[ King, Eig warns us, has been ‘defanged’. On Martin Luther
King Jr Day, we don’t hear the voice of the radical King, the ally
of the labour movement and critic of economic inequality and war.]
[[link removed]]

DEFANGED  
[[link removed]]


 

Eric Foner
October 5, 2023
London Review of Books
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ King, Eig warns us, has been ‘defanged’. On Martin Luther King
Jr Day, we don’t hear the voice of the radical King, the ally of the
labour movement and critic of economic inequality and war. _

President Lyndon B. Johnson and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meet
at the White House, 1966, Yoichi Okamoto / Public domain

 

King: The Life of Martin Luther King 
by Jonathan Eig
[[link removed]].
_Simon & Schuster, 669 pp., £25, May, 978 1 4711 8100 9_

In March​ 1968, only a few days before his assassination, Martin
Luther King Jr visited Long Beach, a suburb of New York City, at the
invitation of a local NAACP leader. Like many suburbs at that time,
Long Beach was effectively a segregated community, with an African
American population living in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes
of local white families. I grew up in Long Beach, but by 1968 had
moved to the city. My parents, however, still lived there, and my
outspoken mother arranged to see the city manager, a non-partisan
administrator who exercised the authority normally enjoyed by an
elected mayor. ‘A great American is visiting Long Beach,’ she
declared, urging the manager to hold a reception for King at City
Hall. He refused: ‘He’s a troublemaker and we don’t want him
here.’

This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography
of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns
several times. People of every political persuasion now claim King as
a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights
movement aroused considerable opposition, not only in the South. The
government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the
authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson,
the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and
planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement
was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of
his trysts with women and mailed them to his house, accompanied by an
unsigned letter suggesting that he take his own life.

Eig’s previous subjects include Muhammad Ali, Al Capone and the
baseball stars Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig. He is an indefatigable
researcher, and _King_ is based on a vast array of material, old and
new, including documents collected by previous historians of the civil
rights movement, thousands of pages of recently
released FBI intercepts, more than two hundred interviews, and
previously unknown audio tapes recorded by King’s wife, Coretta,
after his death. Does all this produce a strikingly new portrait of
King? Not really: the trajectory of his life is, in the end, familiar.
But Eig offers affecting accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott, which
made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of
Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s
dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to
Montgomery. Eig’s admiration for King is obvious, but he is not
reluctant to point out failures, such as the Chicago Freedom Movement
and the Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to expand the civil
rights movement to address poverty among Americans of all races.

Eig’s style is journalistic, with brief paragraphs driving the
narrative forward. This structure sometimes seems at odds, however,
with the book’s aspiration to present a full portrait of King; it
makes it hard for Eig to provide analysis of the movement’s
historical background or King’s own ideas. But he avoids pitfalls to
which some previous writers have succumbed, such as drawing too stark
a contrast between a ‘good’, racially integrated, non-violent
movement led by King and a subsequent ‘bad’ one when Black Power
became the order of the day and urban uprisings alienated many
previously sympathetic whites. Eig makes clear that King was masterful
in appealing for support from white Americans by associating the civil
rights struggle with cherished documents such as the Declaration of
Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. But he resists the
temptation to portray the movement as fulfilling the immanent logic of
an American creed of liberty and equality established at the
nation’s founding. (For this latter approach, see _The 1776
Report_, a brief account of American history issued in the waning days
of the Trump administration, which claims that the establishment of
the American nation ‘planted the seeds’ of the abolition of
slavery and equal citizenship rights for Blacks.) Eig demonstrates
that neither the movement’s emergence nor its successes were
preordained. They required both King’s leadership and the
mobilisation of thousands of courageous men and women who risked their
lives to bring down the legal edifice of Jim Crow.

King was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of Martin ‘Daddy’ King,
a prominent Baptist minister who grew up in poverty in rural Georgia
and through hard work and self-discipline managed to join Atlanta’s
Black middle class. The elder King established strong connections with
the city’s white power brokers – so strong, in fact, that even
while speaking out against racism he urged parishioners, including the
ten-year-old Martin, dressed as a slave, to take part in a gala
celebration for the 1939 premiere of _Gone with the Wind_. Daddy King
‘fought for social change’, Eig writes, but ‘urged his followers
to be patient’. King Jr, who after some resistance acceded to his
father’s pressure to follow him into the ministry, attended the
segregated Morehouse College in Atlanta; Crozer Theological Seminary,
a small institution in Pennsylvania; and Boston University, where he
earned his PhD. At Morehouse, King was inspired by the lectures of the
college president, Benjamin Mays, who urged students to challenge
segregation and was strongly influenced by the Social Gospel movement
popularised by the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, who in the late
19th century had argued that the fight for social justice was a
religious duty. King Jr was a serious student of philosophy and
theology, drawing on the writings of Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau to
develop a powerful justification for disobedience to unjust laws. At a
time when only 2 per cent of the Black population had graduated from
college, King exemplified the ‘talented tenth’ to whom W.E.B. Du
Bois looked for racial leadership.

In 1954, King became minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama, a rigidly segregated city that Eig describes as
‘a bastion of the Ku Klux Klan’. When King arrived, local leaders
were already campaigning for improvements in the Black condition. But
in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a
white passenger, as required by Alabama law, Montgomery became the
site of a bus boycott that lasted a year and inspired advocates of
social change throughout the US. Partly because he was new to the
city and hadn’t been involved in factional fighting among Black
leaders, King was asked to lead the boycott. Eig makes the useful
point that thanks to housing segregation, the solidly middle-class
King family had no choice but to live among maids and sanitation
workers, giving him, perhaps for the first time, experience of the
Black working class.

In his speech, delivered to an overflowing crowd at a Baptist church,
King struck a prophetic note, telling his audience of ordinary African
Americans that the Constitution and Christian morality were on their
side and that their moral superiority over the white perpetrators of
violence was their greatest strength. ‘If you will protest
courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history
books are written in future generations, the historians will have to
pause and say: “There lived a great people – a Black people –
who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of
civilisation.”’ King’s oratory, combined with the commitment of
Montgomery’s Black residents, who walked for a year rather than ride
the segregated buses, eventually led to a Supreme Court decision
requiring the integration of public transportation. King was
catapulted to national prominence. For the rest of his life, he
travelled the country lecturing, leading demonstrations, raising funds
and recruiting participants to the civil rights movement. In 1960,
when the sit-ins launched a wave of protests throughout the South,
leadership passed to a younger generation of Black activists. But the
press never stopped equating King with the movement, to the annoyance
of many of his associates.

The path from Montgomery to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting
Rights Act a year later and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 – the
movement’s legislative triumphs – was anything but smooth. Eig
points out that in 1964, a decade after the Supreme Court declared
racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional, only 1 per cent
of white children in the South attended school alongside Blacks. Later
in the 1960s, when King brought the movement to Chicago, his marchers
were met by rioters carrying ‘White Power’ signs. The fate of the
Chicago Freedom Movement revealed some of the strengths and weaknesses
of King’s leadership. He mobilised Blacks and white allies with
memorable speeches and earned his followers’ respect both for his
deep religious convictions and for being willing to suffer the same
treatment they endured. He was jailed more than two dozen times and
had a bomb explode at his Montgomery home.

But King was never a strong administrator and the result, according to
Eig, was ‘organisational chaos’. King refused to listen when
colleagues warned that the movement lacked the resources to launch a
campaign against urban poverty, slum housing and other manifestations
of economic inequality. He battled exhaustion from ceaseless travels
and suffered bouts of self-doubt and depression. Eig discusses two of
King’s less praiseworthy traits. One was a weakness for plagiarism,
which began in high school and was evident in his doctoral
dissertation, though Eig points out that his supervisors at Boston
University should have caught King’s appropriation of language from
well-known works of theology and philosophy. Without excusing what he
calls his subject’s ‘bad habit’, Eig notes that King’s
plagiarism reflected his haphazard research method of copying
information onto notecards without recording the source, then
incorporating the material directly into his text. ‘Sampling’ –
borrowing particularly effective passages from the sermons of other
ministers – wasn’t uncommon among Baptist preachers.

More serious is King’s history of extra-marital relationships, some
brief, some long term. The FBI’s wiretaps of King’s phone calls
and surveillance of his travel reveal the extent of such liaisons.
Hoover was obsessed with King’s sex life, though his preoccupation
seems to have had as much to do with prurience as national security.
He delighted in sharing salacious information from the recordings with
select members of Congress as well as Kennedy and Johnson (who
weren’t exactly choirboys when it came to infidelity). The most
serious accusation against King is that he was present in a hotel room
where a woman was raped by one of his associates. This charge appears
in a summary of phone recordings written by William C. Sullivan, one
of Hoover’s lieutenants. Experts on King’s career have questioned
the reliability of Sullivan’s account. Like Hoover, Sullivan was
committed to ‘completely discredit[ing] King as the leader of the
Negro people’. A judge has ordered the recordings closed until 2027,
when scholars can evaluate the truthfulness of Sullivan’s report.

Eig takes a matter-of-fact approach in discussing King’s liaisons.
He points out that King – charming, powerful and widely respected
– attracted interest from many women, but rightly focuses on the
impact of King’s behaviour on his wife, who was aware of at least
some of the affairs. Eig devotes more attention to Coretta Scott King
than previous biographers, emphasising that she was an anti-racist
radical in her own right. It tells us something about life in the Jim
Crow South that although she was the daughter of a successful Black
businessman she grew up in a home in rural Alabama without running
water or electricity and was forced to walk five miles each day to
attend school while white children travelled by bus.

Coretta attended Antioch College in Ohio, where she became involved in
political activism. In 1948, as a student delegate, she attended the
national convention of the Progressive Party, whose presidential
candidate, Henry Wallace, advocated for racial justice and challenged
the Truman administration’s emerging Cold War foreign policy. In
1952, during their courtship, she gave King a copy of Edward
Bellamy’s influential socialist novel _Looking Backward_ (1888).
She was a talented singer and attended the New England Conservatory in
Boston. (Ironically, in accordance with the Supreme Court’s
‘separate but equal’ doctrine, the government of Alabama partly
paid her tuition since the state did not make such training available
to Black students.) With four children at home and her husband almost
always absent, a professional career was impossible but she sometimes
gave fundraising performances. King admired her intellect and
frequently consulted her on matters of strategy. Yet she later wrote
that he thought women’s main role was as mothers and housewives. The
movement had no dearth of talented, strong-willed women activists,
including the grassroots organiser Ella Baker and Jo Ann Robinson, a
Montgomery college professor and a key organiser of the bus boycott.
But its top echelons were almost entirely male. Every speaker at the
1963 March on Washington was a man.

In 1957, Black ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), with King at its head, to co-ordinate protests
against segregation throughout the South. But as state and local
governments embarked on a path of ‘massive resistance’ to
integration, the pace of progress slowed and the phrase ‘white
backlash’ began to appear in the press. Resistance stiffened as the
1960s progressed. ‘King came under attack from all sides,’ Eig
writes. After the 1966 march demanding open housing in Chicago was
targeted by rioters, King said: ‘I think the people of Mississippi
ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.’

The Chicago campaign​ and the Poor People’s Movement that followed
are often seen as marking the shift in King’s priorities from racial
to economic equality. But King had long recognised how closely these
issues were intertwined and had often spoken of the need for
‘economic justice’. Despite racial discrimination by many unions,
King saw the labour movement as Blacks’ greatest potential ally. In
1959, he lent his name to organising efforts by Local 1199, the Drug,
Hospital and Health Care Employees’ Union in New York City, whose
members at the time earned a meagre thirty dollars a week. ‘Whatever
I can do, call on me,’ he told the union’s executive secretary, my
uncle Moe Foner.

Sometimes King spoke of eliminating the ‘physical ghetto’
altogether. It is often forgotten that the March on Washington was a
joint venture of the civil rights movement and liberal labour unions,
and that its demands included a massive public works programme to
provide the poor of all races with ‘Jobs and Freedom’ – the
event’s official title. In the mid-1960s, King and the veteran
activist Bayard Rustin proposed a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged
that would eradicate poverty by guaranteeing full employment and a
universal basic income. Portions of the left had been promoting such
policies since FDR proposed a Bill of Economic Rights in 1944. When
King delivered his Riverside Church speech of 1967, calling for an end
to the war in Vietnam, he not only spoke in unusually heated language
about the US government – the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in
the world’ – but also warned that the conflict was draining
resources from the struggle against what he elsewhere called the
country’s ‘tragic inequalities’.

Eig notes that as a college student, King expressed interest in
‘democratic socialism’. Before their marriage he wrote to Coretta
that ‘I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than
capitalistic.’ But Eig doesn’t do enough to elucidate King’s
economic ideas. It’s true that the anti-poverty campaigns of the
last years of his life were grounded in Christian morality as much as
economic analysis. It might be best to view him as seeking ways to
extend to African Americans the principles of the Social Gospel, most
of whose advocates had ignored the Black condition even as they called
for equality of wealth and power. King insisted that ‘genuine
equality’ meant ‘economic equality’. Such comments reinforced
Hoover’s conviction that King was ‘the most dangerous Negro’ in
the United States.

One of the things Hoover found alarming was the presence among
King’s close advisers of Stanley Levison, a New York lawyer and
businessman who had once been a member of the Communist Party. Hoover
passed warnings about Levison to Kennedy, who urged King to sever
their connection. Neither Hoover nor Kennedy knew much about African
American history. If they had, they wouldn’t have found the presence
in the movement of a former communist surprising. Since the 1930s, the
party had been one of the few predominantly white organisations to
make racial justice a major concern. Levison had spent many hours
helping to get SCLC off the ground. He also prepared King’s annual
tax returns. Levison, in fact, often pushed King in a moderate
direction. He warned him that white Americans were willing to support
some changes in the social order, but not ‘revolution’, and argued
against shifting movement resources to the Poor People’s Campaign.
Levison criticised the Riverside Church speech for lacking focus and
urged King to ‘remain basically a civil rights leader and not a
peace leader’. (This didn’t prevent Hoover from informing Johnson
that Levison had written the speech for King.) Despite the voluminous
research he has conducted, Eig doesn’t take advantage of recent
books by Martha Biondi, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Honey and others who
delineate the role of communists in civil rights struggles without
embracing Hoover’s fantasy that the movement was directed from
Moscow. None of these historians is cited in Eig’s text or notes.

Nor does Eig touch on the last major speech before King’s death,
delivered in 1968 in New York City at a celebration of the centenary
of Du Bois’s birth. King paid tribute to Du Bois’s _Black
Reconstruction in America_, calling it a ‘monumental achievement’.
The book had dismantled the racist representation of the post-Civil
War years as a period of misgovernment that demonstrated the supposed
inability of Blacks to take part in American democracy. Du Bois, King
declared, ‘exemplified Black power in achievement and he organised
Black power in action’, language that reminds us of the often
ignored overlap between King’s views and those of younger Black
militants. King forthrightly rejected Cold War ideology. Du Bois, King
noted, was ‘a communist in his later years ... a genius [who]
chose to be a communist’, and his career demonstrated the absurdity
of ‘our irrational obsessive anti-communism’.

King’s Du Bois speech came at a time when his own view of American
history was changing. Previously he had rarely discussed
Reconstruction. Now he saw that era, not the Revolution or even
emancipation, as a crucial moment of hope for Black Americans,
‘their most important and creative period of history’. The
continuing distortion of the period by historians raised a troubling
question. King had long identified the movement with core American
values inherited from the nation’s founding. But what, in fact, were
the nation’s deepest values? All men are created equal? Or something
more sinister, exemplified by Reconstruction’s violent overthrow?
King had originally believed, he told the journalist David Halberstam,
that American society could be reformed through many small changes.
Now, he said, he felt ‘quite differently’. ‘I think you’ve got
to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of
values.’ Was the movement the fulfilment of American values, or
their repudiation?

According to Monuments Lab, an organisation that keeps track of such
things, King today ranks fourth, after Lincoln, Washington and
Columbus, among individuals with public monuments in the United
States. But the price of King’s deification in recent years has been
the absorption of the civil rights movement into a consensual,
feel-good portrait of American history. King, Eig warns us, has been
‘defanged’. On Martin Luther King Jr Day, we don’t hear the
voice of the radical King, the ally of the labour movement and critic
of economic inequality and war. His great speech at the March on
Washington is all but reduced to a single sentence: ‘I have a dream
that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of
their character.’ Conservatives have long quoted this to enlist King
retroactively in the campaign to end affirmative action. In fact, in
his final book, _Where Do We Go from Here?_ (1967), King, while
acknowledging that ‘special treatment’ for Blacks seemed in
conflict with the principle of ‘equal treatment of people according
to their individual merits’, embraced affirmative action. Why?
History supplied the answer. After doing ‘something
special _against_ the Negro for hundreds of years’, the US had
an obligation to ‘do something special _for_ him’. It is a pity
that six members of the Supreme Court recently made it clear that they
do not agree. It is still more lamentable that because of recent laws
barring the teaching of ‘divisive’ subjects, the history of racism
– without which King’s life is incomprehensible – is being
driven out of American classrooms.

_ERIC FONER is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at
Columbia and the author of many books on Reconstruction,
including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery (2010), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011._

_The LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS is Europe’s leading magazine of
culture and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for
some of the world’s best writers
[[link removed]] to explore a wide variety of
subjects in exhilarating detail – from art
[[link removed]] and politics
[[link removed]] to science
and technology
[[link removed]] via history
[[link removed]] and philosophy
[[link removed]], not to
mention fiction and poetry
[[link removed]]. In the age
of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the
intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its
range and its elegance. Subscribe to LRB.
[[link removed]]_

* Book Review
[[link removed]]
* Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]