Reclaiming the radical legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We continue today to struggle for the objectives sought by Dr. King's movement, including universal healthcare, the right to food, the end of state violence, and freedom from militarism.

[This post is also accessible as a podcast]

Every year, our nation celebrates a holiday dedicated to the memory of a modern day prophet, international hero, voice for peace, and (as he is often described by many unaware of his broader legacy) civil rights leader. Washington erected a monument depicting his likeness situated among others commemorating presidents and world wars. Yet, at the same time that so many voices rightfully praise Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., most also manage to ignore the continuing significance of his voice, his experience, and his legacy.

Dr. King was far more than the feel-good icon of a victorious struggle for civil rights to which he has been widely reduced. Like previous figures from Jesus to Galileo, he saw through the illusions of this world and his era, explained truths that others were either too ignorant or complicit to recognize, and paid the ultimate price for doing so.

Even though Washington formally commemorates Dr. King’s memory every year, few today recognize the profound depth of his voice, or its continuing relevance to U.S. politics. In no uncertain terms, he identified over 50 years ago precisely the same patterns that continue to besiege democracy in America today. Even the struggle to secure the national holiday in his memory offers lessons, particularly about the power of music to drive cultural dialog, and also the limits of that power when channeled towards policy goals.

MLK’s experience

I wrote an article in 2017 titled “Remember Dr. King—and What He Endured” published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I worked at the time. It explained how MLK’s unfortunate experiences offer lessons with continuing relevance, even setting aside (for now) his voice and broader legacy.

While we remember Dr. King’s many achievements today, we also must remember the documented and unfounded vilification by U.S. intelligence agencies that he, and others in the civil rights movement, endured….

A movement in Memoriam

The emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, its triumph over hate to establish desegregation and secure procedural voting rights, and the narrative of interracial struggle for justice—all reflect an inspiring legacy of a grassroots movement that aspired to hold America true to our founding values. As Dr. King succinctly exhorted, the movement called on America to "Be true to what you said on paper." 

The movement was subjected to brutal violence, both by the assassination of its leaders and by the daily brutality of police and vigilantes reacting to the desegregation of public institutions. Dozens of civil rights activists from various backgrounds were murdered during this era, alongside hundreds—if not thousands—of African-Americans as young as 14 year-old Emmitt Till and 11 year-old Denise McNair, whose church in Alabama was bombed by extremists using violent terror to oppose racial integration….

Violent state suppression of speech

Throughout Dr. King's life, and for a decade (if not longer) beyond it, the FBI pursued what members of the U.S. Senate in 1976 described as "a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at suppressing…First Amendment rights of speech and association." Those operations, described in internal FBI files as COINTELPRO, have been forgotten by many Americans, but represent a key to understanding why the specter of mass surveillance threatens not only privacy, but also democracy.

For 40 years, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover presided over a reign of intimidation and terror across Washington. Under his tenure, the FBI blackmailed members of Congress, and infiltrated organizations seeking everything from international peace to equal rights for women.

The Bureau’s aim was not to guard national security from any external threat, but instead to “neutralize” constitutionally protected domestic dissent and people using their rights—including Dr. King. In addition to bugging his hotel rooms, monitoring his movements, and recording his liaisons, the FBI also tried to break up Dr. King's marriage and attempted to prompt his suicide.

Many Americans reacted to seemingly politicized FBI disclosures in the days before the 2016 presidential election with surprise. But the FBI has embroiled itself in partisan controversies since its very origins. From the Palmer Raids through the McCarthy era, from the Green Scare to its infiltration of labor organizing by farm workers, the FBI has a long history of investigating and undermining constitutional rights in the context of political movements.

Under Hoover’s direction, the FBI achieved its written goal: the "neutralization" of domestic social groups speaking out to advance their views as protected by the First Amendment. Hoover's FBI achieved its goals with a fraction of the budget, staff—and none of the computing power—of the FBI today.

I wrote another article addressing Dr. King’s legacy in 2017, this time for Truthout, titled Elusive Victories: Voting Rights, Desegregation and the Erosion of Civil Rights. It explains how, contrary to popular belief, the movement that Dr. King helped lead and represent half a century ago was less than successful in achieving its goals than most people today think.

Ultimately, the civil rights movement was denied its most visionary goals by a policy establishment unwilling to grant them.

Civil rights leaders had hoped to secure a right to employment, food, housing, education and health care — all of which were goals that Dr. King explicitly referenced. Among its various goals, desegregation and voting rights were the only two ultimately secured in law and policy.

The two victories that the civil rights movement did secure have withered in the decades since then. Voting rights, for example, have dramatically eroded from their high-water mark….

Narratives describing the historic victories for voting rights obscure the ultimate reality. What few gains the civil rights movement did secure, unfortunately, on the most part did not survive.

Elusive Victories goes on to examine the history and fate of desegregation, which was judicially imposed in the 1950s before the courts later flipped the 14th Amendment on its head to more recently prevent efforts seeking equity in public opportunities.

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court rejected de facto housing discrimination as a justification for unequal educational opportunities. More than 60 years ago, the Court recognized that “segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws,” and required interdistrict busing between school districts to ensure racial integration.

Fifty-seven years later, the Court effectively reversed itself.

In 2007, two new justices (Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito) joined the Supreme Court, having been appointed by a president whose own legitimacy was suspect. One of the first decisions in which they participated effectively overturned Brown, without claiming to do so.

The 2007 Parents Involved decision prohibited public school districts from pursuing voluntary intradistrict busing plans to prevent racial isolation — prohibiting essentially what Brown had historically mandated. While perversely citing Brown, the Roberts Court eviscerated its holding and left Brown a doctrinally dangling shadow of its former self. As Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent from the majority decision, “The chief justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown,” entails “a cruel irony.”

Today, de facto segregation in the housing market routinely determines which public schools students have an opportunity to attend. It also drives the experiences of young people with respect to police, who are deployed across the US, particularly in low-income communities of color, and who behave very differently in those settings than when policing high-income areas or examining white suspects.

The few goals that the civil rights movement did secure for a time have been either abandoned by policymakers & jurists (like voting rights and desegregation) or instead turned on their heads (like anti-discrimination principles, which conservatives weaponized to challenge and overturn programs allowing preferential access for minorities to opportunities such as public education or employment).

We continue today to struggle for the broader objectives sought by his movement, including universal healthcare, the right to food, the end of state violence, and freedom from militarism.

MLK’s Voice

Dr. King’s voice is remembered in many ways. Some of them—like reflexive invocations of his 1963 speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in which he declared, “I have a dream”—ironically water down the broader range that his voice attained across contexts.

A letter from jail

Two texts, in particular, help reveal the radical perspective of this still underappreciated thinker. One was written while he was in jail in Alabama, just four months before his historic speech in Washington for which he is most widely remembered.

Dr. King’s iconic Letter from Birmingham Jail offers a succinct and compelling critique of deference to an establishment for the sake of expediency. He wrote to white clergy who had argued against King’s organizing and agitation for racial justice. He explained the intrinsic urgency behind any struggle for justice, and how the preference of more comfortable allies for “order” leads many to resign, abandon, or simply forget their commitments to justice.

King explains how the intransigence of unapologetic racists should be expected. There is little, after all, that can be done to shift their attitudes.

But he saves a sharper critique for the so-called “ally” who disappears at the first sign of agitation. King describes “the white moderate” as playing the role of impeding justice, despite their intentions.

While many proud moderates might think of themselves as making reasoned compromises between opposing extremes, King explained how they in fact enable the brutality of the right wing by siding with it—in the name of order—against grassroots movements in every generation clamoring for long overdue justice.

The dynamic that Dr. King described in his letter from Birmingham Jail is unfortunately timeless.

Many voices, for instance, have responded to the contemporary movement for Black lives, and calls to abolish policing and mass slavery through incarceration, by emphasizing how poorly the slogan “defund the police” polls with public audiences. They either never learned, or chose to ignore, Dr. King’s teaching.

To reduce demands for justice to slogans, and evaluate them based on public opinion—as opposed to the moral and legal principles at stake, as courts are supposed to do—is to abandon the rule of law altogether.

When the Supreme Court took action to end Jim Crow, it didn’t do it by deferring to the established order. Desegregation was deeply unpopular in 1954, so much so that after the Court issued its ruling in Brown, state officials openly tried to nullify the case by invoking state rights, prompting a series of further decisions (including one of the only unanimous joint opinions in the Supreme Court’s 250-year history) that ultimately forced the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, to finally desegregate four years later. It took yet another case to force the schools open after local officials tried to close them altogether.

Today, nearly a century later, our country continues to wage a cultural war over the vision animating those rulings, while pretending to have made progress on issues that in fact reflect stagnation and retrogression. The deference shown by “the white moderate” towards power, motivated by a need to preserve the establishment’s order in spite of its thorough illegitimacy, remains the central challenge confronting movements for justice in the United States, as well as those around the world responding to abuses enabled by Washington.

Four months after writing his letter from Birmingham Jail, King spoke in Washington of his dream envisioning a post-racial society. That vision has armed legions of subsequent white moderates with the quotes necessary to defang King’s critique—especially in the wake of the symbolic triumphs to which President Obama reduced his own legacy. That is why the Letter from Birmingham Jail ranks among the most crucial political texts in U.S. history. It exposes the true voice of an international icon widely reduced to caricature.

As we shall see, that truth remains crucial to expose today. In fact, it has grown only more urgent as the injustice to which King responded has expanded dramatically, both here in the U.S. and across the entire world.

A speech identifying three “intersecting evils”

Four years (almost to the day) after his historic speech in Washington, King spoke in Chicago at the National Conference for New Politics. This address was incredibly significant, both because he coined an analytical method that gained a widespread following only decades later, and also because he specifically named three plagues that continue to besiege democracy in America—and life on Earth—today.

King described how seemingly separate social phenomena reinforce each other. Racism refers to systems of entrenched hierarchy, while capitalism is an economic model that bases its legitimacy on claims to meritocracy that should seemingly align with an anti-racist perspective.

Meanwhile, militarism emerges through spending priorities, foreign policy, and a culture dedicated to glorifying war & conflict in forums from movies to video games.

The problems of racism and militarism may seem separate from a country’s economic model, but King spoke—in no uncertain terms—about how militarism, capitalism, and racism inevitably “intersect.”

It’s not hard to see why.

Capitalism is predicated on the ability of investors to invest capital in order to seek investment income or capital appreciation. It is necessarily path dependent, in the sense that anyone with greater resources at any given moment in time enjoys massive advantages over others who do not, particularly in the ability to leverage existing capital, and the ability to decline to transact at all.

Yet, despite claims that it somehow advances meritocracy, the contemporary distribution of wealth—capital—reflects generations of theft, appropriation, genocide, forced labor, and war. It has been dramatically skewed by a long history of violent racism by colonial powers: the militarism that King described as another intersecting evil.

Colonialism is not merely a historical phenomenon, but in fact has continuing aspects that all tend to reinforce white capital. The most direct example may be discriminatory assessments in housing markets, but the dynamic repeats itself in hiring, advancement, and any number of other spheres from education to agriculture and technology. Dr. King himself spoke about how even constructions of beauty and language have been warped by dimensions of racism that continue to loom over our country today.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center @TheKingCenter

“I’m Black and Beautiful!” #MLK

In addition to substantively identifying racism, capitalism, and militarism as the evils poisoning America and its role in the world, King also pioneered an analytical method that at the time was revolutionary.

Rather than analyze each of those social conditions in isolation, he observed how they each serve as reinforcing causes and effects for the others. This holistic approach to considering the implications of policies, and the paradigms they together construct, stands in sharp contrast to the dominant analytical method that instead aims to isolate issues and divorce discussions from context or history.

Journalists learned nothing from King. In 2011, when an intersectional movement responding to his vision reclaimed public space in cities across America to challenge economic inequality, forever wars, and ecocide on behalf of the 99%, the same canards that King faced were deployed once again against us.

In particular, the press demonstrated its ignorance of intersectionality by foolishly insisting that the movement reduce its various intersectional demands to bullet points. Editors dutifully played the role of “the white moderate” decried by MLK himself.

Over the years since the Occupy movement once again inspired a generation of American justice activists, the notion of intersectionality has gained increasingly widespread recognition. I was proud to help pioneer its application to grassroots organizing against policing abuses starting in 2010, by developing intersectional goals that combined the objectives of various grassroots movements, crafting information resources to support grassroots coalitions, and cultivating them across the U.S. for several years.

I later grew dismayed to discover how many voices loyal to the Democratic establishment get away with mouthing concerns about intersectionality while ultimately punching down in the service of corruption.

MLK’s Legacy

Describing King as merely a “civil rights leader” is offensive for at least two reasons. First, his voice addressed a vast array of issues well beyond civil rights, including economics, foreign policy, and jurisprudence. Second, he was a leader not only of a movement, but an entire civilization.

If more Americans came to recognize the continuing relevance of Dr. King’s voice—not to history, but to current events—we might finally make some progress on the underlying goals of his movement that were never satisfied.

Not only do we have yet to secure the goals that King explicitly sought, but we today carry a further burden: overturning the impacts of a mounting global crisis whose precursors he observed, only to be ignored.

Beyond offering vital insights on how our seemingly separate struggles ultimately intersect, King also presaged the mounting global climate catastrophe.

First, his own stated concerns centered on racial justice, economic justice, and global peace & justice—each of which informs the contemporary movement for climate justice. To the same extent that intersectional analysis informed his identification of the “evils” that we have yet to overcome, it has also revealed in the years since his assassination just how dangerous the threats he discussed then have come to grow now.

King recognized explicitly that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” which is in itself a succinct description of the inevitably shared nature of the climate calamity. But he also more precisely identified the most crucial “evils”—militarism, capitalism, and racism—that continue to enable accelerating climate chaos.

Few settings offer a more vivid depiction of how these intersections fuel climate change than corporate natural resource extraction. I referenced Dr. King’s analysis of the “intersecting evils” at the Youth Climate Strike in San Jose in September 2019, using that example to explain the roles played by militarism, capitalism, and racism in the global climate catastrophe.

Shahid Buttar (find me on Substack) @ShahidForChange

On September 20, millions joined a climate strike to demand 🌎 A Green New Deal ⛰ Respect for Indigenous Land ⚖️ Enviro Justice 🌱 Biodiversity 🌾 Sustainable Agriculture We added 🏰Dismantle the CIA & Pentagon MLK decried racism, capitalism & militarism. We must end them all!

Shahid Buttar (find me on Substack) @ShahidForChange

In addition to the climate crisis, another contemporary issue reflecting the intersections that MLK warned us to confront is police violence.

The role of racism is fairly obvious, if only in the remarkably consistent selection of which innocent people police kill with stunning regularity.

Militarism is also inevitably implicated: the surveillance tools and paramilitary combat gear to which police gain access are parts of the same military-industrial complex that Eisenhower also warned us to fear, while a disturbing number of police officers are recruited from the ranks of veterans returning home from international conflict.

Capitalism also plays crucial roles in police violence with impunity. First, policing is a lucrative enterprise for everyone involved. Police officers—especially senior ones—are paid handsomely, despite increasingly visible reputations for responding to public safety crises like cowards. Beyond individual officers, public spending on police departments has grown as quickly as the costs of higher education and healthcare, while also crowding out other local budget items—many of which many be better poised to protect public safety—that have suffered as a result.

Finally, capitalism plays another, widely ignored role underlying policing, which San Francisco depicts painfully well. It is capital, after all, that police protect. In our city, a backlash has emerged targeting unhoused people, overlooking their inherent dignity as human beings and the harsh reality that most of them were San Francisco residents who enjoyed stable housing until they didn’t.

The casual disregard for other human beings that leads, for instance, a property owner to douse an unhoused person with water in the middle of winter, or an entitled tech worker to write an open letter critical of their very existence, reflects the triumph of capitalism over humanity.

But this is not just an individual problem. Despite a judicial order prohibiting officials from doing so, and having had to publicly apologize for its prolific racism in the past, San Francisco has recently conducted illegal sweeps of homeless encampments, seizing tents and lifesaving gear even in the midst of catastrophic storms and flooding.

The extent to which avarice has been institutionalized—from Washington, DC all the way down to the local level in cities across the U.S.—can not be overstated.

No one can say we were not warned.

History offering hope—and caution

It’s tough to reflect on how an ignorant civilization has watered down Dr. King’s voice —despite his attaining the status of global justice icon, and losing his life to right wing terrorism—and feel any sense of hope for the future.

I’ll offer a closing vignette for paid subscribers that might offer some hope, while admitting at the outset that the story also suggests its unfortunate limits. If nothing else, this coda—which helps explain how Martin Luther King, Jr. Day became a national holiday—helps indicate how artists and musicians can help inform history.