rode home in his “place,” forced to yield his bus seat to a white passenger. “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life,” he recalled.¹¹

Morehouse Mentors

King, Jr. entered Morehouse College in the fall of 1944, when his commitment to “racial and economic justice was already substantial.” He immediately felt the magnetism of President Benjamin Mays, whom he acknowledged as one of his “great influences.” The son of sharecroppers, Mays preached the ethics of political agitation and success through education, admonishing students to perform their work, however humble, “so well that no man living [or] unborn could do it better.” King repeated these phrases verbatim in his sermons on black achievement in the face of adversity. Mays also preached the social gospel, writing in 1940 that “a religion which ignores social problems will in time be doomed.” Religion must transcend all secular faiths, Mays argued, including communism, fascism, and “capitalistic individualism.” King had other activist social gospel models, but Mays clearly stood out as a towering exemplar.¹²

As postwar cold war tensions intensified, Daddy King worried that Martin was “drifting away” from his own belief in “capitalism and Western democracy.” The specifics of King, Jr.’s anticapitalism remain obscure until 1950, but he clearly thought that democracy was incompatible with capitalism built on exploitation and white supremacy. In 1946, a rash of racial murders swept the South as soldiers returned from World War II. King wrote to white readers of the Atlanta Constitution in conventional terms of postwar racial liberalism. Blacks merited full citizenship rights: the right “to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation and public services; the right to vote; [and] equality before the law.” Sounding more radical in a critique of black class power, King wrote to his “ ‘brethren’ ” in the Morehouse newspaper in 1947. “The purpose of education,” he wrote, was to expose repressive propaganda and sharpen social action. Yet most of his classmates thought education would help them forge “instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses.”¹³

A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s largest all-black labor union, addressed Morehouse in June 1945. Benjamin Mays welcomed to Morehouse radical race men who were committed to mobilizing, not just uplifting, the masses. Well before King met “the dean of Negro leaders” in June 1956, he was surely exposed to the “socialist thinking” that shaped his mature political philosophy. Under Randolph’s threat of a massive march on Washington, Franklin Roosevelt had agreed to create the Fair Employment Practices Committee to ensure nondiscrimination in defense industries. At Morehouse, Randolph issued a Popular Front call to arms against global and American capitalism, fascism, an...