Happy Birthday To A Socialist Antiwar Victim Of Gun Violence

-by Patrick Toomey

This weekend, our nation is engaging in its annual ritual of amnesia. It will celebrate the birth of an activist minister who was, in the public mind, trapped in amber in August 1963. We will hear countless commemorations of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, with its famous soundbite about his children not being “judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

We won’t hear other, more controversial provisions from that speech, such as this description of the promise of the Declaration of Independence: “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’." More important, we won’t hear anything meaningful about the actual Dr. King, whose views were a lot closer to those of, say, Bernie Sanders, than they were to the wide variety of political figures who are purportedly proclaiming his message on this holiday.

King made no bones about his disdain for capitalism. In an era with vastly less inequality than we have come to accept in the past 4 decades, King said in 1961:

“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.”

– Speech to the Negro American Labor Council, 1961.

Five years later, he said:

“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”

– Speech to his staff, 1966.

MLK wasn’t exactly a fan of the military-industrial complex, either:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

One can only imagine what he would’ve said about the recently passed “bipartisan” military budget of $858B, particularly in an era when spending on social programs is widely derided. One should also never forget this line from his epic Riverside Church sermon (given a year to the day before his death) where he publicly broke with LBJ’s Vietnam policy:

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today-- my own government.

The MLK who is being presented now to generations who were born after his untimely death is a safe and sanitized symbol whose relationship to the real man and his actual message is largely coincidental. Even worse, that presentation forgets that he was ruthlessly gunned down in broad daylight while trying to rally support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis. He was the second of three left-leaning leaders to be shot in cold blood in less than five years. Those assassinations changed the course of our politics and coarsened our citizenry. They helped make gun violence more commonplace.

Yes, it is a good thing that MLK is officially remembered almost 55 years after he was taken away from us in the prime of his life. It would be much better, however, if the commemorations actually came close to resembling his reality. He was perceived by many as a dangerous radical when he was alive, and his actual views would be considered well outside the mainstream today.

We can only wish that his actual worldview were being conveyed now.