Thomas F. Jackson's From Civil Rights to Human Rights
Isserman, Maurice
FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE by Thomas F. Jackson University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006 459 pp $39.95 I N EARLY SUMMER...
...FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE by Thomas F. Jackson University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006 459 pp $39.95 I N EARLY SUMMER 1960, socialist activist Michael Harrington was asked by his friend and comrade Bayard Rustin to help civil rights groups in Los Angeles plan and organize a march to the site of the Democratic National Convention when it opened deliberations in that city in July...
...By November 1967," according to Jackson, "he was proudly comparing himself to socialist Eugene V. Debs, who was sent to prison during World War I for the seditious act of praising draft resisters...
...He traveled abroad, to India, Ghana, and elsewhere, and spoke of his identification with "colored brothers in Asia and Africa" who were struggling to overthrow the legacy of European colonialism...
...During his first year at Morehouse, A. Philip Randolph delivered an address describing a world in the throes 98 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 of revolutionary change, a struggle that he predicted would bring an end to the global supremacy of the white race, and to capitalism as well...
...The "seeds of his mature socialism," Jackson writes, "are clearly visible in his youth and education...
...It is easy to imagine scenarios in which both Harrington and King set aside youthful ideals as impractical, to embrace the conventionally successful careers for which their educations (however dotted with radical teachers and books) were intended to prepare them...
...Nor did King, whose own American dream was profoundly shaped by social democratic as well as Christian ideals...
...Two months later, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, he declared that America had much to learn from Scandinavian "democratic socialism...
...King rejected Marx's atheism and materialism, but he shared with the nineteenth-century socialist prophet a moral distaste for the capitalist system...
...Capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction . . . King wrote without comment in 1951, as if the proposition were self-evident...
...If the White House and Congress had delivered on Freedom and Jobs in 1963-1965, they would have benefited the long-term political prospects of the Democratic Party, as well as the lives of the poor...
...At King's personal request, Michael Harrington drafted a Poor People's Manifesto to set forth the goals of the campaign...
...His inclination to question the status quo was reinforced by his studies...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Republican...
...From Civil Rights to Human Rights should reinforce King's credentials as one, and perhaps the wisest, of the radical voices of the 1960s...
...filling in at a 1958 Washington civil rights rally for her husband (who had been wounded days before in a knife attack by a demented woman in Harlem), Coretta Scott King cited the Indian and Chinese revolutions as inspiration for the black struggle in America and predicted an upsurge of campus activism in the near future, for "the 'silent generation' is not so silent," and the "beat generation" was "definitely not 'beat...
...Jackson, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, suggests that it was Harrington, not King's would-be expropriators on the right, who displays the better grasp of the civil rights leader's true political allegiances and values...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 97 BOOKS Apart from the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., is probably the most written about figure in American history...
...But, until now, there has been no single study focusing on the evolution of his political worldview, making From Civil Rights to Human Rights a welcome addition to the library of books on King...
...Louis, finding it, according to his later account, "only mildly embarrassing" to be making the circuit of debutante parties, where he would invariably "sit in front of a swimming pool filled with flowers and drink some rich BOOKS father's whiskey while trying to convince a friend that capitalism was a rotten system...
...Jackson, in contrast, thinks that King was already, more or less, a fully formed Gandhian when the boycott started...
...How far was far enough...
...Nixon (an associate of Randolph) to lead the movement chiefly because he was new to town and not embroiled in feuds or rivalries with other black ministers in the community...
...King welcomed Lyndon Johnson's declaration of "war on poverty" the following year, but thought it did not go nearly far enough...
...They sometimes mocked him behind his back as "de Lawd...
...His April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church in New York City ranks with Eugene Debs's of 1917 in Canton, Ohio, as one of the great antiwar manifestos of the twentieth century...
...There, his socialist inclinations were reinforced by an immersion in the works of the influential Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, especially Niebuhr's more radical pre-Second World War writings...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., and black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the Los Angeles "March on the Convention" sought to pressure the Democratic Party to adopt a strong civil rights plank as part of its 1960 presidential campaign platform...
...Time and again, students flirt with radical political doctrines in their youth only to set them aside the moment they leave behind the politically cloistered confines of the campus...
...MAURICE ISSERMAN teaches American history at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York...
...In last year's congressional races the National Black Republican Association targeted black communities with radio spots proclaiming, "Dr...
...It seems likely that some combination of King's "earlier professors," the presence of Rustin and Smiley on the scene, and the powerful learning experience represented by "the Montgomery struggle itself" share credit for ushering in King's emergence as the American Gandhi in 1955-1956...
...The newly ordained twenty-six-year-old minister was asked by boycott organizer E.D...
...King, he believed, was a democratic socialist in all but name...
...Since then, and especially in recent years, scores of historical studies have followed, including two Pulitzer Prize—winning biographies, one by David Garrow (Bearing the Cross, 1986), and another by Taylor Branch (Parting the Waters, 1989, the first volume of his recently completed trilogy America in the King Years...
...in an essay written in 1950 he would describe the "anti-capitalistic feelings" he had grown up with as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines in the 1930s...
...Rooted in Christian social gospel traditions, King drew on the legacy of civil rights unionism and democratic socialism, on the inspiration of anticolonial movements, and on the intellectual ferment on the democratic left .. . Or, in King's own words, from a 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council quoted in Jackson's book, "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children...
...In October 1964 he called for a "gigantic Marshall Plan" for the poor...
...There was more than one prophetic voice in the King household...
...A society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people's needs is wrong," he told his new girlfriend Coretta Scott, when he moved to Boston in 1951 to continue theological studies at Boston University...
...Or maybe not...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 In another measure of his radicalism, King emerged as a leading figure in the antiwar movement...
...In reading Jackson's book I was reminded more than once of Nick Salvatore's 1982 biography Eugene V Debs: Citizen and Socialist— and not simply because, in his last years, King sometimes compared himself to Debs...
...Jackson argues that, properly understood, the story of King's political career "draws our attention to democratic socialist alternatives to economic and poverty policy" in the 1960s...
...That's one I'd buy...
...He spoke at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a place where communists were not shunned, and as a result found himself portrayed on posters throughout the South as a supporter of a "Communist Training School...
...A younger generation of activists soon did come to the fore in the civil rights struggle, and before too long they would outflank King on the left...
...Before you rush out to buy the shirt (or its premise), you might want to read Thomas F. Jackson's From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice...
...In Harrington's case it was a crisis of conscience brought on by the onset of the Korean War and his impending military service, leading him first to the Catholic Worker movement and later to the socialist cause...
...But King never made it to Washington...
...0 NE CAN ONLY go so far with this kind of account of books read and notes scribbled...
...THERE WAS nothing inevitable about King's role in the Montgomery events or his subsequent rise to national prominence...
...These days, it seems, everyone wants a piece of King—even those whose political predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s denounced him as a troublemaker or worse...
...With Rustin as principal organizer, the march called for a "massive Federal Public Works program to provide jobs for all the unemployed," and spoke of the "twin evils of discrimination and economic deprivation...
...In January 1968, King announced plans for SCLC's next project...
...As Jackson argues, King's economic policy proposals and his attempts to mobilize an interracial movement of the poor to secure reform "were more radical than the rhetoric of most black power advocates...
...King's spiritual beliefs and role as a religious figure have been the subject of several specialized studies see, for instance, Richard Lischer's The Preacher King...
...The Black Republican Web site currently features a brief essay with the same title, characterizing the Democrats with partisan succinctness as the "party of the four S's: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism"— four political categories that, it implies, King would have found equally repugnant...
...Over the next few days he shepherded King around Los Angeles, to the march itself, and to a meeting with the convention's platform committee...
...And someone should bring out a "Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Ironically, by the late 1960s, SNCC would forsake grassroots organizing for a celebritydriven politics of its own...
...Harrington and King also found time for private discussions about political strategy and philosophy...
...THROUGHOUT THE 1960s, King spoke as a social democratic as well as a civil rights leader...
...As a result, in the eyes of younger firebrands, King appeared riskaverse and compromising, beholden to big conDISSENT / Summer 2007 n 99 BOOKS tributors and powerful politicians...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression...
...At the age of fifteen, King enrolled as a first-year student at Morehouse College...
...Under the official leadership of Dr...
...Lawrence Reddick, a black historian at Montgomery's Alabama State College (and a long-ago Dissent contributor), published King's first biography, Crusader Against Violence, in 1959, when King was just thirty years old...
...But only in the latter case was his message heeded or remembered...
...He chose to major in sociology, and under the direction of his adviser, Walter Chivers, studied the impact of poverty on black family life...
...was a Republican" T-shirt from the same Web site...
...He was not born a Socialist," Salvatore wrote of Debs in the epilogue of his biography, "and he did not reject American values when he became one...
...The Montgomery experience put King in touch with a network of left-wing advisers from the overlapping circles of the democratic socialist and pacifist movements...
...Many such seeds are sown in vain...
...As he notes in his introduction...
...This was the Poor People's Campaign, envisaged as a sustained campaign of protest and civil disobedience by an interracial coalition of poor people to pressure the White House and Congress to launch a genuine war on poverty...
...And for just $14.95 plus shipping, you can order your own "Martin Luther King, Jr...
...He urged the Morehouse students to link up with "the people in the shacks and the hovels," who, although "poor in property" were "rich in spirit...
...But, in these two instances, something happened to transform a nodding acquaintance with leftist doctrine to a lifetime personal commitment to fundamental social change...
...As Jackson writes, "King pledged 'eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism' in his April 4 Riverside address, which in its radicalism went beyond anything he said before . . . " King saw the issues of poverty and war as inextricably bound together, since it was the poor who were fighting and dying in Vietnam, and the dollars wasted on war abroad were not available to pay for jobs and social welfare programs at home...
...A few months later he was dead, assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to support a strike of the city's sanitation workers...
...100...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 101...
...In between campaigns like Birmingham and Selma, King's life was a constant whirlwind of public appearances and fundraising events, a long way from "the shacks and the hovels" where Randolph had once counseled him to seek for truth...
...Still, some of the SNCC critique of King in the 1960s lingered on to influence later generations of historians, who criticized accounts of the civil rights movement that made too much of King's inspirational and strategic contributions, preferring to celebrate the purist radical vision of those to his left...
...As the child of one of the city's most prominent black ministers, King grew up knowing few privations (except for the indignities imposed on all of Atlanta's black citizens by the South's Jim Crow system), but he was not oblivious to the mass suffering caused by the depression...
...He is the author of An Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, among other books...
...Harrington did his work well, and the march attracted five to six thousand supporters, many more than organizers had anticipated...
...Jackson notes that "Rustin later claimed that he and the Montgomery struggle itself, not King's 'earlier professors who had read Gandhi,' taught King nonviolence...
...And, notwithstanding a rather traditional attitude toward women's place in the home and family, King seemed perfectly comfortable to be married to a woman whose public pronouncements and affiliations were sometimes more radical than his own...
...He opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee, and other legacies of the McCarthy era...
...King's notebook jottings from his years at Crozer suggest a young man whose mind was on the welfare of the world as well as of the soul...
...At Crozer, King was exposed to the writings of Christian socialists, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, as well as to the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx...
...Perhaps we should amend the Debs-ThomasHarrington lineage to Debs-Thomas-KingHarrington...
...At about the same time and age that Martin Luther King discovered Marx at Crozer, Michael Harrington was whiling away a postgraduate summer living with his parents in St...
...Instead of the "oversold and underfunded programs of the War on Poverty," which came to be perceived by white working-class and middle-class voters as attempts to buy off an undeserving black urban underclass, King's preference for policies "that would further racial equality in the context of human rights to decent housing, medical care, guaranteed work, wages, and family incomes for all Americans" was a great and tragically "missed alterBOOKS native...
...was a Socialist" T-shirt...
...Clayborne Carson, author of an influential history of SNCC and himself a critic of "Kingcentric" histories of the civil rights movement, recently commented that "for me and for many of his youthful critics, King became wiser as we grew older...
...The day before it stepped off, Harrington picked up King on his arrival at Los Angeles airport...
...After graduating from Morehouse, in 1948, King moved on to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, an institution that was, as Jackson notes, "a bastion of the social gospel...
...Muste, and others to help King reach out to a national audience, and became a trusted adviser, as did Reverend Glenn Smiley, a white pacifist...
...But there has been a shift in recent years...
...In King's case, it was the Montgomery bus boycott that determined his future political direction...
...In the conventional narrative of twentieth-century American socialism, the story begins with Eugene Debs, continues with Norman Thomas, and culminates with Michael Harrington...
...He considered his opposition to the war a matter of conscience and patriotic duty, and did not fear being called disloyal...
...King's ideology and leadership emerged from and fed back into the political culture of the democratic left...
...In the years immediately following the boycott, Jackson writes, King "widened his ideological horizons and extended his networks of support . . . " He forged alliances with progressive unions, including the United Auto Workers, District 65, Local 1199, and the United Packinghouse Workers...
...In Fragments of the Century, his 1973 memoir, Harrington reported how he was heartened to learn from their time together that King had "in the course of a much more profound political and intellectual journey than mine, come to a view of America and the world that I largely shared...
...Garrow's book was the first to note King's democratic socialist beliefs, though few reviewers (with the exception of this one) seemed to pay much attention at the time...
...Despite the fact that the peroration of King's "I Have a Dream" speech is ritually replayed every year in January, when his birthday rolls around, few Americans today recall that the occasion for that speech was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (emphasis added...
...Rustin came to Montgomery at the behest of Randolph, Norman Thomas, A.J...
...Unlike the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with its emphasis on grassroots organizing, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) focused on big splashy campaigns where King's celebrity could be counted on to generate media attention...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
