Last summer I happened upon a neat find in a used book store. I found an original edition of Martin Luther\u00a0 King\u2019s posthumously published book\u00a0The Trumpet of Conscience<\/i>\u00a0(New York: Harper & Row, 1968) \u2013 a compilation of five lectures King gave over the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) during November and December of 1967, just five months before his assassination (or execution) in Memphis. The CBC had invited King to talk about anything he considered relevant not only in the U.S. but around the world.<\/p>\n
The Trumpet of Conscience<\/i>\u00a0does not jibe well with the conventional domesticated and whitewashed image of King that is purveyed across the nation ever year during and around the national holiday the bears his name.\u00a0 That image portrays King as a moderate reformer who wanted little more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a mostly benevolent American System \u2013 a loyal supplicant who was tearfully grateful to the nation\u2019s leaders for finally making those adjustments.<\/p>\n
The official commemoration says nothing about the Dr. King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age[1]<\/b> and who said in his last years that \u201cif we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism\u201d [2].<\/b> It deletes the King who wrote that the \u201creal issue to be faced\u201d beyond superficial matter was \u201cthe \u00a0radical reconstruction society of society itself.\u201d[3]<\/b><\/p>\n
In his first talk (\u201cImpasse in Race Relations\u201d), King reflected on how little the black freedom struggle had actually attained beyond some fractional changes in the South. He deplored \u201cthe arresting of the limited forward progress\u201d blacks and their allies had attained \u201cby [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs elation and expectations died,\u201d King explained, \u201cNegroes became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of deprivation. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern ghettoes. Al the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions \u2013 and even these were only partially improved\u201d (p.6).<\/p>\n
Worse than merely limited, the gains won by black Americans during what King considered the \u201cfirst phase\u201d of their freedom struggle (1955-1965) were dangerous in that they \u201cbrought whites a sense of completion\u201d \u2013 a preposterous impression that the so-called \u201cNegro problem\u201d had been solved and that there was therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism. \u201cWhen Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the second rung of the ladder,\u201d King noted, \u201ca firm resistance from the white community developed\u2026.In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters unmistakably it was outright resistance\u201d (p.6).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe White Man Does Not Abide by Law\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Explaining the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no apologies for black violence. He blamed \u201cthe white power structure\u2026still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact\u201d for the disturbances. He found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of \u201cthe white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept\u00a0radical structural change<\/i>,\u201d which\u201d produc[ed] chaos\u201d by telling blacks (whose expectations for substantive change had been aroused) \u201cthat they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor\u201d (9-10, emphasis added).<\/p>\n
King also blamed the riots in part on Washington\u2019s imperialist and mass-murderous \u201cwar in [here he might have better said \u201con\u201d] Vietnam.\u201d The military aggression against Southeast Asia stole resources from Johnson\u2019s briefly declared and barely fought \u201cWar on Poverty.\u201d It sent poor blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even a solution to social and political problems.<\/p>\n
Black Americans and others sensed what King called \u201cthe cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit,\u201d King said in his second CBC lecture, adding that he \u201ccould not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor\u201d (p. 23).<\/p>\n
Racial hypocrisy aside, King said that \u201ca nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better have said \u201cmilitary empire\u201d] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom\u201d (p.33).<\/p>\n
Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters\u2019 transgressions were \u201cderivative crimes\u2026born of the greater crimes of the\u2026policy-makers of the white society,\u201d who \u201ccreated discrimination\u2026created slums. [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty\u2026.[T]he white man,\u201d King elaborated, \u201cdoes not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.\u201d (p.8).<\/p>\n
Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said in his fourth lecture, but noted that their aggression was \u201cto a startling degree\u2026focused against property rather than against people.\u201d He observed that \u201cproperty represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [understandably] attacking and trying to destroy\u201d (pp. 56-57). Against those who held property \u201csacred,\u201d King argued that \u201cProperty is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Roots are in the System\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
What to do? King advanced significant policy changes that went against the grain of the nation\u2019s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New Left Radicals that \u201conly by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations\u201d (p.40). King advocated an emergency national program providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income \u201cat levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.\u201d He also called tor \u201cdemolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that lives in them\u201d (p. 14).<\/p>\n
His proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that \u201cthe Negro revolt\u201d had come to challenge what he called \u201cthe interrelated triple evils\u201d of racism, economic injustice\/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism). It had \u201cevolve[ed] into more than a quest for desegregation and equality\u201d by becoming \u201ca challenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology to create justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf humanism is locked outside the system,\u201d\u00a0<\/i>King said in his opening lecture,\u00a0\u201cNegroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism\u00a0<\/i>and a far grater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war\u2026.\u201d (pp. 16-17, emphasis added).<\/p>\n
There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to \u201cthe system\u201d and its \u201cinner core of despotism.\u201d[4]<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cThey Must Organize a Revolution\u2026. Against the Privileged Minority of the Earth\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
No careful listener to King\u2019s CBC talks could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. \u201cThe dispossessed of this nation \u2013 the poor, both White and Negro \u2013 live in a cruelly unjust society,\u201d King said in his fourth lecture. \u201cThey must organize a revolution against that injustice,\u201d he added (p. 59)..<\/p>\n
Such a revolution would require \u201cmore then a statement to the larger society,\u201d more than \u201cstreet marches\u201d King proclaimed. \u201cThere must,\u201d he added, \u201cbe a force that interrupts [that society\u2019s] functioning at some key point.\u201d That force would use \u201cmass civil disobedience\u201d to \u201ctransmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force\u201d by \u201cdislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth,\u201d King added for good measure. \u201cThe storm will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth\u2026\u201d (p. 17). As this reference to the entire earth suggested, the \u201cmassive, active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system\u201d (p. 48) that King advocated was \u201cinternational in scope,\u201d reflecting the fact that \u201cthe poor countries are poor primarily because [rich Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism\u201d (p. 62).<\/p>\n
In the\u00a0Trumpet of Conscience<\/i>\u00a0you read a democratic socialist mass-disobedience world revolution advocate who the guardians of national memory don\u2019t want you know about when they honor the official, doctrinally imposed memory of King.<\/p>\n
Regression, Betrayal, and \u201cThe Mendacity of Hope\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
The threat posed to that official memory by King\u2019s CBC lectures \u2013 and by much more that King did and said and write in the last three years of his life \u2013 is not just that they show an officially iconic gradualist reformer to have been a radical opponent of the profits system and its empire. It is also about how clearly King analyzed the incomplete and unfinished nature of the nation\u2019s progress against racial and class injustice, around which all forward developments pretty much ceased in the 1970s, thanks to a white backlash that was already well underway in the early and mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers) and to a top-down corporate war on working class Americans that started under Jimmy Carter and went ballistic under Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n
The \u201cspiritual doom\u201d imposed by militarism has lived on, with Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of Iraqis, Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and Asians in many different ways over the years since Vietnam.[5]<\/b>\u00a0Accounting for half the world\u2019s obscene military expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level \u201cdefense\u201d (empire) budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global killing machine (which operates from more than 1000 bases located in more than 100 \u201csovereign\u201d nations) even as the current record-setting number of officially poor Americans remains stuck at 46 million, a very disproportionate number of whom are black and Latino\/a.<\/p>\n
It is ironic that Barack Obama keeps a bust of King in the White House\u2019s oval office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred peace and justice leader\u2019s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed Jr.\u2019s early (1996) dead-on description of the future President as \u201ca smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics\u201d[6],<\/b>\u00a0President Obama has consistently backed top corporate and financial interests (whose representatives have filled and dominated his administrations, campaigns, and campaign coffers) over and against those who would undertake serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth (the savage re-concentration of which since Dr. King\u2019s time has produced a New Gilded Age in the U.S.), constrain capital, and save livable ecology as it approaches a number of critical tipping points on the accelerating path to irreversible catastrophe. Thus is that one of Obama\u2019s supporters was moved in late 2012 to complain that a president \u201cwhose platform consists of Romney\u2019s health care bill, Newt Gingrich\u2019s environmental policies, John McCain\u2019s deficit-financed payroll tax cuts, George W. Bush\u2019s bailouts of filing banks and corporations, and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate\u201d was still being denounced as a leftist enemy of business by the Republicans.[7]<\/b><\/p>\n
Obama has opposed calls for any special programs or serious federal attention to the nation\u2019s savage racial inequalities, so vast now that the median of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. He has done this while the fact of his ascendency to the White House has deeply reinforced white America\u2019s sense that racism is over as a barrier to black advancement and has generated its own significant white backlash that only worsens the situation of less privileged black Americans. He has made it clear that what Dr. King called (white) America\u2019s unpaid \u201cpromissory note\u201d and \u201cbad check\u201d to black America [8]<\/b> will remain un-cashed under his watch \u2013 consistent with his preposterous 2007 campaign claim (at a commemoration of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March) to believe that blacks had already come \u201c90 percent\u201d of the way to equality in the U.S.[9]<\/b><\/p>\n
Completing the \u201ctriple evils\u201d hat trick, Obama \u2013 he of the of personally approved Special Forces Global War on (of) Terror Kill List \u2013 has embraced and expanded upon the vast criminal and worldwide spying and killing operation he inherited from Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush. He has tamped down their spent and failed ground wars only to ramp up and inflate the role of unaccountable special force and drone attacks in the spirit of his dashing and reckless imperial role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In waging his deadly and disastrous air war on Libya, he did not even bother with the pretense of seeking Congressional approval. Meanwhile he has far outdone the Cheney-Bush regime when it comes to repressing antiwar dissenters, not to mention those who oppose the rule of the 1 percent \u2013 smashed by a coordinated federal campaign in the fall of 2011.\u201cAs all kinds of journalists have continuously pointed out,\u201d Glenn Greenwald notes, \u201cthe Obama administration is more aggressive and more vindictive when it comes to punishing whistleblowers than any administration in American history, including the Nixon administration.\u201d [10]<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cA Calling Beyond National Allegiances\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Thinking of the FTBP\u2019s imperial record, I am reminded of something King said in his second CBC lecture. Explaining why he had turned against the Vietnam War, King noted that \u201ca burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964: I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission \u2013 a commission to work harder that I had ever worked before for \u2018the brotherhood of man.\u2019 This is a calling which takes me beyond national allegiances \u2026to the making of peace\u201d (p.25).<\/p>\n
In answering that call, King stood to the portside of leading U.S. 1960s social democrats like Bayard Rustin, A Phillip Randolph, and Michael Harrington.\u00a0 These and other left leaders (e.g. Max Shachtman and Tom Kahn) were unwilling to forthrightly oppose the US-imperial assault on Indochina because of their misplaced faith in pursuing the fight against poverty in alliance with the pro-war Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO [11]<\/b> Besides opposing the war on moral grounds, King understood very well that expenses of crushing Vietnam were precluding and cancelling out anti-poverty spending.<\/p>\n
A Testament of Radical Hope<\/b><\/p>\n
Perhaps the Obama experience is at least a lesson on how progressive change is about something much bigger than a change in the party or color of the people in nominal power. That is certainly something King (who would be 85 today) would have thought has been able to witness the endless mendacity of the the nation\u2019s first half-white president first-hand. \u201cThe black revolution,\u201d King wrote in a posthumously published 1969 essay titled \u201cA Testament of Hope\u201d \u2013 embracing a very different sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008 \u2013 \u201cis much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws \u2013 racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of out society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be faced.\u201d[12]<\/b><\/p>\n
Those words \u2013 words you will not hear via \u201cmainstream\u201d media during the national King Day celebrations\u2013 ring as true and urgent as ever today, as it becomes undeniable that the profits system\u2019s inner core of despotism is driving humanity over an environmental cliff and that it has become eco-\u201csocialism or barbarism if we\u2019re lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n
Selected Endnotes:<\/b><\/p>\n
1. Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr, A Life<\/i> (New York: Penguin, 2002), 25<\/p>\n
2. \u00a0David J.Garrow,\u00a0Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council<\/i>(HarperCollins, 1986), 41-43.<\/p>\n
3.\u00a0 See note 12, below.<\/p>\n
4. Garrow,\u00a0Bearing the Cross, <\/i>382, 591-92; Michael Eric Dyson,\u00a0I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/i>\u00a0(Free Press, 2000), 87-88.<\/p>\n
5. A useful review is William Blum,\u00a0Rogue State: A Guide to the World\u2019s Only Superpower<\/i>\u00a0(Common courage Press, 2005). See also Noam Chomsky,\u00a0Year 501: The Conquest Continues\u00a0<\/i>(South End Press, 1993) and Ward Churchill,\u00a0On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality\u00a0<\/i>(AK Press, 2003),<\/p>\n
6. And with my description of Obama\u2019s commitment and career in my book\u00a0Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics\u00a0<\/i>(Paradigm 2008, written in 2007). See Adolph Reed, Jr., \u201cThe Curse of Community,\u201d\u00a0Village Voice<\/i>\u00a0(January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed,\u00a0Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (<\/i>New York, 2000), 10-13.<\/p>\n
7. Ezra Klein, \u201cBlock Obama!,\u201d\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/i>, September 27, 2012, quoted in Perry Anderson, \u201cHomeland,\u201d\u00a0New Left Review<\/i>\u00a081 (May-June 2013).<\/p>\n
8. Martin Luther King, Jr., \u201cI Have a Dream\u2026\u201d (1963), http:\/\/www.archives.gov\/press\/exhibits\/dream-speech.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n 9. Paul Street, \u201cThe Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Meaning of the Black Revolution,\u201d\u00a0 Black Agenda Report<\/i> (March 20, 2007), http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/content\/pale-reflection-barack-obama-mlk-and-meaning-black-revolution<\/a><\/p>\n 10.\u00a0 Transcribed from http:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com\/dorsey\/glenn-greenwald-tears-into-ruth-marcus-over-edward-snowden<\/a><\/p>\n 11. For a detailed and remarkable account, see Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil; Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today<\/i> (New York: Monthly Review, 2013).<\/p>\n 12, Martin Luther King, Jr., \u201cA Testament of Hope\u201d (1969) in James Washington, ed.,\u00a0A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King. Jr<\/i>\u00a0(New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 315.<\/p>\n ____________________________<\/p>\n