The unknown King
MLK preached integration, reconciliation, unity
It may come as a shock to realize that, had he not been assassinated in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could still be alive today. He would have turned 91 last week.
He was a young man when he died. He was 26 when he led the successful Montgomery bus boycott following Rosa Parks’ famous arrest; 34 when he made his “I have a dream” speech on the Lincoln Memorial; barely 39 when he was shot to death on a hotel balcony in Memphis.
There was, however, more to Mr. King than the majestic speaker or even the civil rights leader for African Americans. In his later years, he was increasingly concerned with economic inequality and structural poverty. He conceived of the “poor people’s march” in an attempt to unite poor, disenfranchised whites, Hispanics and blacks — urban and rural. And he favored a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.
He also opposed the Vietnam War, which was controversial because many felt he was distracting himself from his chief identity and main task. Exactly a year before he died, Mr. King delivered a major address opposing the war, which brought wrath from some friends and allies, most notably the American politician who had done more for civil rights than anyone — Lyndon B. Johnson.
This Martin Luther King — the critic of the American economy, of the militarization of American life and of our consumer society — is too little known and discussed.
There is a second side to him that is also often ignored. And that is the prophet of the color blind society.
Mr. King was not a practitioner or advocate of identity politics or indeed any form of separatism. To the contrary. He preached integration, racial reconciliation and American unity.
Mr. King knew that he might well not live to be an old man. That is clear in his last speech, delivered the night before he died. He told his followers he might never see the “promised land.” In his too short life, he persuaded America that segregated Jim Crow laws could not stand and that it was time to “lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice.”
But if one reads his essays and speeches it is clear that, for him, the promised land, our “more perfect union” was one in which human beings could one day transcend race and find a brotherhood and sisterhood of values — one in which human rights were universal and forgiveness and friendship were possible across all lines of division. He would be satisfied with no less and he challenged his fellow Americans to be satisfied with no less: that we all might be, not many tribes and factions, but one.
We have largely forgotten this part of the dream.
Mr. King envisioned a society in which character and not external identity mattered most, and in which people of all colors and religions were united by what, for him, were gospel values and the deepest American values. He was not a separatist. He did not demonize. He was righteously angry but never bitter. He taught and practiced nonviolence. He united; he did not divide. He did not preach resentment, but love.