Resources for the Radical King

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. – Dr. King

If Americans permit thought-control, business control, and freedom control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism. – Dr. King

Video interview with Dr. King (apologies for the 30 second ad at the start, it’s worth waiting it out):

We don’t talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enough. When we do speak about him–on the few days surrounding the national holiday–the public discourse is a watered down, misleading and shallow version of his life. Like so much of our current news we will learn about Dr. King this holiday in repeatable soundbites deemed acceptable by the mainstream media. The “I Have a Dream” speech will be played, his civil rights legacy will be reflected upon and presidents and preachers will encourage us to engage in service from his grave site in Atlanta. Yes the King Holiday is a day to “serve”–a day on, not off as the King Center states. And yes of course Dr. King was a courageous champion for civil rights. But the true Dr. King is deeper, more complex and much more radical than you will ever hear about in mainstream press or will be taught about in school.

King resisted the many systems of domination of his day-war, capitalism, U.S. Imperialism, fundamentalism and racism. For this in addition to his progressive synthesis of faith and reason he is extremely relevant to us. But understanding his vision requires more than I can convey in one blog post and more than alternative media outlets can provide. Ultimately we must engage him through reading his own words, listening to his speeches and sermons and watching him being interviewed. In this post I am providing links to a number of interesting writings, interviews, speeches, papers and books that shed light on his radical views on war, Imperialism, Religion, poverty and capitalism.

Two collections of King’s speeches and sermons are available in audio and book format. “A Call to Conscience” is a collection of King’s most famous speeches and addresses. His powerful critique of the Vietnam War called “Beyond Vietnam” can be heard on this collection. And in “A Knock at Midnight” you can listen to some of King’s most powerful sermons. One of my favorite sermons which is in his book “Strength to Love” is called “Transformed Nonconformist.” You can read it via google books here. And his speech and book called “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community” is an excellent source for King’s analysis of white supremacy, racism, poverty and the future of the country.

War

King began making statements about the Vietnam War in 1965, but they started out mild, saying for example, “The Vietnam War has accomplished nothing.” As he increased his public criticism of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam he was attacked by both his mainstream political allies in the government such as President Johnson and his fellow civil rights leaders who were worried about being distracted from the cause. Mainstream newspapers and magazines heavily criticized King and many predicted his career was over. But King persisted and by 1968 the tide had turned against the war. Protests were then getting a hundred thousand people compared with just one-hundred a few years before.

Audio/Transcript

The Casualties of the War In Vietnam – Feb. 25th 1967. King spoke at the Nation Institute’s symposium in Los Angeles. This speech marked his shift toward a more developed and potent critique of the War. Click here for the transcript.

Beyond Vietnam – King’s most famous speech on the war, delivered on April 4th, 1967-exactly one year to the day before his assassination can be listened to in its entirety here. And the printed version is available to download in PDF form here. King’s speech extended beyond the realm of Vietnam into a wider critique of U.S foreign policy.

During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela, this need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala, it tells why American helicopters are being used against guerillas in Cambodia and why American Napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

On the connection between poverty and the War,

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam - Sermon delivered at Riverside Church on April 30th, 1967. This is shorter and more accessible than “Beyond Vietnam.” Click here for the transcript.

DVD: King-Man of Peace in a Time of War – I have embedded a video of Dr. King being interviewed in 1967 on Meet the Press about his criticisms of the Vietnam War, but also recommend this title. Unfortunately the documentary feels as if it was quickly put together in order to provide a storyline surrounding the true treasure of the film-a previously unreleased and rare interview about Vietnam on the Mike Douglas show. The questions King receives from the establishment interviewers and his well-crafted and witty responses are almost comical. But it is the most interesting interview I have seen with Dr. King about his views on War-Vietnam or otherwise.

Meet the Press Interview - In this 1967 interview (see above) on Meet the Press Dr. King calls for Public Opposition to the Vietnam War.

Other significant quotes on war:

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

“It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to return to her true home of brotherhood and peaceful pursuits. We cannot remain silent as our nation engages in one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars.”

“In an age so adjusted to war, I call upon you to be maladjusted. In an age so amazingly adjusted to imperialism and colonialism I call upon you to be maladjusted.”

“Maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world, rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.”

“Their questions hit home, and 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.”

Capitalism, Poverty & Labor Justice

Even though Dr. King was assassinated one-year to the day after delivering “Beyond Vietnam,” some suggest that he was killed not for his critique of the Vietnam War but his increasingly radical stance against capitalism. Let’s remember that Dr. King moved himself and his family into the slums of Chicago to stand in solidarity with the poor. He was assassinated while in Memphis TN supporting striking sanitation workers. And he was in the process of organizing a very large march on Washington D.C. – one that consisted of a “multiracial army of the poor” to demand economic aid for those in poverty.

From “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

From “SCLC conference Presidential Address“, August 16th 1967

We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s ability and talents. And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other….I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about Where do we go from here, that we honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, Who owns the oil? You begin to ask the question, Who owns the iron ore? You begin to ask the question, Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water? These are questions that must be asked.

Other quotes on Capitalism

“Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.”

“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

“One day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

“A legion of thoughtful persons recognizes that traditional capitalism must continually undergo change if our great national wealth is going to be more equally distributed, but they are afraid their criticisms will make them seem un-American.”

Religion

Dr. King was raised in an orthodox Baptist family. His father, grandfather and uncle were all preachers. However, from an early age Dr. King rejected the emotionalism and fundamentalism that he was raised in. As he learned the modern methods for interpreting Christianity he began to see how religion could be reconciled with science. After seminary Dr. King received a Ph.D in Philosophy & Theology from Boston University. He wasa highly educated person who used reason to interpret his religious tradition. He therefore rejected any literal interpretation of Christianity. For a great summary of Dr. King’s understanding of Christianity and the Bible including his beliefs on Jesus’ divinity, Heaven/Hell, the second coming of Christ read my recent article in Tikkun “King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Here are a few relevant quotes from Dr. King.

Interpretation of Jesus, from “The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus”

The orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such supernatural qualities makes the rejoinder: “Oh, well, he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possibly have …” So that the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied. The significance of the divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promissory for every other true son of man who is willing to submit his will to the will and spirit of God. Christ was to be only the prototype of one among many brothers. The appearance of such a person, more divine and more human than any other, and in closest unity at once with God and man, is the most significant and hopeful event in human history. This divine quality or this unity with God was not something thrust upon Jesus from above, but it was a definite achievement through the process of moral struggle and self-abnegation.

On Heaven/Hell

“A physical heaven and a physical hell are inconceivable in a Copernican world … for us immortality will mean a spiritual existence…In reality I know nothing about heaven … personally I don’t believe in hell in the conventional sense.”

On Jesus’ Atonement

“Any doctrine which finds the meaning of atonement in the triumph of Christ over such cosmic powers as sin, death and Satan is inadequate…. If Christ by his life and death paid the full penalty of sin, there is no valid ground for repentance or moral obedience as a condition of forgiveness. The debt is paid; the penalty exacted, and there is, consequently, nothing to forgive.”

The Second Coming of Christ

“It is obvious that most twentieth century Christians must frankly and flatly reject any view of a physical return of Christ.”

The Bible

It is certainly justifiable to be as scientific as possible in proving that the Pentateuch was written by more than one author, that the whale did not swallow Jonah, that Jesus was not born a virgin, or that Jesus never met John the Baptist. But after all of this, what relevance do the scriptures have? What moral implications do we find growing out of the Bible? What relevance does Jesus have in 1948 A.D.? These are questions which the liberal theologian must of necessity answer if he expects to influence the average mind. Too often do we find many of the liberals dodging these vital questions.

On the Church

So it was very easy for slavery to receive a religious sanction. The church is one of the chief exponents of racial bigotry. Monopoly capitalism has always received the sanction of the church.

Since this is the case, we must admit that the church is far from Christ. What has happened is this: the church, while flowing through the stream of history has picked up the evils of little tributaries, and these tributaries have been so powerful that they have been able to overwhelm the mainstream. This is the tragedy of the church, for it has confused the vices of the church with the virtues of Christ. The church has been nothing but the slave of society; whenever the mores call for evil practices, society runs to the church to get its sanction.

Therefore I conclude that the church, in its present state, is not the hope of the world. I believe that nothing has so persistently and effectively blocked the way of salvation as the church. On the other hand, the church can become the hope of the world, but only when it returns to Christ. If we take Christ to the world, we will turn it upside down, but the tragedy is that we to often take Christianity. It is our job as ministers to bring the Church back to the center of the human race. But we can only bring the church back to the center of the human race when we bring Christ back to the center of the church.