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NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2008

Black/Red View

The Philosophy of Dr. King

by John Alan

This April 4th, 25 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The nation has remembered that day; and there is no doubt that many eulogies have been given and an untold number of references made to Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and his philosophy of non-violence. But at this moment, is American civilization ready to recognize its own complicity in King's assassination by ending racism and poverty in this country? Obviously the answer is NO!...

Dr. King was the preeminent leader of the Civil Rights Movement that radically changed Black and white relations in this country. These changes were historic in scope. Venerable practices of racism, which reduced African Americans to the status of things, were uprooted. Jim Crow signs were torn down and segregation in public places was "abolished" by boycotts and mass sit-ins. The movement put American civilization on trial and pressured the courts to open up the ballot boxes to Southern Blacks, who had been disenfranchised since the post-Reconstruction period.

PHILOSOPHY OF NONVIOLENCE

King advocated and practiced a "philosophy" of non-violent direct action against the forces of segregation. For him, civil disobedience was an act of "self-emancipation." Indeed, this concept was pivotal to the Movement and was the original reason for its spontaneous beginning in Montgomery, Ala.

King, in his "Letter from a Birmingham jail," raises self-emancipation to the level of a principle, when he rejects the proposal of a group of white clergymen to confine the struggle to legalism. "We can never forget," he wrote, "that everything Hitler did was...'legal' and every thing that the Freedom Fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal'...this calls for confrontation with the power structure."*

Many of us didn't realize at that time that Dr. King had broken with the past. Not just with the old dehumanizing Southern master/servant relationship, but with the method by which that relationship would be changed. Here King was not specifically speaking about "a philosophy of nonviolence," but a philosophy of human liberation, which he universalizes by joining it with the Hungarian mass uprising against state-capitalism.

After the battle was won over the legal manifestations of Southern racism, King began to urge the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and other civil rights groups to participate in demonstrations to "end-the-slums" in Chicago.

LESSONS OF CHICAGO

The lesson that King learned in Chicago was that it was easier to get the Federal government and many white people to support Black civil rights than it was to end Black poverty. He also discovered that there was a gulf between himself and a whole generation of Black youth living at the cutting edge of poverty in the Black community. He never understood the mind of that generation, or why it considered Malcolm X to be their leader. And yet it is these unemployed youth who revealed the contradiction in King's philosophy and the limits of civil rights. They exploded into revolt at the very moment he was engaged in his unsuccessful campaign to end poverty in the Black ghettos.

...We often forget that King's personal philosophy of nonviolence was an abstract concept of a "personal God" in each person as "the meaning of the ultimate reality" that can "synthesize opposites." Thus, he thought that the Watts and Detroit revolts were desperate and suicidal acts, the "voice of the unheard" and "powerless" who were "so fed up with (their) existence that (they would) rather be dead than ignored." He thought that the "irrationality" of the masses was a reaction to the "irrationality" of the state, i.e., its failure to act to end poverty and racism.

By reducing the African American urban revolts to an irrational opposite confronting an equally irrational opposite, the State, King literally takes Black subjectivity (the idea of freedom) out of American history, by giving power to an abstract moral force to resolve the problem of freedom.

What does King's personal philosophy have to do with Black freedom? The answer is: one's philosophy determines one's attitude toward actuality. When King carried his "end-the-slums" campaign to Chicago, he was not only confronting the machine politics of Mayor Richard J. Daley, but also the entrenched world of U.S. capitalism, which created the poverty in the Black urban ghettoes.

Black masses living in urban ghettoes have long developed their own attitude to that actuality; they wanted to rid themselves of that type of life and not just to better it by negotiations among "men of good will," as King was doing with Daley and the businessmen of Chicago.

The vision that Black masses have had of a new society has always conflicted with the practical political attitudes of their leaders. As we commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King's death, we should remember that while Dr. King didn't resolve this problem philosophically, his recognition of the power of the masses to change society could be a beginning towards resolving it philosophically and practically.

NOTES

* The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt sparked by students against the Stalinist government of Hungary. See "The Beginning of the End of Russian Totalitarianism" in Marxism and Freedom.

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