By Emmanuel Konde
Introduction
Introduction
Having just recently concluded the
first phase of the struggle for civil rights by 1965, the second phase of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s struggle was consumed by his obsession to obliterate poverty
in America. This compelled him to oppose the Vietnam War because he felt that
the latter war was distracting attention and detracting resources from the
former. But by opposing the Vietnam War,
Dr. King placed himself in the middle of two wars—the war of imperialism abroad
and the war on poverty at home. In both wars he sought to dismantle the
prevailing order that was supported by significantly powerful groups. By
opposing the Vietnam War and advocating for the War on Poverty, Dr. King
simultaneously became the enemy of both the political and economic power brokers
of America.
Dr. King’s opposition to the Vietnam
War would ultimately result in his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Whether
Dr. King was killed as the result of a conspiracy hatched and executed by
political, economic and other hideous forces, as some have speculated, is
beyond the capacity of this writer to determine. Abundantly clear, however, is that the
assassination of Dr. King was inextricably connected to his putsch to end the
war in Vietnam and redefine the workings of capitalism in American society. Drawing on his previous success that
culminated with the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. King
transcended race in his pursuit of justice and real freedom for all
Americans. This essay maps out the
trajectory of Dr. King’s last year on Earth that witnessed the transition of
his struggle from political to economic, his personal transformation from mere
man to legend, and his eventual premature death resulting from his sense of
conviction and love for America. But
first some background information about his rise to national prominence.
Background to the
Transition
The 1950s-1960s Civil Rights movement
in the United States was first and foremost an intellectual revolution that
drew its ethos from a long Western tradition of transforming society with ideas
dating back to the Italian humanists of the 13th century. Humanism spawned the Scientific Revolution of
the 17th century, which likewise provided the necessary impetus for
the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Although few activists knew the source of the
ideas propagated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights
Movement of the mid-twentieth century, the movement was a direct descendant of
the Enlightenment that provided the steam for the American and French
revolutions. To this end, Dr. King was a son of the Enlightenment and, like the
philosphes of the Enlightenment who
came before him, he, too, was an advocate for justice and the advancement of
humankind.
Initially ignited by the Montgomery
Bus Boycott event, the Civil Rights Movement reached its apogee during the 1963
March on Washington—the largest politically-motivated assemblage of humanity at
one place at the same time in America’s history—whose crowning moment came when
Dr. King delivered his electrifying and visionary “I have a Dream” speech. Drawing from the ideas that made the modern
Western world and gave birth to the United States of America, Dr. King tailored
his words to the social crisis at hand.
His speech penetrated deeply into the soul of America and directly contributed
to persuading Congress to pass the civil rights legislation that guaranteed
voting rights of the hitherto forgotten Americans of darker hue. That speech also exposed two interlocking
variables about the African American who dared to dream so publicly: (1) the
power of persuasion that lurked in the small frame of Dr. King; and (2) the
revelation that if he was left unchecked the speaker could pose a formidable
challenge to the then extant capitalist economic order in America.
After the signing of the Voting Rights
Act by President Lyndon B. Johnson in August 1965, however, it became obvious
that some measure of success had been attained.
This success brought some degree of closure to the first phase of the
Civil Rights Movement, which was essentially political and involved principally
America’s black population. The need for
expansion into the economic sphere to include other impoverished and forgotten Americans—Latinos,
Amerindians, poor whites and blacks through articulating and executing a new
civil rights agenda—naturally intruded itself.
Whereas the first phase was
political, the second was to be economic.
The latter campaign would seek to bring the benefits of the world’s
richest nation to all of its citizens. But
was the quest for inclusion of poor whites and minorities into the wealthy
white dominated American economic order attainable? Obviously, this question did seem to matter
but Dr. King was progressive enough to understand that the political right to
vote was not in and of itself a panacea for freedom. Surely, a homeless and
hungry person can hardly be said to be politically free. To be
truly free poor Americans would have to be included in a new social contract
that guaranteed them a living wage.
Dr. King was thus poised to resolve
the contradiction arising from the dichotomy in capitalist America between the idealism of political equality and the realism of economic inequality. Well-versed in the ideas that made America
the first nation-state contrived by the human mind, King methodically undertook
to tackle this seemingly intractable contradiction by taking up the question of
“economic rights” on behalf of the dispossessed American masses. By embarking on this quest for economic rights
for poor Americans, Dr. King placed himself squarely at variance with the
established economic interests of the nation. This essay examines how Dr. King and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) sought to resolve the inherent
contradiction between political equality and economic inequality in American
society via the medium of the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) organized by Dr.
King himself.
The Poor People’s
Campaign
On December 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. announced the “Poor People’s Campaign” (PPC) in Atlanta,
Georgia. At the press conference, Dr.
King declared to the reporters there assembled that
The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington,
D.C. next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States
government and to secure at least jobs or income for all. We will go there, we will demand to be heard,
and we will stay until America responds.
If this means forcible repression of our movement we will confront it,
for we have done this before. If this
means scorn or ridicule we embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now
receive. If it means jail we accept it
willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and
discrimination (See “Press conference announcing the Poor People’s Campaign,”
Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.[1]
Barely
four years after the successful 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, this
announcement signaled the beginning of the transition of Dr. King’s struggle
from political equality among America’s races to some degree of redistribution
of wealth among America’s classes, from the haves to the have-nots. This transition was bold in conception and equally
bold in its proposed method of execution.
It sent off alarm bells, which rang in the ears of the traditional
“liberal consensus”—comprised of blue-collar democrats, a collection of liberal
intellectuals and the press, policy makers, progressive-minded businessmen,
church leaders, and students—that had lent support to the 1963 Civil Rights
March on Washington.
The proposed PPC was in fact
progressive in its orientation but, unlike the African American civil rights
struggle that was embraced by many Americans, it ran counter to the philosophy
of the “liberal consensus” enshrined in the belief that “American capitalism
was a revolutionary force for social change, that economic growth was supremely
good because it obviated the need for redistribution and social conflict, that
class had no place in American politics.”[2] In
the eyes of those whites who had supported the March on Washington in August
1963, the Civil Rights movement was in accordance with, and an affirmation of,
the liberal faith. Nothing in the ideas
of the movement at that stage seemed to contradict the liberal orthodoxy. The political phase of the Civil Rights
Movement’s goal to integrate blacks more fully into white society was
championed by the liberal consensus, stretching from the White House, labor,
churches, and intellectuals, to sectors of the business community. There was hope, as late as the fall of 1963,
that integration could be achieved without posing a challenge to the basic
structure of white society.[3]
As long as white liberals controlled
the agenda of the civil rights struggle, all was well. But no sooner the SCLC began to articulate a
course of action at variance with the “liberal consensus” than the liberal reaction set in. Professor Manning Marable has noted that
“effective power is never exercised solely by a single race, but by a dominant
social class. Thus Black political movements are simultaneously movements that
seek to restructure or radically transform class relations.”[4]
Dr Martin Luther King understood just
too well what needed to be done to alter the negative sides of both race and
class relations in American society.
Where he might have miscalculated was in the timing of the launching of his
Poor People’s Campaign. At the height of
the Vietnam War, Dr. King’s simultaneous opposition to the war and his linking
of the Vietnam War to the War on Poverty in America meant that he was not only
alienating the liberal consensus that had been instrumental in the civil rights
gains, but also that the hostile right could now find common ground with
liberals in their opposition to the PPC.
Vietnam War and the Fracturing
of the Civil Rights Coalition
Following the Meredith, Mississippi
March in 1966, the slogan “black power” became a distinct philosophy that
contrasted sharply with King’s ideas of integration. In 1965, national issues arising from the
Vietnam War coupled with African American frustration with respect to a
perceived stagnation of goals and progress in the movement confounded King and
the SCLC staff.[5] When on March 2, 1965 President Lyndon B.
Johnson launched “Operation Rolling Thunder” that occasioned the bombing of
North Vietnam, in a speech at Howard University Dr. King openly questioned U.S.
policy in Vietnam and called for a negotiated settlement. Not wishing to provoke Johnson for fear that
the president might turn against the Civil Rights movement, Dr. King exercised
caution and did not fully rebuke U.S. efforts in Southeast Asia.
Like King, other civil rights leaders
were well aware of the politics of collaboration that entailed support for the
black civil rights struggle in exchange for black silence on the Vietnam
War. Consequently, Whitney Young of the
Urban League noted that “Johnson needs a consensus. If we are not with him on the Vietnam War,
then he is not going to be with us on Civil Rights,”[6] When the Student Non-Violence Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1966, Dr. King neither
issued a statement of support nor did he join the rising chorus of Civil Rights
leaders condemning the SNCC. Speaking
for the Urban League, Young stated that his group would renounce Civil Rights
organizations that “formally adopted black power as a program, or which [tied]
domestic rights with the Vietnam conflict.”
Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) similarly remarked on the SNCC’s position against the war by
labeling them as “only one of many civil rights groups,” and added that their
statement was “not the statement of other groups of what is loosely called the
Civil Rights movement.”[7]
Dr. King was slow in condemning
the war in Vietnam, even as he progressively moved toward a position that
coupled the war with the social spending programs at home. Accordingly, in April 1966 Dr. King and the
SCLC board passed a resolution condemning the Vietnam War. In August of that same year at the SCLC
annual convention that met in Augusta, the organization called for immediate
and unilateral de-escalation of the Vietnam conflict. Concerned with the plight of the poor, King
proposed three initiatives for the organization during an SCLC strategy session
in October 1966. One of these called for
the organizing of America’s impoverished towards a “crusade to reform society
in order to realize economic and social justice.” In November of that year, King spoke at
Howard University and told his audience that African Americans needed to
confront “basic issues between the privileged and the underprivileged.” While lending his support to Byard Rustin and
A. Philip Randolph’s 1966 “Freedom Budget” that asked for a guaranteed annual
wage,[8]
King’s transition from civil rights for African Americans to human rights for
all impoverished Americans culminated with his speech against the Vietnam War
at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967.
Entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to
Break the Silence,” King noted with particular emphasis the link between the
war in Vietnam and the War on Poverty in America that,
Since I
am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major
reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the
outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam
and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago
there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real
promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty
program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup
in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some
idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America
would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its
poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and
money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly
compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. [9]
Consequently,
by Dr. King who had by 1967 concluded that ending the war in Vietnam was a
moral imperative, and thus could draw a clear link between the war in Vietnam
and the need for a real “war on poverty” at home.[10] The proposed PCC, at least for Dr. King and
the SCLC, was an appropriate strategy for winning the “war on poverty” at
home. To this end, the quest for African
American civil rights was effectively subordinated to the human rights of
America’s poor of all races.
Strategizing for the
Poor People’s Campaign
After the passage and signing of the civil
rights legislation in 1964, the emergence of Black Power and abating of urban
riots the previous summer, the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference met in November 1967 to discuss a new direction of their movement. From these discussions sprung the idea for
the Poor People’s Campaign. As leader of
the SCLC, Dr. Martin Luther King was barely 38 years old in 1967. His calling
to uplift America’s poor and disinherited may well have been providential. Yet
he was by no means oblivious to the difficulty of the task that lay ahead. King knew that a multi-racial poor people’s
movement aimed at redistributing America’s wealth might prove more daunting to
build than the non-violent tactics employed by blacks with a uniform history of
suffering to end legal segregation in the South. King was obviously moving toward a new
direction, a direction few Americans were willing to veer toward in 1967. Although many Americans were opposed to the
Vietnam War without equating it with issues of class and poverty in America,
Dr. King believed that there was an intrinsic relationship between the federal
expenditure on an “immoral war” and the paucity of funds to spend on President
Johnson “war on poverty.” In an
interview with Jose Yglesias, “King explained that although the cost to the
nation of wiping out poverty had not been reduced to a dollar figure, the war
in Vietnam—this unjust and immoral war,’ as he always characterized it—cannot
be waged if the campaign’s demands are met.”[11]
The proposed PPC march on
Washington was planned for early April 1968.
The SCLC was to organize people to move on Washington from ten major
cities and five rural areas. It was to
be no ordinary march, “no mere one-day march in Washington but a trek to the
nation’s capital by suffering and outraged citizens who will go to stay until
some definite and positive action is taken to provide jobs and income for the
poor.”[12] The campaign was to entail a massive
dislocation without destroying life or property, but consciously designed to
dramatize the situation, and “channelize the very legitimate and understandable
rage of the ghetto….”[13]
Expectedly,
King’s call for a poor people’s campaign—which was essentially a coalition based
on class and race that called for militant non-violent confrontation—did not
sit well with members of the liberal establishment. The reluctance of many Americans to embrace
this approach was understandable.
Americans have always been averse to class wars. They pride themselves as a classless society
in which the greater majority belong in the amorphous middle class. Dr. King’s “poor people’s campaign” therefore
posed a direct challenge to an American myth that articulated a non-existent
economic equality that drew its ethos from America’s democratic principle of
political equality. It is no wonder that
members of the liberal press, who had hitherto supported the Civil Rights
movement, immediately took to expressing their discontent with King’s “poor
people’s campaign.” A New York Times editorial responded to
Dr. King’s new campaign as follows:
Like the threat to ‘close down’
Federal induction centers, Dr. Martin Luther King’s plan to seek ‘massive
dislocation’ of the national capital violates the principles of responsible
protest. Dr. King insists that the
massive civil disobedience campaign he plans in Washington next April will be
nonviolent. But his proclaimed goal of
massive dislocation belies Dr. King’s profession of peaceful intent. If such a result were achieved, by whatever
means, it would probably involve some overt violence and it would certainly
violate the rights of thousands of Washingtonians and the interests of millions
of Americans. This is one more case in
which the means are not justified by the end.”[14]
In
other words, the New York Times was
opposed to King’s “poor people’s campaign” and its opposition was also
class-based. It feared that the rabble
of society, if brought in huge numbers to Washington, D.C., might end up
resorting to violence. Such violence
would disrupt the accustomed way of life of the bourgeoisie who had worked hard
for what they had and were not ready to share their wealth with America’s poor.
For what it is worth, the
leadership of the SCLC was very progressive in its thinking than many
Americans. The late-Rev. Hosea Williams,
the PPC’s “political action” director, had captured the essence of this new
orientation of SCLC rather eloquently, when he accurately analyzed the
situation at hand thusly:
We will never get free by eliminating
racism or bringing about integration. If
black people were able to eliminate every aspect of racism and integrate every
aspect of American life, we would not be free. Black folks will never be free
until we have our fair share of the economy.
We live not in a political society, nor in a social society, nor a
religious society, we live in an economic society. So we had to launch a movement to gain our
fair share of the economy.[15]
Contextualizing the
Struggle in Time Prespective
To understand why Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. was assassinated short of unveiling the actual actors who orchestrated
his assassination, we need to place the struggle he led within the context of his times as well as the then prevailing national
political and economic values. The
United States of America was founded on laissez capitalism, which from the
onset established a high wall separating the government and the economy. Over time Americans have come to believe that
capitalism provided an avenue of upward mobility to all, hence capitalism
obviates the need for redistribution of wealth through socialist experiments. Consequently, Dr. King’s “Poor People’s
Campaign” posed a challenge that portended a viable threat to the prevailing
American economic ideology of laissez-faire capitalism. By proposing a
redistribution of wealth in a country that did not espouse such an idea and in
fact felt that such an idea was contrary to American values, Dr. King
effectively placed himself in direct opposition to the guardians of the
American system.
Timing is important in everything that
human beings do. The timing of the “Poor
People’s Campaign” could not have come at a less propitious moment. The 1960s saw the United States and the
Soviet Union embroiled in a Cold War, a period of global tension brought to the
fore by two hostile camps representing two contending economic ideologies of capitalism
and communism. Each of the two major
powers were determined to spread their ideology across the globe. In the ideologically-ridden atmosphere of the
time, one was either for or against the American Way. It was therefore not the content of King’s
ideas that mattered as much as how he was perceived by those who mattered.
Granted, the contradiction between
political equality and economic inequality within the context of a democratic
society is yet to be resolved. Whether
it was King’s desire to force this resolution on American society is not
clear. What is clear is that for good or
ill, Dr. King had made himself the ultimate anti-establishment man on two
important fronts: his opposition to the Vietnam War and his proposal to alter the
economic arrangement of American society.
Never before in American history has an ordinary black preacher risen to
such prominence; never has a black-skinned American been so able to galvanize
American citizens to mass action with mere words. An exceptionally well-educated man who
understood the power of Western revolutionary ideas and knew how to use them,
Martin Luther King, Jr. was deemed a dangerous man who had to be eliminated.
Incidentally, his campaigns were executed during a troubling period of
political assassinations in America’s history.
The 1960s was a period in America’s
political history in which political assassinations were rampant. One cannot but wonder whether these
assassinations were not linked to the Civil Rights aspirations of African
Americans, especially when viewed from the vantage point of the individuals who
were assassinated. Medgar Wylie Evers was assassinated on June 12, 1963;
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963; Malcolm X in 1965;
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968; and Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968. All these men were involved with the civil
rights movements in varying degrees, either as activists or sympathizers. Whether the plots to eliminate these men were
in any way connected, whether their deaths were the result of a concerted
conspiracy, whether they were killed as a result of the convergence of hatred
against African American aspirations, is not clear. But all five men were all killed within a
time span of five years.
The Man Who Defied Death
Martin Luther King, Jr. was barely 26
years old when he was catapulted to the position of spokesman charged with
articulating the aspirations of African Americans in the Jim Crow South. There are few instances in history when a man
so young has been invested with such a heavy burden. Martin was neither the man for the time nor the
man for the responsibility that was suddenly thrust on him. He was too young to shoulder the great
American burden of racism more than
300 years in the making. The times
caught up with him, entangled him, and thus the young preacher, unable to
disentangle himself from that web of historical destiny, was swept by the
whirlwind of his calling. His people
called him to service, and Martin answered their call. Barely thirteen years (1955-1968) into the mission that destiny
had ordained for him, the eloquent and compelling young preacher’s promising
life was cut short by deep, ingrained hatred.
Today, however, we cannot but ask these questions: Why was Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. killed? And why did the Civil
Rights Movement die with him, even though his legacy lives on?
Chronology
of the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC)
|
November
1967
|
|
|
Dec. 4,
1967
|
|
|
Measure of the PPC
|
|
|
April 4,
1968
|
|
|
May 12 – June 19, 1968
|
|
|
Demands of the Campaign
|
Specifically,
the campaign requested a $30 billion anti-poverty package that would include
|
|
Ineffectiveness of the Campaign
|
|
[2] Geoffrey Hodgson, America
[3] Ibid., p.179.
[4] Black American Politics: From the Washington
Marches
[5] Robert T. Chase,
“Class Resurrection: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 and Resurrection City Virginia
[6] Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern
Christian Leadership Conference and martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1978), pp. 23-25; Young quoted in James Forman, The Making of a Black Revolutionary (New
York: Macmillian, 1972), p. 309.
[7] Young and Wilkins,
quoted in Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights movement from
the 1950s Through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 339.
[8] David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr.,
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow,
1986), pp. 539-540.
[9] See “Beyond
Vietname: A Time to Break the Silence” By martin Luther King, 4 April 1967.
BRC-News list at http://www.ssc.msu.edu/-sw/mlk/brksInc.htm
[10] Chase, “Class
Resurrection,” p. 3.
[11] Jose Yglesias, New York Times Magazine, March 31, 1967.
[12] Press conference announcing the Poor
People’s Campaign. December 4, 1967, Atlanta ,
Georgia
[13] Ibid., pp. 2-3.
[14] New York Times Editorial, “The Responsibility of Dissent,” December
6, 1967, p. 46.
[15] Reverend Hosea
Williams, interview with Robert T. Chase.
See Chase, “Class Resurrection,” p. 5
***Dr. Emmanuel Konde is a Professor of History,
Political Science & Public Administration at Albany State University in Albany, Georgia***
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