Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peter Ling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317552208
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Peter Ling's acclaimed biography of Martin Luther King Jr provides a thorough re-examination of both the man and the Civil Rights Movement, showing how King grew into his leadership role and kept his faith as the challenges facing the movement strengthened after 1965. Ling combines a detailed narrative of Martin Luther King's life with the key historiographical debates surrounding him and places both within the historical context of the Civil Rights Movement.

This fully revised and updated second edition includes an extended look at Black Power and a detailed analysis of the memorialization of King since his death, including President Obama's 50th anniversary address, and how conservative spokesmen have tried to appropriate King as an advocate of colour-blindness.

Drawing on the wide-ranging and changing scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement, this volume condenses research previously scattered across a larger literature. Peter Ling's crisp and fluent style captures the drama, irony and pathos of King's life and provides an excellent introduction for students and others interested in King, the Civil Rights movement, and America in the 1960s.

1    Introduction

Historians still mistrust biography, although the reading public clearly prefers it. Biography can inflate the role of its subject and, with one person consistently placed in the foreground, it may overlook the contribution of less celebrated figures. It may also distort historical understanding by giving too little weight to structural forces that require less personal, even quantitative, analysis. This continues to be the mood among scholars of the American Civil Rights Movement, who honor Dr. King, but want us to appreciate a longer and more complex struggle (Dowd Hall 2005).

Martin And The Movement: A Concise View

In an early oral history interview, a critic of King, Ella Baker, complained that “the Movement made Martin, not Martin the Movement,” and her view has been championed in several works that collectively insist that we need to pay attention to the numerous stories of ordinary people in the Movement rather than become fixated on the myth of a fallen hero (Grant 1998: 123). In this biography, when you read about the people behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapter 3), or about how others besides King set the pace for the Civil Rights Movement before 1963 (Chapter 4), or how the Birmingham campaign turned on the basis of tactics that King was unsure of (Chapter 5), or when you consider the criticisms leveled against King regarding the 1964 St. Augustine and the 1965 Selma campaigns (Chapters 6 and 7 respectively), you may detect that I have some sympathy with Baker’s view. Without the activities of the Movement, most of which he did not control, Martin Luther King might well have been no more than just another black Baptist preacher who spoke well.

This biography also tries to reclaim a Martin Luther King who risks being forgotten by giving due weight to the years after the Selma campaign and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the two and a half years of additional life that fate allowed him before he was gunned down in Memphis on April 4, 1968, King could point to no achievement to match the Voting Rights Act. His relationship with President Lyndon Johnson’s administration deteriorated from mistrust to hostility. After his Riverside church sermon (April 4, 1967), condemning US policy in Vietnam in stark terms, he was vilified in the mainstream press, notably by important, moderate black leaders, as either a communist dupe or an ignorant publicity-seeker. At the same time, other African American voices, like those that had cheered in 1963 when Malcolm X had denounced King as a “chump” not a “champ,” became more voluble after 1966, as they rallied behind the overt call for “Black Power.” Such voices were not entirely new, but they were louder and the media heeded them in a cynical way since they fed a story-line that sold. They reported how African American militants jeered King at the “New Politics” convention of 1967 more readily than they explained why King was there. They noted how some ghetto youths even giggled during his speeches in Cleveland that fall, and seized upon the fact that Memphis gang members, stirred up by a militant youth group, the Invaders, broke up a nonviolent protest march that King was leading in their city in late March 1968 and looted stores. This was proof, it seemed, that King’s nonviolence was at best a spent tactic and at worst a threadbare ruse. At the time of his death, the press saw King as a falling star more likely to damage America than to help it fulfil its creed.

We are already as far away in time from King’s life as he was from World War I. His shocking death and the subsequent commemoration culminated in King becoming the first African American to be honored with a national public holiday in 1983. During this time distorted memory allowed conservative critics to cite King selectively in support of their resistance to affirmative action and renewal of key civil rights measures. King’s posthumous image as a saint within America’s civil religion makes it harder to appreciate the hostility he generated because of the genuine radicalism he showed in 1968 when he threatened the functioning of the federal government in time of war by his Poor People’s Campaign. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and other powerful figures regarded King, for all his advocacy of nonviolence, as a dangerous demagogue. One can depict King’s career as a classic case of rise and fall, and incorporate aspects of Ella Baker’s charge. As the Civil Rights Movement expanded and intensified in the years prior to 1965, King’s career prospered. But as the Movement fractured and the white backlash intensified, King’s career correspondingly nose-dived. Martyrdom in Memphis rescued King’s reputation in a way that his struggling efforts to mobilize a nonviolent army of the poor against the federal government seemed to have little chance of doing.

In practice, good polemic seldom corresponds to good history, and the line taken in this biography is more balanced. The pivotal Chicago campaign is extensively treated in Chapter 8, with particular attention being paid not simply to the arguments made that King, as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, should not have attempted to address racial inequality outside of the South, but also to the crucial distinction between “organizing” and “mobilizing.” Under Ella Baker’s mentorship, SNCC devoted most of its early energies to grassroots organizing in Mississippi and other Deep South states prior to 1966, as part of what Charles Payne has called “the organizing tradition.” In this tradition, activists concentrated on developing the collective ability of ordinary local people to organize for the constant contest for power. As they did so, they laid the foundations for the success of various mobilizing campaigns, and had confirmed that what was needed was Black Power.

Although he was a shrewder, more experienced leader by 1966 than the man that Ella Baker had dismissed in 1960 as a hero with “feet of clay,” King remained more suited to the task of mobilization. His charisma generated short-term enthusiasm and his public relations skills enabled him to present an issue as so pressing a moral wrong that it demanded action. In Chicago and subsequent campaigns, King struggled to reconcile his strategy to the fact that deep-seated problems of economic injustice required long-term organizing as well as short-term mobilization. He was unable to secure the kind of victories in his efforts to organize neighborhood unions against slums that could be first translated into federal law and then subsequently used to extract further concessions. Via the summer “Open Housing” marches in Chicago, he tried to dramatize the issue of housing segregation by a strategy of mobilization for nonviolent protest, but the practical effect of the Summit Accord, agreed in August 1966, depended on continuing organizational pressure, which King’s campaign had failed to develop sufficiently as a self-sustaining force.

This biography argues that King’s predicament in 1966 can be no more ascribed exclusively to his deficiencies than his earlier supposed successes can be attributed solely to his talents. King’s failure to secure a significant improvement in the lives of Chicago ghetto dwellers crucially owed more to the opposition or lack of will of others, including many whites in churches and unions, than to his own failings. Accepting that King was more of a mobilizer than an organizer, one begins to see that some of the Movement setbacks of his later years sprang primarily from the failures of others. Some of the best recent scholarship provides a richer understanding of the Black Power thread that runs within the Freedom Struggle and argues that the post-1965 period saw vital successes rather than setbacks (Joseph 2006, 2010). This revisionist position requires the rejection of King’s own judgment that, despite its emotional appeal and essential logic, Black Power was a slogan that was more effective in inducing solidarity among whites than among blacks. It also seeks to minimize the conservative counter-movement that used Black Power to mobilize against radical social change.

Black Power and King’s relationship to it is central to understanding the growing racial crisis of the 1960s. Chapter 9 considers this topic and the concurrent challenge faced by King: how far should he publicly oppose US involvement in Vietnam? The two developments significantly reduced his room for maneuver as a strategist of the center by 1967. Black Power’s resonance with African Americans whether in Mississippi, Alabama, California, Illinois, or New Jersey, made it a potent mobilizing strategy, but it seemed at times to generate a level of the black militancy that was hard to organize and sustain, especially in light of the white repression it fueled. Many Black Power leaders were forced into exile, imprisoned, or even killed before they could mature as organizers. In terms of mobilizing leadership, King’s credentials had been best demonstrated by his ability to end rather than just lead demonstrations. In Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma, he had proved able to terminate campaigns that had served their purpose in key respects. Black Power advocates interpreted the ghetto disturbances after 1965 as uprisings expressive of their ideology of self-determination. To the chagrin of white conservatives, the Kerner Commission was unable to prove that the disturbances were sparked by black militants, but the latter’s inability or reluctance to control the uprisings ultimately undercut demands for concessions to prevent renewed disorder.

A close examination of King’s decision to speak out against the Vietnam War exposes both his initial reluctance (of which he remained disproportionately ashamed) and his limited options. By the time of his Riverside speech, remaining silent or even discreet about the war was earning African American leaders little of substance. The cutbacks to the War on Poverty were already severe, and the escalating costs and casualties offered no prospect of a reversal, until the Vietnam War was halted. The remaining argument for silence was one of fear and narrow self-interest, and King decided that if he was to continue in public life, he should do so for what he genuinely believed. As with the Chicago campaign, one can question not King’s decision to speak out, but the political judgment of those, like Bayard Rustin, who counseled him not to. Nevertheless, while King took a vocal stand, he did not lead a nonviolent campaign against the war, as colleagues like James Bevel pleaded with him to do.

Already you may detect that my interpretation of King is paradoxical. I argue that Baker’s charge that he was made by the Movement is most valid for the period up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the period of legislative achievements for which he is commonly accorded the greatest praise. Conversely, I contend that the Martin Luther King who emerges from the later struggles is the heroic figure, a radical leader striving to address injustice at the cost of unpopularity and isolation. In the process of highlighting this aspect of King’s life, what follows is informed by a well-established scholarship on the conservative resurgence that reads the racial confrontations of the 1960s not simply in terms of immediate liberal, legislative victories, but also incipient, neo-conservative, political ones (Carter 1995). By 1968, the margin of victory for Republican Richard Nixon over veteran liberal Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the presidential race was narrow largely because Wallace siphoned away some of Nixon’s conservative support. Four years later, the shooting of Wallace during the primary contests helped to ensure a Nixon landslide. The political tide had never been entirely on King’s side, and at the time of his death it was clearly running against both him and his dreams.

King’s career was not just made by the Movement, but shaped by the counter-movement. In many respects, this is a familiar argument that sees Southern outrages from Montgomery in 1956 to Selma in 1965 as generating national support for the civil rights cause. What is added here is a reminder of how potent Southern political influence remained and how shallow white sympathy proved. The Kennedy-assisted release of King from jail in 1960 actually entailed the cultivation of white Southern Democrats by the future president in a way that heralded his preferred, neutral stance on civil rights. By the summer of the Freedom Rides of 1961, King and Attorney-General Robert Kennedy regarded each other with more distrust, not less. Over the next twelve months, involvement in Albany, Georgia, demonstrated to King and other Movement activists that the Justice Department wanted order more than justice.

By 1963 when King published his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” much of his harshest criticism was leveled at white liberals and moderates, people who claimed to be sympathetic to African American calls for equality and yet found excuses as to why the dream should be deferred. The white contribution to the successful Selma campaign of 1965, however, seemed to lessen King’s skepticism, albeit temporarily. Despite warnings from his white advisor Stanley Levison, he expected his Chicago campaign to enjoy support from white church congregations. But white, ethnic, working-class fears of black competition for jobs, housing, and schooling turned the union and parish halls of Chicago into recruiting grounds for George Wallace-style conservatism. The Alabama demagogue spoke about the federal government’s threat to the little guy who had worked hard to buy his home and raise his kids. According to Wallace, “Big Government” was trying to increase his taxes to provide handouts to lazy blacks and to reduce the value of his home by allowing blacks to move next door. It threatened his children’s education by busing in blacks from crime-infested schools, and would destroy not just his, but his son’s, prospects by racially affirmative action in the workplace. With greater skill and geniality, Ronald Reagan would use these arguments to win the White House in 1980.

King fully appreciated the strength of white racism, and he was shrewd enough to realize that since 1966 the Black Power calls and summer ghetto disorders had boosted rather than drained it. Racism, materialism, and militarism were threatening to engulf the United States, and so he resolved to “go for broke.” The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 was intended to show that nonviolent direct action was more effective politically than the previous summer’s violent confrontations in Detroit and Newark. It was intended to force the needs of the American poor, the numerical majority of whom were white, onto the political agenda ahead of containing communism in Vietnam or landing a man on the moon before the Soviets did. King, of course, did not live to see the Poor People’s Campaign, nor did he have to cope with its dispiriting defeat. Nevertheless, his plans confirm that he had developed a critique of American society that was revolutionary in its intentions, even though he remained ambivalent about the exact scale and intensity of the mass non-cooperation and civil disobedience campaigns that were the nonviolent concomitants of his vision. In early discussions of the Poor People’s Campaign, the goal seemed to be nothing less than the complete disruption of government operations. Later, King seemed to retreat to more modest, symbolic actions, although in the eyes of the authorities, his plans remained deeply suspect and disturbing.

Given the 1999 court ruling that King was killed as a result of a conspiracy rather than solely at the hands of the now deceased James Earl Ray – the man convicted of his assassination – no new biography can properly ignore the fact that speculation persists about government involvement in King’s murder. In the pages that follow, the hostility of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to Martin Luther King is detailed, and the chapter on Memphis (Chapter 10) not only recounts the murder itself and Ray’s capture, but briefly reviews the claims Ray made concerning the involvement of his mysterious accomplice Raoul, the accusations leveled against the Memphis Police Department, the suggestions of “Mob” or CIA involvement, as well as the more mundane but compelling fact of a bounty scheme for King’s death funded by white supremacists.

The new edition gives greater treatment to King’s commemoration and his paradoxical position in Obama’s America. If the evidence for a conspiracy to kill King is still untrustworthy, the signs that his memory is being distorted are more abundant. Individuals like Jerry Falwell, founder of the conservative Moral Majority, once saw King as a dangerous subversive but now declare that they are following in his footsteps. The portion of his “I Have a Dream” speech in which he laments that America has given African Americans a “bad check” is hardly remembered, while the line that America will one day judge people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of the character” is wrenched out of context to support the idea that King opposed affirmative action and placed his faith in the free market. The King celebrated on King Day has become a gentle preacher who wants all Americans to think what they as individuals can do for others, and not the radical prophet who felt that the very architecture of American society had to be transformed so that it no longer sustained injustice and fetishized wealth but cherished the sanctity of every person by guaranteeing their human rights to food, shelter, health care, work and security. The elevation of King as an icon is most insidious when it forms part of the Civil Rights Movement as an episode in which good simply triumphed over an aberrant evil – symbolized by Bull Connor and his attacks on children or the murders in Mississippi and Alabama. What the Movement achieved was a partial and transient willingness on the part of ordinary people who did not see themselves as complicit in evil, to act so as to reduce its scale. The cause of justice is not yet won and King’s radical and unfulfilled demands are a part of the story that needs to be remembered.

Barack Obama’s presence in the Oval Office is evidence of the change that the Civil Rights Movement made, and King would have relished it. But King’s call for justice would have continued no matter who was in power. Black Power radicals sometimes spoke of the ballot or the bullet. King mistrusted both, and saw nonviolent direct action (sustained protest) as the vital complement to the first and alternative to the second. Obama has spoken eloquently about King’s example, even in his Nobel Peace Prize address, when he felt compelled to repudiate King’s own pacifism. While Obama can endorse King’s faith that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice and urge Americans as individuals to accentuate the bend, he remains sufficiently the moderate and pragmatic politician to follow the polls as well as the Gospel. Ultimately, this biography seeks to remind readers that King and the Movement were co-dependent, and that their story still calls us to action rather than acceptance.

2 Junior

Becoming Martin Luther King, 1929-55

“Cast out the sinner!” That was the call in August 1848 when William Williams asked fellow members of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Greene County, Georgia (seventy miles north of Atlanta) to expel Willis, one of his slaves, for stealing. Slave owners commonly complained that their slaves stole, though some expected Christianity to deter theft. The slaves regarded taking from one’s master differently than they did stealing from fellow slaves. It was not pilfering but an act of resistance. Masters regarded slaves as chattels, after all, and so the food they took was, in a sense, not even stolen – just stored differently. Preaching the Gospel to one’s slaves may have reduced the incidence of theft but it also provided a powerful ideological framework for claiming equality and asserting human dignity. Despite efforts to limit their knowledge to scriptural passages that recommended submission, slaves readily embraced the idea that everyone was equal in the sight of God. They relished the prospect that their masters would face divine judgment, just like themselves. In October 1848, Willis presented himself to the Shiloh church elders. He confessed his offense, but added that the Lord had forgiven him. Preempted by the Lord Himself, the elders had little option but to receive Willis back into their communion. By skillfully obliging the church committeemen to be better Christians, Willis – a preacher among his fellow slaves – was a fitting ancestor for his great grandson, Martin Luther King, Jr. He sounded a drum for justice to which his famed descendant would march.

A Family Of Preachers And Race Leaders

Like many a son, Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to escape his father’s shadow, yet followed his example. Born Michael King in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, the “Junior” in Martin Luther King, Jr. underlines the centrality of his relationship to his father, a powerful figure in his own right. A barely literate, Georgia country boy, Michael King, Sr. established himself as a mini...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chronology
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Junior: Becoming Martin Luther King, 1929-55
• 3. Loving Your Enemies: Montgomery, 1955-59
• 4. Finding His Way, 1960-62
• 5. Let The Children Come To Me: Birmingham, 1963
• 6. Along A Tightrope, 1963-64
• 7. Across A Bridge Of Mistrust: Selma To Montgomery, 1964-65
• 8. King’s Call: Organizing And Mobilizing Chicago, 1965-66
• 9. Shrinking Options: “Black Power” And Vietnam, 1966-67
• 10. Going For Broke: Memphis, 1968
• 11. Epilogue: In Memoriam – Remembering King
• Glossary of Organizations
• Guide to Further Reading
• Select Bibliography
• Index