MLK Day-Related Reflections
Over the weekend and on the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I revisited some of King’s work and engaged with work and dialogue about King and his legacy.
Having sat for a while with some thoughts on what I took away from all that, I figured it would be worth trying to put some of the takeaways, observations and insights into words — and here into Waywards.
On Monday, I listened to two speeches by Dr. King I’d heard and read before. I wanted to refresh my memory and hear him speak at length again. Democracy Now posted audio from King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, and from his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop Speech,” delivered April 3, 1968, in Memphis the night before he was killed. So I listened to them and read through the accompanying transcripts, which along with the other germane material I engaged with, sparked a few reflections. I try to flesh some of those out in part below.
International Solidarity and the Meaning of Family
I’ll discuss both here, but I’ll begin with “Beyond Vietnam,” a speech in which King denounced the US war on Vietnam.
“Dr. King was greatly excoriated for that speech,” explained Ryan Sorrell in his acceptance speech upon receiving the MLK Community Service Award from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City this year. In addition to drawing the ire of the Johnson administration, “major civil rights leaders felt that the position taken by Dr. King on the war would bring harm to the struggle for civil rights,” Sorrell, founder and executive editor of the Kansas City Defender, continued, adding: “Dr. King agreed that the speech would bring condemnation, but he stated in the speech that his conscience left him no other choice than to be critical of a war that brought not only devastation to the Vietnamese people, but to the poor people of this country because of the tremendous diversion of resources that were being invested in the war and not at home.”
The speech illustrated King’s growing commitment to international solidarity, expressed during that 1967 speech with respect to the Vietnamese people, and showed his unwillingness to sacrifice that solidarity, his refusal to ignore the moral imperative to denounce industrial-scale violence abroad, for domestic achievements in civil rights. Although, as noted in the documentary MLK/FBI (2020), it took him time to find his bearings on this.
Yet, in addition to recognizing the need to speak out publicly against the war to end the suffering inflicted by napalm, guns and bombs, I think he also understood the interconnectedness of struggles. His analysis seems to suggest efforts to redress poverty and racism in the US were systematically undermined by devoting massive energy and resources to militarism and war.
The title of the speech comes from King’s claim in 1967 that “war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” a “sobering reality” demanding “a significant and profound change in American life and policy.”
Demonstrating characteristic concern for his fellow human beings, King emphasized the toll of the war on US soldiers.
In light of not only ongoing destruction still abetted by US decision-makers but also the various ways military service harms those involved, that kind of compassion seems as necessary today as ever. It’s still as necessary as the “radical revolution of values,” and the much-needed “shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society” King advocated in that speech.
Similar themes came up in the recent MLK symposium hosted by the Philadelphia-based coffee and book store, Uncle Bobbie's Coffee & Books, founded by Marc Lamont Hill, who facilitated the panel discussion.
In the recording I listened to and watched over the weekend, Rev. Dr. Leslie Callahan, one of the panel participants, talked a bit about King's role as a pastor in relation to his growing commitment to international solidarity, his refusal to remain silent about the war on Vietnam and his evolving ideas about the social transformation needed to achieve the "beloved community."
"If you ever really get serious about the well-being of somebody besides just you and your family, then ... your politics change,” Callahan commented, riffing on the above. “They just do."
Of course, fighting for family — and perhaps in so doing enlarging the scope of who becomes family — can likely lead to a change in politics and a revaluation of values on some scale.
In his book, “Where Do We Go From Here? From Chaos to Community,” King wrote about how “on the coasts of Africa, mothers fought slave traders fiercely to save their children,” offering “their bodies to slavers if they would leave the children behind.” Enslaved parents on plantations “fought unarmed against guns and knives” too, he noted, and after formal emancipation, “countless mothers wandered over roadless states looking for the children who had been taken from them and sold.” In his time he witnessed mothers, fathers and children marching “together against clubs, guns, cattle prods and mobs, not for conquest but only to be allowed to live as humans.” He called the Black family “sacred,” but acknowledged it was struggling to survive.
He referenced the “racing locomotives of American history” that had ripped families apart.
We see that still today. Institutions like prison violently separate families.
But at the same time, efforts to redress the harm prison inflicts on human beings, families and communities persist.
A book like “Missing Daddy,” by organizer and author Mariame Kaba, gives children of incarcerated parents a resource that reminds them they’re not alone and helps explain their experience, for example.
In the same spirit, the annual Seasonal Joy Drive organized by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a collective of incarcerated legal activists and scholars, provides gifts for kids with incarcerated parents and accepts requests for assistance from imprisoned persons each year.
And as far as organizing to actively end family policing and separation goes, Joyce McMillan spearheads the JMacForFamilies organization endeavoring to abolish the racist and “punitive child welfare system and to strengthen the systems of supports that keep families and communities together.”
As the inspirational people and efforts mentioned above illustrate, King’s work continues.
Unconditional Love for Human Beings
One reason King’s spirit remains present in the world probably has to do with people taking seriously his “call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind,” which also came during the “Beyond Vietnam” speech.
Before citing the First Epistle of Saint John — with its affirmation, “God is love,” and insistence that when we“love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us” — King qualified what he meant.
“When I speak of love, I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response, I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh,” he said. “I’m speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.”
Similar sentiments can be found in the last book King authored.
“Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all,” he wrote in “Where Do We Go From Here?”
In the same book lamenting the corrupting “withered sense of justice,” he wrote that “too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America,” and asserted ignoring evil makes one “an accomplice to it.”
He also explicitly connected racial justice with socioeconomic justice. King referenced “Power for Poor People” — a notion he had hoped to bring to light with the Poor People’s Campaign he was organizing before his assassination — and he suggested racism, and what today might be termed anti-Blackness, couldn’t be meaningfully addressed “unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.”
King echoed the idea in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech when he claimed real “compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
To that point, he called for a “guaranteed income” as a way to respect and honor the dignity of each individual and to help put an end to unnecessary deprivation.
And the “abolition of poverty” King referenced in the aforementioned book requires going beyond charity.
This is not always readily acknowledged when major institutions pay tribute to the civil rights champion, however.
I’ll try to explain. I watched some as the NBA honored King during a series of games on TNT on Monday. Although sometimes those commemorations risk whitewashing his most significant commitments to justice, I personally think that athletes, especially those in a predominantly black organization like the NBA, celebrating MLK on the federal holiday and sharing how he’s inspired them can contribute to the common good. A lot of athletes in the NBA and in other professional sports also do charitable work, but not all of it seeks to restructure conditions that underlie the need for that kind of philanthropy to begin with.
Now, some philanthropic work makes a real difference in people’s lives and material well-being, but some also try to go beyond that in ways that come closer to resembling the kind of justice King embraced and wanted to help bring into being.
Take former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, for example. The series he edited and helped publish, “Abolition For The People: The Movement For A Future Without Policing & Prisons,” encourages people to ask whether they will remain complicit with injustice or cooperate in dismantling and transcending institutions that perpetuate it.
Paige Bueckers, an outstanding guard for the UConn women’s basketball team and one of the 2022 Seventeen Voices of the Year, actively sparks conversations about social justice and supports a pop-up mutual aid food distribution program in her home state of Minnesota. I think there’s more she can do and, from what I gather, intends to do with her platform and resources, even as she also focuses on basketball, her passion.
On that note, I don’t think it’s helpful when people clamor at others to abandon what they’re passionate about rather than thinking through how those passions can enable and facilitate some of the social changes desired, but I do tend to think commitment to sport and to the kind of love King called for need not be mutually exclusive. It can even be complementary. With that line of thinking, Sorrell and his colleagues at the Kansas City Defender brought their community together for a basketball park-run last summer, drawing on a tradition of organizing neighborhood programs popularized by the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
Accepting Human Imperfections and Rejecting Dehumanization
Another related lesson reiterated when I engaged with work on King over the weekend has to do with the necessity of grappling with our inevitable flaws as human beings and understanding that even those of us who accomplish the incredible and stand as paragons of justice and virtue in many respects are still human and have their own moral shortcomings as we all do.
That theme came up in the film MLK/FBI (2020).
I think it’s the Yale historian Beverley Gage who speaks when there are important connections drawn in the documentary regarding FBI surveillance of King and the Bureau’s intention to use what they discovered by monitoring his private sex life to derail his movement building. Based on a letter the FBI sent him, those in the Bureau also hoped they could compel King to kill himself.
Not for nothing, the documentary proceeds to point to the shameful history of accusations and labels of sexual deviance being used in the interest of racist politics and misandry, as with it how it functioned to justify obstruction of Black male suffrage.
I think it’s Gage who in the documentary refers to the "representation of Black political aspiration as sexual threat” in the US, adding: "And unfortunately that's an ever recurring theme — this mobilization of Black sexuality as a justification for murder, for exclusion, for discrimination and for incarceration.”
A framework for analysis and field like Black Male Studies, championed most notably by philosopher Dr. Tommy J. Curry, helps draw attention to and encourages critical interrogation of that neglected history and social ill.
The reference to incarceration in the film also strikes me as relevant. Sexual deviance, racialized and otherwise, has been used as justification for perpetuation of prisons and for retributive penal policies as well as practices. Without going into detail here, suffice it to note Loïc Wacquant documents how some of that has played out in the chapter, “Moralism and Punitive Panopticism: Hunting Down Sex Offenders,” featured within his book, “Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity,” published in 2009.
In effect, punitive ideological justification dehumanizes through imprisonment. It does so without concern for or attempts to come to terms with human shortcomings and mistakes — and without real effort to repair harm that can come from those mistakes. It militates against the militant love that might seek to understand and transform the sociocultural and political-economic conditions, as well as the interpersonal conflicts, that can compel and exacerbate our flaws. Instead, the ideological-political intervention invents or exaggerates examples of (often sexual) harm to justify harmful institutions that exacerbate and reproduce racism and poverty through a paradigm that equates justice with punishment at the expense of love.
All of that informs a philosophy of prison abolition for me. I could also argue a thoroughgoing philosophy of nonviolence, not unlike what Dr. King embraced, now demands a notion of justice at odds with the prison system too, given the violence always inherent and reproduced in it.
On that note, it’s worth invoking another apropos point Rev. Dr. Leslie Callahan made during the MLK panel hosted by Uncle Bobbie’s. She suggested King's philosophy of nonviolence can’t easily be separated from his commitment to self-determination, though she added that in her view self-determination is possible without that philosophy. Drawing on Callahan’s insight, we can view the value of self-determination King evinced by refusing to let anti-Blackness or those embodying it determine how he would act and respond as a powerful assertion of humanity, of human dignity and of agency of the kind that, it seems to me, prisons systematically and violently deny people.
Developing “a kind of dangerous unselfishness”
Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention the light radiated by King during the speech he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was killed. The speech ends indelibly with arguably the most powerful words ever used to conclude, and I used to play the last few minutes of that “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” talk when I taught community college public speaking courses — including one I taught inside the state prison in Norco, California, near Riverside, where I live.
Some backdrop and context to set the stage: King was in Memphis to support sanitation workers on strike. His time spent in Chicago and exposure to work around housing rights made it even more apparent to him that achieving real justice and racial justice required addressing the unjust socioeconomic system. At the end of his life he also hoped to grow the Poor People’s Campaign and organize a popular march on Washington that could’ve effectively shut the city down as a way to peaceably-yet-militantly achieve some of the desired structural changes.
In his final speech that night in Tennessee, King spoke about the solidarity required to realize justice and reorient social as well as (inter)personal values in the interest of the human family.
“Be concerned about your brother,” he said. “You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.”
What is more, he encouraged cultivation of a profound outlook and approach to life.
“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” King offered.
Excellent advice, I think, if we wish to nourish all-too-latent human instincts for love and our innate, if currently repressed, self-transforming capacities.
My own moral and ethical efforts routinely fall short of anything approximating a “dangerous unselfishness,” but I firmly believe that to be a righteous orientation to guide our daily lives. It’s an orientation that ought to guide mine, at any rate.
Of course, developing a “dangerous unselfishness” can involve taking risks, as suggested above.
When I would play the conclusion to King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, the consensus among students would usually be that he waxed prescient. Watching it all these years later still gives chills. He intimates he might not get to the “promised land” with everyone, but he informs listeners he’s not concerned about that; rather, he just wants “to do God’s will,” and God, he explains, has permitted him ”to go up to the mountain” and look over and see that land. Then, with a crescendo followed by a mic drop-like exit, he ends the speech with a biblical refrain made famous by “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which I reckon is also as appropriate a place as any to conclude this piece:
And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!