Today (I am writing on Monday, January 15) the nation pretends to celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. King, you see, was a socialist. This is something that relatively few United States citizens are remotely permitted and perhaps (in pains me to say this) interested to know.

This ignorance is no accident, of course, just it is no accident that most U.S. citizens would be surprised to learn that Hellen Keller, Jack London, and Albert Einstein (the latter wrote a flat out Marxist argument for socialism in the first issue of Monthly Review) were socialists. Just as it is no accident that few Americans know how remarkably racist the Woodrow Wilson administration was or that Harry Truman nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki largely in order to warn and preemptively discipline the Soviet Union in the coming Cold War or that the New Deal Roosevelt government welcomed the rise of fascism in Europe or that U.S. occupation forces restored fascist power structures in Europe after World War II or that the Gerald Ford White House gave a green light to Indonesia’s nearly genocidal invasion of East Timor or that the United States established thousands of “sundown towns” – intentionally all-white jurisdictions – between 1890 and 1960 (as sociologist James Loewen shows in his fascinating new book "Sundown Towns" [New York, 2005]) or that...[fill in the blank, it’s a long list].



As George Orwell reminded us in Nineteen Eighty Four, “those who control the present control the past; those who control the past control the future.” The dominant record of collective memory is crafted for and by the powerful.



On King’s socialism, you can read (among other sources) the fourth chapter of Michel Eric Dyson’s excellent biography "I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Jr." (New York, 2000). You can look at David Garrow’s monumental study "Bending the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference" (New York, 1986). You can also review a ZNet Sustainer Commentary I did last year this day under the simple title “Martin Luther King, Democratic Socialist” (read at www. zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/ 2006-01/14street.cfm and Black Commentator [February 2, 2006]: www. blackcommentator.com/ 169/169_ street_mlk_democratic_socialist.html).



Around this time each year, I pick up Garrow’s remarkable biography and look at some of the notes I took in the back. The main thing I noticed this time (and its something I forgot to emphasize in my commentary last year) is that King appears to have been a socialist of some kind at a much younger age than is commonly acknowledged and emphasized by the relatively few Americans who know about King’s left sentiments.



It’s commonplace in that small crowd to note how radical King became “after Chicago” – after, that is, his defeat at the hands of northern liberal metropolitan racism and Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1966.

I think it’s certainly true that the radicalism of King’s rhetoric increases after 1966. You see King worrying his bourgeois sponsors (and probably leading J. Edgar Hoover to say “I told you so”) with repeated calls for the “radical restructuring of society” and recurrent denunciations of the “triple evils (racism/militarism/ economic exploitation [capitalism]) that are interrelated.” You see King noting the need to disrupt “the power structure” through direct action and making comments reflecting remarkable discouragement with how incredibly little the civil rights movement had actually accomplished for poor and working-class blacks. He seems to think that the great victories of the civil rights movement have actually made things worse for black ghetto dwellers by encouraging whites to think the nation’s racial problems have been solved. You see him talking about the need to organize not simply on the basis of race but also and at the same time on the basis of class, in the name of all the poor and their struggle with the “captains of industry” and with the rich people and corporations who think they have the right to privately own and exploit material and human resources. There’s at least one case where (speaking to the SCLC in 1967) King makes an actual public reference to the need for democratic socialism.



And of course by April 4, 1967 (exactly one year before his assassination or execution), he openly opposes the Vietnam War, giving a speech in which he burns his last bridges to the Great White Liberal President and Indochina Crucifer Lyndon Baines Johnson (signer of the Voting Rights Act) and refers to the U.S. as the world’s leading “purveyor of violence.” The "post-Chicago" King relates America’s imperialist foreign policy to the selfish need of the United States business community and the “perverted national priorities” imposed by the military industrial complex. He mocks the Johnson administration's claim to be exporting "so-called freedom" to Vietnam and links Vietnam to peoples’ struggles in Latin America and Africa. He dies while leading a working-class fight for economic justice in Memphis, Tennessee. It was not the first time he’d been involved in workers’ struggles.

This is “the late” – “A.D.” (“After Defeat”) King,” different than the “B.C.” (“Before Chicago”) King that Dyson talks about in his wonderful, provocative biography (see Dyson, "I May Not Get There," p. 84). But looking again at Garrow, I find some interesting, rarely acknowledged history. Writing about King’s years at Crozer Theological Seminary in 1950-1951, Garrow records that:

“King [then 22 years old] pondered just what greater social justice might entail. One key area was economics, and Mike [as King was known to his friends] was becoming increasingly hostile toward capitalism and its reliance on the profit motive. In [a Dr.] Smith’s fall class, King presented an excellent and positive report on R.H. Tawney’s classic Marxist study, 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.' In another paper, King spoke about ‘my present anticapitalistic feelings.’ Reverend Barbour, recalling his long conversations with King at the time, said that King ‘thought the capitalistic system was predicated on exploitation and prejudice, poverty and that we wouldn’t solve these problems until we got a new social order.’ King, Barbor added, ‘believed that Marx had analyzed the economic side of capitalism right.’” (Garrow, Bending the Cross, p. 43)

Recording King’s courtship of the future Coretta Scott King, Garrow writes that:

“Throughout the early months of 1952, King and Coretta Scott saw each other regularly...When Martin and Coretta went out, they often discussed politics and race. ‘ I remember him talking,’ Coretta said later in recalling those dates, ‘about his concern for the masses. He talked about the unequal distribution of wealth, and he said, “It’s so unfair that a small percentage of the population could control all the wealth.” He felt that there could be a more equal distribution of wealth.’ She recalled that he said that ‘my old man is a capitalist, and I don’t believe in capitalism as it is practiced in the United States. He,’ Martin, ‘felt that was very unjust and he said that his father loved money’ and thought only about his own family, not the rest of humanity.’ Martin made those same attitudes clear to his father when he visited Atlanta, though he avoided heated clashes with him. Daddy King said later about M.L. at that time. ‘politically, he often seemed to be drifting away from the basics of capitalism and Western democracy that I felt very strongly about.’” (Garrow. pp. 45-46)

Writing about King’s first meeting with democratic socialist Michael Harrington in 1960 (at a picketing of the Democratic National Convention), Garrow observes that “King surprised Harrington with ‘how intellectually serious he was; that he was radical on all kinds of economic issues, and as far as I was concerned [Garrow is quoting Harrington, P.S.] he was a socialist, although he didn’t use the word and I was much too discreet to pose it’” (Garrow, p. 140).

Writing about King’s brief stay in a Selma, Alabama jail in February 1965. Garrrow notes that “King and Abernathy shared a cell with white SCLC staffer Charles Fager.” One morning, “King struck up a conversation with Fager about how difficult it would be to win true freedom. King’s vision was more far-reaching than his public remarks would indicate. It was an unforgettable realization, Fager recalled years later. ‘I remember the words, exactly, "if we are going to achieve equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism" ’” (Garrow, p. 382).

I have the distinct impression that King was a socialist by his early 20s. Some on the left might fault him for keeping his “Marxist” sentiments private but we should appreciate the complexity of his situation before doing that. Like most radicals I know, I make no effort to hide my opposition to capitalism. But McCarthyism (really J. Edgar Hooverism) cast a long shadow in the 1950s and early Sixties and King was obviously in a remarkable and sensitive position to play a critical role in the making of anti-racist history in a time (it is important to recall) when formal segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial terrorism still reigned in the Deep South.

I am familiar with at least one prominent, widely cherished liberal social justice spokesperson-author who is privately socialist. He has legitimate concerns about damaging his critical public leverage were he to make his deeper political beliefs known. Most of us radicals have no such strategic position to potentially damage by going public with our desire for revolutionary societal transformation.

But there’s also something else today. It increasingly appears that we will be unable to sustain an ecologically livable habitat for humanity on this earth unless and until we create a new and post—non-capitalist social order. On that note and continuing with the theme of things being known earlier than is often acknowledged, listen to the following lines from Barry Commoner’s book "Science and Survival," published in 1967, the same year that King was going public with his opposition to the imperialist war on Vietnam:

“A report by the President’s Science Advisory Committee finds that the extra heat due to fuel-produced carbon dioxide accumulated in the air by the year 2000 might be sufficient to melt the Antarctic ice cap – in 4000 years according to one computation, or in 400 years according to another. And the report states: ‘the melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level by 400 feet.’... This would result in catastrophe for much of the world’s inhabited land and many of its major cities” (Commoner, p. 11).

We certainly know a lot more about carbon-emission-generated global warming today than we did in the mid 1960s. If I’m not mistaken, we are now talking about imminent disaster in the current century and the next one.

The federal report cited by Commoner ("Restoring the Quality of Our Environment" [Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office]) is dated November 1965. It came out just as King was getting ready to take his social and racial justice struggle to the urban North, only to suffer an historic defeat that encouraged him to take his underlying radicalism to a new level.

I found the Commoner book in an old dusty box on Martin Luther King Day, when the nation pretends to honor a man it barely understands. I used the holiday to clean up a disorganized den. Reading Commoner’s lines on the threat of climate warming, I was reminded of something I’d come to think over years of combining the study and teaching of history with journalistic and “social scientific” examination of contemporary social conditions and policy: the present is often less novel and the past is often less (well) past than commonly assumed.

I found myself wondering what King would say about contemporary climate issues, not to mention the criminal U.S. war for “so-called freedom” war in (on) Iraq, the persistent (and deepened) inner-city horrors briefly exposed by the warming-related Tropical Storm and Societal Disaster Katrina and abut so much more. My sense is that his clear and early opposition to capitalism and his dream of a “new social order” would be out in the open and would carry a significant environmental slant.

-- Paul Street (paulstreet99 (at) yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian, speaker, policy analyst and journalist in Iowa City, IA. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, November 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005); and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007).