Beyond civil right - Dr. King

BEYOND CIVIL RIGHTS

Until 1964, King's work and words focused almost entirely on gaining civil rights for African-Americans in the South, where they were denied their rights by law. In 1964 and 1965, he began to look to the North. There he saw that there is more to justice than legal civil rights. He began to wonder whether the economic and social racism blacks suffered in the North might not be worse, because the racism was more hidden and the whites’ conscience could not be so easily aroused.

Once he had broadened his view beyond legal rights and the South, King recognized that he was actually dealing with the entire range of injustices, and therefore the entire structure, of U.S. society. "Justice is indivisible, " he declared; all political, economic, social issues are interrelated. So he began to consider a host of issues that he had not considered before. He looked at the role of technology and found that U.S. society tended to value technological means as ends in themselves, without asking what moral (or immoral) ends might be served by technological innovation: "The devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live" had become more important in most people's lives than spiritual values.

Looking at the machinery of production and consumption led to thinking about how products are distributed and consumed. King already believed that integration required equally shared political power and responsibility. Now he took full account of the links between political and economic power. He argued that integration required a major redistribution of wealth. To explain how this could be done, he had to become something of an economist: "We must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods." Why were so many people kept in poverty, as both nonproducers and nonconsumers? The basic answer he found was the nature of capitalism: "The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered…Capitalism fails to realize that life is social."

Since King had started analyzing these issues out of his concern for integration, he was quick to see the links between capitalism and racism. He saw that private property, nearly all of which was owned by whites, supported and embodied the white power structure. On a more theoretical level, he saw that the institution of private property means valuing things that have no personal being and thus no genuine reality. A society built on such a dehumanizing basis will naturally dehumanize and exploit other person. Property is the most basic symbol of exploitation. This, he said, was the meaning of the riots that began breaking out in northern black ghettos in 1964. The seemingly blind destruction of property was, above all, a protest against the institutionalized exploitation built into U.S. society.

King's focus on the North and the broader societal structures coincided with the escalation of the U.S. military effort in Vietnam, which began in 1965. The war soon became the most pervasive public issue in the nation. King could hardly avoid it. But he viewed it in the context of his new, broader vision. For him, as for all the more radical critics of the war, Vietnam was not an aberration from U.S. values, or an isolated case of excessive U.S. power. Rather, it was a logical and predictable outcome of U.S. values. It was a symptom of the deeper evils of capitalism, imperialism, and militarism.

As an advocate of nonviolence, King was naturally opposed to all war. As early as 1959, he had begun to preach against the dangers of war in the nuclear age. Calling nuclear weapons "the most colossal of all evils," he warned: "It is either nonviolence or nonexistence." By the mid-'60s, he saw links connecting nuclear weapons, conventional weapons, technology, and capitalism to racism. When a society makes machines and property more important than people, he said, it cannot stop "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism" He also saw this complex as the root of the poverty. He explained that the exploitation of blacks in the U.S. is the paradigm for the exploitation of all poor Americans. Poverty here is directly related to the increase in U.S. capital investments abroad, which create more poverty and oppression in other nations. To sustain those oppressive structures, the U.S. must build up its military and be prepared to fight wars, like the war in Vietnam. Thus racism, poverty, materialism, militarism are all interwoven and "deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society." It was this whole structure that had led inexorably to the tragedy of Vietnam.

In the last three years of his life, King's words combined his increasingly sophisticated economic and political analysis with the moral and religious preaching that always remained his foundation. "We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values," he proclaimed. This call to revolution drew on the basic principle of nonviolence¾ attacking evil structures, not individual people. Since King had long supported this principle, it was natural for him to call for a total transformation of societal structures, a total change in "the system." It was equally natural for him to justify this in personalistic moral terms: "We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ to a ‘person-oriented’ society."

Here, too, nonviolence could make a crucial contribution. Through self-sacrificial suffering for others, people would learn that there are values more important than self. They would learn to separate themselves from the individualism, hedonism, and narcissism of our consumer society. They would act out their opposition to those values and encourage others to join in the nonviolent radical revolution. King admitted that he did not yet know what new structures would be take the place of the unjust system we live under today. But he did not see that as a problem: "Structures will follow, if we keep our ears open to the spirit."

Martin Luther King, Jr., did not live long enough to see new structures emerge, nor to lead any kind of revolution. There is no way to say what might have happened to the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s, had its greatest and most powerful leader survived. Perhaps he died because others feared that he might indeed be great and powerful enough to lead a revolution. There is no way to say what directions his life and thought might have taken, had he survived. He was clearly learning and changing very rapidly in the last three years of his life.

In those three years, he saw many African-Americans turn away from his teaching of nonviolence to embrace a Black Power philosophy that urged blacks to take their rightful share of power and resources "by any means necessary." In the African-American and radical white communities, King's commitment to nonviolence was criticized (sometimes quite harshly) as foolish obstinacy. His influence began to wane. Some said that his work was done, that the movement for social change had moved on to a new phase in which King's thought would be largely irrelevant. King was not deaf to the criticisms. He responded by voicing respect for the Black Power movement. He saw validity in its central argument: before power can be equalized between white and blacks, there must be some separate black structures, in order to build up black power. But, despite the immense pressures on him, he held firmly to his commitment to and arguments for nonviolence. So it seems likely that, no matter how long he might have lived and how radical he might have become, the revolution he worked for would always have remained a nonviolent revolution.

Would this have doomed him to the margins of the nation's political life? Or would he have moved the whole nation closer to nonviolence? The answer must remain forever unknown. As it is, his radical leanings in the last years of his life have been largely forgotten, so that their influence has been very marginal. He is remembered and revered in both the black and white communities almost solely for his leadership of the civil rights movement in the South. Yet how much influence does that memory have upon the nation's life today? The success of the civil rights movement is widely debated because its ultimate results are so unclear. The lasting impact of King's nonviolence is even less clear. Did he make nonviolence a significant enduring force in the U.S.? Or did his nonviolence allow the white community to see him as harmless and therefore to ignore the radical challenge of his message? Is the creation of "Martin Luther King" as a national icon another a way of avoiding that radical challenge? To what extent has the revered image permanently eclipsed the actual man and his message? Because the answers to all these questions remain uncertain, the true measure of King's influence remains uncertain as well. Perhaps it is simply too soon to tell.

Posted by Tyler at January 12, 2005 11:45 AM