Black/Red View

Political alienation of Martin Luther King Jr.

by John Alan

Recently newspapers across the nation published illustrated stories about the large numbers of people, of all races and classes, and even Presidents of the United States, who came to the Mall in Washington, D.C. to watch the ground breaking for a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. to be put between Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

Undoubtedly President Bush had political reasons for attending the ground breaking ceremony. But the kind of Martin Luther King Jr. that President Bush needs now is not the historic Martin Luther King Jr. who articulated the aspirations of a large, mass Civil Rights Movement of African Americans during the 1960s and was regarded by many as its major leader. By 1955 Dr. King had become the newest leader in the long African American struggle for freedom in America. THAT Martin Luther King Jr. would be difficult for President Bush to deal with.

KING MEMORIAL

By placing a memorial to Dr. King among those of Jefferson and Lincoln, the differences between those historic figures and the actual history they represent are obscured. From the start the Enlightenment concept that Jefferson inscribed in the Declaration of Independence--that all men are created equal and that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--were meant only for white Americans. African Americans, in whose enslavement Jefferson participated, responded to that concept in their own way. They wanted to make it concrete. That effort continues to this day when racism still pervades American society.

Jefferson, the slave owner, was a racist who felt African Americans, one fifth of the U.S. population at the time, were innately inferior. Jefferson at one point tried to deal with his own hypocrisy by suggesting that maybe African Americans could be granted those "inalienable" rights eventually, but only after being sent to Africa or the Caribbean.

COLONIZATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS

Much later Lincoln invoked Jefferson's idea that "all men are created equal" in his immortalized Gettysburg address. Yet, like Jefferson, he urged Congress to colonize African Americans by sending them out of the country as a way to solve the race problem in the U.S. Though he opposed slavery, Lincoln felt African Americans could never be treated equally in this country. Karl Marx supported the North in the American Civil War and ruthlessly criticized Lincoln for having to be dragged into issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. When, after the Proclamation, Lincoln started enlisting African American troops in the Northern army, as Marx and the Abolitionists were urging, he paid them less than white soldiers.

Some studies of Dr. King's thought have reduced his philosophy to being merely about nonviolence. But Dr. King's nonviolence was about creating a new society, setting "a new man afoot." African American masses gave a new content to the idea of equality in America initiated by Jefferson and repeated by Lincoln. Dr. King's greatness was not just repeating the idea as an abstraction but seeing how African American masses kept making it something completely new in their activity.

African Americans didn't always agree with Dr. King about his concept of nonviolence, especially in the north, but Dr. King kept participating in new aspects of the idea of freedom concretely unfolding among the masses. By the time he was assassinated in 1968 Dr. King had moved on to expand the movement beyond political freedom and toward economic freedom, supporting sanitation workers in Memphis inseparable from his opposition to the Vietnam War. This living legacy, beginning from the concept of a whole new human being, becomes totally alienated when politicians think they can enshrine the idea of freedom in their marble monuments and statues.