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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Column:
Black-Red View by John Alan
Martin
Luther King's philosophic legacy
Martin
Luther King Jr. is the only African American that this nation as a whole
formally recognizes with a national holiday. All other great African Americans
who have fought valiantly for freedom, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner
Truth, are not formally remembered. Rev. King was indeed a great leader during
the mass struggles against segregation, racism, poverty and the Vietnam war. He
understood the reasons for those struggles and universalized them as struggles
of humanity against oppression. While
racism and poverty are still ingrained in American civilization, it does not
mean that the Civil Rights Movement was a failure. By liberating African
Americans from the social conditions imposed upon them by segregation, the Civil
Rights Movement shook up the rulers of this nation and forced them to enact new
laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and
government programs against poverty. BEGINNINGS
IN BUS BOYCOTT Since
1881 Southern African Americans had been segregated in public transportation.
Some resisted and were severely beaten. "Enough is enough" said Mrs.
Rosa Parks on Dec. 1, 1955, when she boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala. to go
home after a hard day's labor and discovered that the segregated back of the bus
was filled with passengers and took a seat in the so-called neutral zone between
the races. She didn't violate the segregation law until an arrogant white man
boarded the bus and, finding no vacant seat in the white section, ordered Mrs.
Parks to give her seat to him. She refused to comply with this rude demand and
was arrested. The
27-year-old Rev. King had been living in Montgomery for a year. The bus boycott
was not his idea, but rather it was an idea whose time had come. According to
Charles Denby, in his autobiography, INDIGNANT HEART: A BLACK WORKERS' JOURNAL,
Rev. King told him that "he knew nothing about the boycott until church
members began asking their pastors what they should do, and practically everyone
of the pastors said stay off the bus." Although
Rev. King was not among the initial organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he
did bring to the boycott Mahatma Gandhi's philosophic concept of
"nonviolent direct action." He maintained that Mahatma Gandhi had
practiced it in India and won the battle against the mighty military forces of
the British empire. When
one examines the concept of "nonviolent direct action," it becomes
quite clear that "non-violent" is not the transforming element. It is
the "direct action" of the masses, the self bringing forth of freedom,
that changes things. CHURCH
OF RESISTANCE Rev.
King did not need to turn to Gandhi in order to find a philosophy for
African-American liberation. A direct action philosophy did exist in the
theology of his own Protestant religion, and he was aware of it. After he
graduated from Morehouse College, King enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary
in Pennsylvania. There he encountered the social theology of Walter
Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr's justification for use of coercion to combat
social evils. Rauschenbusch
was the most radical of the social gospel theologians and a member of the Second
German Baptist Church in New York City. He saw wide-spread poverty and disease
among the poor daily, and this caused him to think about the social significance
of the gospel. His critique of capitalism, in his book, Christianity and the
Social Crisis (1907) brought him national fame. Reinhold Niebuhr argued that
Christians had to engage in politics and resist evil with force. This type of
social gospel was part of the very nature of the African-American church which
produced leaders in the opposition to slavery like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey.
By
1967 the Civil Rights Movement was over. A new stage of social solidarity was
glimpsed in the urban revolts in Detroit that year, where looting in some areas
was integrated — a foreshadowing of Los Angeles' revolt of 1992. However, King
didn't leave the battlefield. He attempted to revive the movement by engaging in
a campaign against poverty. After his failed movement to end the slums in
Chicago, he began organizing a Poor People's March on Washington. Finally, King
went to Memphis to support the striking garbage workers where he was
assassinated. We
can learn from King's philosophy of humanism as social solidarity as well as his
sense of being the voice of a mass movement. That striving for social solidarity
needs to be met with a full philosophy of liberation to catch its permanent,
fluid and ongoing character. It may be nonviolent marches in the South one day
and urban rebellions against oppressive police the next. All
through his life, King was never at peace with racism, poverty, war, and the
exploitation of labor. He ceaselessly opposed those forms of human alienation
and denigration because they treated people as if they were things. |
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