From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice

504 Pages·2006·4.03 MB·English

by  Thomas F. Jackson

From Civil Rights to Human Rights
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors
Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Thomas J. Sugrue Books in the series narrate
and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to
the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded
power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all
levels—national, regional, and local. The series is motivated by a desire to
reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic
perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, on
consumption, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
From Civil Rights to Human Rights
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice
Thomas F. Jackson
Copyright© 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Thomas F.
From civil rights to human rights : Martin Luther King, Jr., and
the struggle for economic justice I Thomas F. Jackson.
p. cm. — (Politics and culture in modern America)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 13: 978-0-8122-2089-6
1. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968. 2. Human rights—United
States. 3. African Americans—Civil rights.
E185.97.K5 J34 2007
2006050930
In memory of my mother, Dorothy R. Jackson, and a dedicated
mentor, Michael F. Foley
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is
sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty … and that one is
prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable
price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
George Orwell
I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious
things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Contents
Introduction
1 Pilgrimage to Christian Socialism
2 The Least of These
3 Seed Time in the Winter of Reaction
4 The American Gandhi and Direct Action
5 The Dreams of the Masses
6 Jobs and Freedom
7 Malignant Kinship
8 The Secret Heart of America
9 The War on Poverty and the Democratic Socialist Dream
10 Egyptland
11 The World House
12 Power to Poor People
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Over the course of his public ministry, between the Montgomery bus boycott of
1956 and the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike of 1968, Martin Luther King,
Jr., wove together African American dreams of freedom with global dreams of
political and economic equality. King opposed racism, imperialism, poverty, and
political disfranchisement in increasingly radical terms. Often he referred to the
American civil rights movement as simply one expression of an international
human rights revolution that demanded economic rights to work, income,
housing, and security. For most Americans, however, King’s freedom dreams
have become a sound bite recorded in August 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial, when he envisioned a world where all men sit down together at the
table of brotherhood and children are judged “not by the color of their skin, but
by the content of their character.” King overshadows the mass movement that
made him famous, his sharp, dissident critique compressed into simple messages
of nonviolence and American democracy celebrated as an accomplished fact
rather than thwarted as a deferred dream.
Few Americans recall the discordant notes with which King began his
legendary speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. One
hundred years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Negroes still wore
shackles of segregation, discrimination, and impoverishment. They existed “on a
lonely island of poverty,” banished to “the corners of American society.” The
nation’s founders had issued a “promissory note” guaranteeing life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness to all Americans. But the check bounced when black
Americans tried to collect. “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,” King’s voice boomed from his electronic pulpit.
Negroes were demanding “the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”1
The March on Washington pushed to the foreground economic needs and
demands that reflected the movement’s broadening social base and ongoing
northern struggles for jobs and justice. Dreams of economic justice had long
been central to the black freedom struggle and to King’s social gospel vision.
Though activists could speak of winning civil, political, and economic rights in
sequence, many also considered these human rights as mutually reinforcing and
international in scope.
By 1965, King’s radical voice rang more clearly when he confessed that his
dream had turned into “a nightmare.” The dream shattered when whites
murdered voting rights workers in Alabama, when police battled blacks in Los
Angeles, when he met jobless and “hopeless” blacks on desperate Chicago
streets, and when he saw hunger and poverty in rural Mississippi and
Appalachia. But King picked up the shards of his shattered dreams and
reassembled them into more radical visions of emancipation for all poor people.
As he preached on July 4, 1965, “I still have a dream that one day all of God’s
children will have food and clothing and material well-being for their bodies,
culture and education for their minds, and freedom for their spirits.” Later that
year he dared to dream: “One day men will no longer walk the streets in search
for jobs that did not exist … one day the rat-infested slums of our nation will be
plowed into the junk heaps of history.”2 Dreams of decent jobs, affordable
integrated housing, and adequate family incomes remained central to King’s
public ministry until his death.
As the first half of this book makes clear, King’s vision of economic
freedom was rooted in his intellectual development and early experiences in the
southern black freedom movement. Since the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott,
King had repeatedly urged blacks to dream of a world free of racism, militarism,
and “materialism.” For King, materialism encompassed the irrational inequalities
of wealth under the American system, the “tragic exploitation” of a racially
divided working class, and the morally corrosive and socially isolating obsession
with individual success. As early as 1956, King publicly described his dream of
a world in which “privilege and property [are] widely distributed, a world in
which men will no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the
classes,” a “world in which men will throw down the sword” and learn to love
and serve others.3
Movement veterans never forgot King’s radicalism. In the accurate,
sardonic words of Vincent Harding, King’s legacy has been compressed into
“safe categories of ‘civil rights leader,’ ‘great orator,’ harmless dreamer of black
and white children on the hillside.” Documenting King’s radicalism but
overstating the degree to which the events of the 1960s radicalized him, David
Garrow argued in his seminal books that King transformed himself from a
“reassuring reformer” into “a radical threat” to America’s class system and
dominant institutions. By November 1966, King concluded that the movement’s
most stubborn obstacles “were economic rather than legal, and tied much more
closely to questions of class than to issues of race,” Garrow argues. It is true that
in 1968, King affirmed publicly what he had denied ten years earlier: that blacks
were engaged in “a class struggle.” But since the 1940s, King consistently had
understood race and class as mutually reinforcing structures of unequal power.
As a young man, King recognized racism’s “malignant kinship” with the
nation’s class-based power structures; over time, his understanding of their
deeply intertwined roots only became more sophisticated.4 In 1956 he committed
himself to winning “political and economic power for our race.” Later he
advocated liberation from the coercive control of the “slum colony” that had
been constructed by public agencies and private interests to isolate and exploit
poor and working-class blacks. King’s early critiques of the southern
“oligarchy” and of “business control” over the state became more thorough
indictments of state capitalism as it reinforced middle-class and corporate
privilege and consigned jobless and poorly paid workers to reserve armies of
“cheap surplus labor.”5
Even in the 1950s, King was never simply a “civil rights” leader
unconcerned with the national political economy. Many authors echo Adam
Fairclough’s notion that King was a “non-ideological pragmatist” before he was
radicalized in 1965, that he regarded racism as a southern problem and was only
vaguely concerned with capitalism. Like his father, King advocated thrift, hard
work, “economic individualism,” and self-help, Fairclough argues.6 Again it is
true that King in 1965 stopped preaching that the Negro should lift himself up by
his “bootstraps.”7 But King was much more radical, earlier and more
consistently, than he is credited for being. He always conceived of self-help to
include collective mutual aid and black political assertion as much as individual
self-improvement. Self-help was perfectly consistent with broad social and
governmental “action programs.” King also denounced the more “subtle” but
equally insidious forms northern racism assumed, especially segregated and
unequal housing. He criticized “class systems” that segmented black America,
even when he did not openly call for an American class struggle. Historians have
rediscovered the underlying continuity of “individualist” civil rights goals and
“collectivist” social welfare goals in the freedom movement since the 1930s,
while others document consistent white resistance to black assertions of basic
constitutional and economic rights in the North and South before the 1960s.
Those who argue that a dramatically radicalizing freedom movement
precipitated its own decline in the mid-1960s overlook the continuity and
ferocity of both black assertion and white resistance.8
King’s opposition to racism, war, and poverty did grow more overtly radical