Martin, Malcolm, & Maybe Marx

     Back in September, I had the privilege of attending a Kingian Non-Violence Two-Day Core Curriculum Training led by the Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr. The title's ungainly, granted, but the seminar was an incredible experience. It's not every day (or at every university) that you get to spend the weekend with one of Dr. King's close confidants, learning directly from him what the principles of the movement were.

King and Lafayette, 1968
(Fair use, photo credit AP Photo/Charles Kelly)

     That weekend, we spent about an hour and a half going over some of King's writings, including the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. But I think more interesting (to me), at least for the purposes of this blog post, is an excerpt from King's book "Stride Toward Freedom" in which he enumerates his agreements and disagreements with Marx. Most of his disagreements are what you'd expect - the Reverend was repulsed by the anti-religious bent of Marx ("Religion is the opiate of the masses," etc.) and the tendency of Communist regimes toward totalitarianism, saying, "Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state." Dr. King agreed with Marx in the same places most Americans (myself included) would. "Capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life... In so far as [Marx] pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness in the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian churches, I responded with a definite 'yes.'"

     While King was adamantly opposed to violent revolution, he was no fan of the status quo in which, as he said in his I Have a Dream speech, "America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'" He desired both legal and economic justice for all people, especially the disadvantaged (including by ending the war in Vietnam, which he argued would benefit both poor American draftees and poor Vietnamese citizens alike), and believed that nonviolent protest was the most effective medium for radical change. As the video below will point out, the Dr. King we learn about in school is much more mild in his presence and rhetoric than the one who led the most significant American social movement of the last century.

                                                        


     In some ways, Dr. King and Malcolm X are not as diametrically opposed as we often think. Both agreed that the status quo was not one under which people could continue, and both agreed that it was time for fast and radical change. In this they continue the tradition in black American thought of W.E.B. DuBois who said, "The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression," instead of the tradition of Booker T. Washington who said, "It often requires more courage to suffer in silence than to rebel." The methods of rebellion offered by King and Little (Malcolm X) were very different, but they both had in mind the socioeconomic equality of black Americans with white Americans. This isn't Marxism wholesale - neither advocated government takeover of the means of production, they just wanted government to ensure that black people could have their fair share of control over the means of production. But it does recognize the partial truth of Marxist thought, which is that unrestrained capitalism leads to an economic injustice that prevents people from realizing their full potential.