Prophet of Discontent Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism

2021·1 MB·English

by  Douglas, Andrew J., 1980- author

Prophet of Discontent
General Editor
Vicki L. Crawford
The King Collection
Advisory Board
Lewis V. Baldwin Randal Jelks
Vanderbilt University University of Kansas
Emilye Crosby Barbara McCaskill
State University of New York, Geneseo University of Georgia
Adam Fairclough Kathryn L. Nasstrom
Leiden University University of San Francisco
Robert M. Franklin Rev. Raphael Gamaliel Warnock
Emory University Ebenezer Baptist Church,
Atlanta, Georgia
Françoise N. Hamlin
Brown University
Prophet of Discontent
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique
of Racial Capitalism
•
Andrew J. Douglas
Jared A. Loggins
The University of Georgia Press
Athens
© 2021 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Chapter One
“The Trouble Is . . .”:
On Critique and Tradition 1
Chapter Two
“The Other America”:
On the Method of Dissatisfaction 17
Chapter Three
“Something Is Wrong with Capitalism”:
On the Revolution of Values 33
Chapter Four
“Showdown for Nonviolence”:
On Black Radicalism and the Antipolitical 55
Chapter Five
“Liberated Grounds on Which to Gather”:
On Black Study and the Afterlives of King’s Critique 74
Notes 95
Bibliography 117

Acknowledgments
This project began as an open-ended search in the Morehouse College Martin
Luther King Jr. Collection. It has grown into a book that we hope will speak to
a new era of movement activism. We made final revisions in the summer of 2020,
as mass protests erupted in the United States and quickly spread worldwide. The
tremendous groundswell of organizing energies, aimed at abolishing many of the
same structural injustices that King fought against, breathed life into this book
when the weight of the moment made writing especially difficult. We must first
acknowledge those who have been killed, those who have been injured or jailed
for protesting, and those who have taken to the streets in demonstration and
have been lucky enough to return home unharmed, able to fight another day.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to Vicki Crawford, our Morehouse col-
league who supported this project from its infancy and provided much-needed
counsel as it matured. Many others in the Morehouse community have enriched
our work: Sam Livingston, Kipton Jensen, Cynthia Hewitt, Frederick Knight,
Matthew Platt, Adrienne Jones, Oumar Ba, Levar Smith, Lawrence Carter,
Preston King, Patrick Darrington, and Jaeden Johnson. Beyond Morehouse,
we owe thanks to Paul Taylor, Brandon Terry, Andrew Valls, Da’Von Boyd,
Bryan Garsten, Lawrie Balfour, Ryan Russell, Justin Brooks, Jen Rubenstein,
Dan Henry, Shaibal Gupta, Babak Amini, Meghnad Desai, Justin Rose, Ferris
Lupino, De’Jon Hall, Michelle Rose, Gauri Wagle, and Paul Guttierez. Portions
of the project were presented at the annual meeting of the African-American In-
tellectual History Society, the Yale Political Theory Workshop, the Brown Uni-
versity Graduate Political Philosophy Workshop, and the University of Virginia
Political Theory Colloquium. We thank the participants in those discussions for
their helpful queries and suggestions.
An earlier version of a portion of chapter three was the subject of the 2018
Frantz Fanon Memorial Lecture at the Asian Development Research Institute
in Patna, India, and subsequently published as “King, Marx, and the Revolution
of Worldwide Value,” in Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, Influences: A Critical Examina-
tion on the Bicentenary, edited by Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto, and Babak
Amini (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 159-179. Another portion of
ix