Image of MLK from the Religion News Service.
Of course, Martin Luther King was a liberal Christian preacher. What else was he? At this time of the year, a steady stream of articles say that MLK was something else. From the Right, you get statements about how MLK was a conservative. The Left likes to say that he was a socialist.
Considering the massive social change generated by the Civil Rights, it is no surprise that lots of people like to associate themselves with King’s message. People appropriate your message when you win.
Still, that evades some basic questions. Is there any truth to these statements? In what ways was MLK a socialist or a conservative? The answer, to me, is fairly obvious. MLK was definitely Christian and progressive. He was definitely not a socialist and not a conservative in most senses of the word.
King gave many speeches and published a great deal, so we have a lot to work with. Luckily, much of it is digitized at Stanford’s MLK archive. In this post, I will focus on My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, which can be found at Stanford’s website. This is an elegant and concise account of King’s philosophy and it clearly demarcates King’s view from other philosophies. This is what King has to say about Marxism in particular:
First I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God….
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the “millennial” end….
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism… And if any man’s so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted….
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me.
This isn’t the complete story. King found that he agreed with some of the Marxist’s grievances. Specifically, he objected to poverty: “I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me ever more conscious of this gulf." He also thought that the Marxist demand for a classless society was important: “Communism challenged the late Archbishop and it should challenge every Christian—as it challenged me—to a growing concern about social justice.”
It is important to carefully heed King’s language because it offers clear critique of the socialist remedy for inequality. Here is King again:
Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice
And
Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person.
King make his critique of socialism very clear. Socialism, especially Marxism, may have highlighted a real problem of poverty but it is godless, anti-freedom, and binds people to the needs of the state. This general approach is actually fairly common among liberals of the era. Poverty is a problem but socialism is not the solution.
King, I believe, does not have a fully articulated defense or critique of conservativism. This is not surprising as modern American conservative ideologies are still in formation at that point in history. Still, he makes it very clear at many, may points that he would clearly disagree with movements or ideologies that we would label as “Right” today. For example, in the last quote above from My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence he clearly says “the state is made for man.” He is not, for example, a libertarian who is inherently suspicious of the state. Instead, the state should be used to improve humanity.
It’s also clear that he clearly lays the blame at the feet of Right-wing voters and politicians:
We must face the appalling fact that we have been betrayed by both the Democratic and Republican parties. The Democrats have betrayed us by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed us by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing reactionary northerners. This coalition of Southern Democrats and Northern right-wing Republicans defeats every proposed bill on civil rights. From “Facing the Challenge of a New Age.”
It’s also important to note that King himself led a protest against the 1960 Republican nominating convention.
Perhaps the one way that King might be labeled as a conservative is that he promoted “family values” early in his career. This is the claim of historian Thaddeus Russell and it is based on a number of lectures and addresses in the 1950s where King endorses bourgeois values. For example, King gave a 1953 radio address called “Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions” in Atlanta which any modern family-values conservative would love. It’s a speech that is all about rejecting the idea that social circumstances such as poverty absolve us of the responsibility to live a constructive and positive life. In a 1954 address to Detroit’s Second Baptist Church, he just comes out and says that “It’s wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living.” Still, telling people to stay married, not live a “riotous” life, and get a job is not a uniquely conservative position. That’s probably the message of just about any Protestant preacher of the era.
Bottom line: Don’t twist yourself up in knots trying to fit MLK into your point of view. MLK was a liberal Christian preacher - and that was good enough.
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Christian socialism was a significant movement in the first half of the 20th Century. As you demonstrate, MLK rejected atheist communism as practiced by the USSR and other state socialist societies, and parroted the talking points of the anti-Communist brainwashing that was being fed to people my age in school in the 1960s, i.e. socialism sounds good but it turns into totalitarian atheism. But he advocated policies that are called socialism in the US today, and even in the 1960s the politics of the Socialist Party were markedly different from the politics of the Communist Party. My guess is that, if asked, he would not have repudiated the Christian socialist movement. He was certainly close to the social gospel movement and I think identified with it. He carried Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited which , while not socialist, is not really "liberal" either insofar as it is about challenging structures of domination. You are writing a bait and switch. --Pam Oliver