The Socialist Martin Luther King

     Last month’s Martin Luther King holiday is significant for all Americans, but the Rev. King’s elevation to the status of a national icon (with the accompanying grumbling by a few hard-core racists) risks losing the man’s central message. His celebration in elementary schools, churches, and civic plazas always omits any mention of the antipathy he provoked in the ruling class of his own era or the controversies about his ideas and methods in the Movement itself. Least likely to receive any attention is his lifelong socialist ideology.
     I had myself believed that King came to socialism only as the sixties wore on and a left alternative became more widely discussed in these United States. I recall being cheered by the critiques of capitalism that I heard with increasing frequency in his speeches. Yet a bit of study revealed to me that his politics were decades-old, though he kept prudentially mum about his radicalism until opposition to an imperialist war and the rise of a strengthened American left emboldened him to publically state the convictions he had long held. J. Edgar Hoover’s grumpy rumblings referring to King as “the most dangerous Negro” and “the most notorious liar in the country,” and his attempt to blackmail King while suggesting suicide as an escape, while bizarre and extreme, are also part of the repressive anticommunist hysteria of the era.
     The socialist movement had had long ties to the struggle against racism. Early revolutionary unionists such as the I.W.W. welcomed immigrants and non-whites as fellow-workers. Many of the founders of the N. A. A. C. P. such as suffragist Mary Ovington White, journalists William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell, and W. E. B. Dubois were explicit radicals. In the early twentieth century such prominent black ministers as the Rev. George Washington Woodbey, the Rev. Richard Euell, and the Rev. George Slater Jr. were socialist activists as well as Christian ministers. During King’s youth the left, including the Communist Party, other anti-capitalist formations, and progressive elements of the labor movement, stood virtually alone in white America in their opposition to racism.
     In his university training, King was heir to the particularly pointed social justice teaching of the African-American church [1] as well as being influenced by leftist thinkers such as Walter Rauschenbusch, the religious thinker most often cited by King throughout his career. Rauschenbusch explicitly supported what he in 1907 called communism. [2] In 1950 as a young divinity student King himself described his views as “anti-capitalistic.” [3]
     King wrote in a letter to his fiancée Coretta Scott before their marriage “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic… [Capitalism] started out with a noble and high motive… but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.” [4]
     Many if King’s allies, especially in the earlier days of the modern Movement were committed socialists, among them planners of the August 1963 March on Washington such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.
     He had always known that oppression was at its base a class issue, though it often manifested in association with race, religion, or national origin, yet he tread very carefully. Due to the unique conditions of American anti-communism for many years King was careful to obscure his economic views. Even as late as 1968, while speaking to members of Operation Breadbasket he said of his socialist ideology “I can’t say this publicly and if you say I said it I’m not gonna admit it.” [5] Several years earlier he had warned his staff about the hazards of challenging the fat cats, “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.” [6]
     Yet he continued to clearly identify the necessary linkage of the political, the economic, and the social struggles for equality. “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” [7]
     Thus, King realized that, while reforms might bring amelioration of injustice, the definitive way to combat racism, war, and exploitation was through radical change – the end of capitalism. Reluctant, unable to quite speak the truth without two opening qualifiers, he admitted to a reporter, “In a sense, you could say we’re involved in the class struggle.” [8] He realized that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism. [9] For this reason he called himself a socialist and even a Marxist [10], declaring that “something is wrong with capitalism” and that “America must move toward democratic socialism.” [11] Thus he died supporting a labor struggle in the midst of planning the Poor People’s Campaign, a fight based in economics rather than race.
     King’s socialism is part of the hidden history of America, the story of how nineteenth century communards sought to formulate a new society, radical abolitionists fought slavery, left-wing trade unionists brought better conditions to all, and progressive students helped end the war in Vietnam. Every step forward socially has come from the left. King was one of those people who concluded that social justice and an end to racism and other forms of bigotry, peace and a more reasonable deployment of the planet’s resources, responsibilities, and rewards can only come through the end of production for private profit. The commonwealth of the future he envisioned remains the goal of many around the world, and the struggle that continues today is the truest tribute, the living legacy of Martin Luther King.



1. Even before his university years, his family numbered among their friends the Baptist minister and activist J. Pius Barbour who cited Marx with approval.

2. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, p. 398. Among numerous other influences from this era, his undergraduate advisor was sociologist Walter Chivers who believed capitalism gave birth to racism.

3. Douglas Sturm, “Martin Luther King, Jr., as Democratic Socialist,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall, 1990), p. 80. This article is perhaps the best general survey of King’s socialism. Apart from this reference, it has provided me with many useful sources. See also Cornel West’s annotated anthology The Radical King.

4. Letter to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952.

5. See Sturm who notes that King was afraid that his radicalism could alienate liberals and perhaps confuse his followers.” Sturm also relates C. L. R. James’ recollection that during their 1964 meeting King agreed entirely with his Marxist analysis, but was unable to make his ideas known because of “anti-communist hysteria” in the United States.

6. Speech to staff, November 14, 1966. See also Michael Harrington, Fragments of a Century: A Social Biography, p. 114-5 and David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis, p. 213-214.

7. Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.

8. New York Times, October 16, 1968, story by José Iglesias.

9. Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.

10. DaGarrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, p. 537.

In Memory of my Generation’s People’s Heroes

     In every town are war memorials: statues, parks, shrines, and solemn ceremonies recalling those who donned uniforms and obeyed their officers, and indeed the travails of such people (on all sides and in all wars) can be considerable. Their suffering touches many, and their commemoration is accordingly social and official. Politicians and relatives alike glibly say that their sacrifice maintained American freedom, though what there is of American freedom has not been threatened from without since the War of 1812, most certainly not by Kaiser Bill, Ho Chi Minh, or Saddam Hussein.
     Those who died for the people’s cause are fewer, and sparks of their memory (such as this) are obscure and idiosyncratic. Yet it is this group that has, by the purest voluntarism in most cases, sought to advance humanity as a whole in work that has laid the foundation of the comparative comfort enjoyed by many today. The grasping hands of the powerful will make no concession voluntarily; even the mildest of reforms come only when forced. Frederick Douglass was correct in his celebrated analysis and deserves quoting yet one more time.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [1]

     In other countries and in the USA in days gone by, the killing of political rebels was wholesale and unashamed. The first verse of the old song “The Red Flag” spoke no more than sober reality for all its clothing of sentimental rhetoric.

The People's Flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold. [2]

     Though every country produced such people’s martyrs, I mean here to commemorate only Americans. I conceive the group broadly otherwise, accepting as those who labored for a brighter future: community and labor organizers, socialists, anarchists, communists of various stripes, supporters of civil rights, feminists, ecologists and gay activists. I include people outrightly assassinated by law enforcement or military as well as some who ended their own lives as a political statement. [3] No scholar of American history, I simply write about the people whom I recall and a few others whose names I only recently learned. This list is unsystematic and certainly incomplete, but I feel that simply naming these few names is justified by simple respect for those who genuinely sacrificed for us all. Perhaps, as well, the young and others unfamiliar with the people mentioned here might learn. I welcome additions.
     My own roll call includes only my generation and emphasizes the movements of the sixties, though I am aware of massacres such as those during the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania in 1892 (nine killed), at Lattimer -- another Pennsylvania mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania -- in 1897 (nineteen dead), at Ludlow, Colorado in 1914 (twenty-six killed), Everett, Washington in 1916 (twelve victims) and the 1921 Rising of Logan County, West Virginia in which between fifty and a hundred workers fell, the Little Steel Strike of 1937 when ten demonstrators were killed by Chicago police and sixteen more fell in Youngstown, Ohio. I am aware that controversy has muddied the narrative for such victims of the judicial system as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Whatever the details, like those regularly killed on urban streets by police officers, these people did not receive fair trials or just sentences and thus are victims of political persecution whatever their guilt or innocence.
     Doubtless the greatest number of political killings occurred in the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Fortunately in this case, scholars have documented the deaths of activists, and they are remembered in the only such monument of which I am aware, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Archivists have verified the deaths of forty-one people in the Movement from 1954-1968. [4] They include also a list of seventy-four others who had not yet been killed or for whom the historical research had been in process when the memorial was dedicated. Among those honored there are such well-known names as James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who died in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi as well as others such as Lamar Smith who had organized voters in his community and was shot on the courthouse lawn in midday in Brookhaven, Mississippi in 1955 and William Lewis Moore, a white postman from Baltimore murdered in Attalla, Alabama during his solitary march against segregation in 1963.
     A late spasm of criminal racist violence occurred in 1979 when Klan and Nazi Party members killed five Communist Workers activists during a protest in Greensboro, North Carolina: Sandi Smith, James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cauce, and Michael Nathan. The dead included three physicians (one of whom served as president of a textile workers local). The police provided no protection; indeed, there were not present on the scene of the demonstration though it had been announced well in advance, and the assailants were acquitted by all white juries in spite of film documenting the murders.
     The police regularly reacted with fierce disregard for law during demonstrations in those days and were sufficiently reckless that occasionally someone died. Dean Johnson was killed in Chicago in 1968 at the beginning of the historic demonstrations around the Democratic Convention, and in 1969 James Rector died in Berkeley while demonstrating in behalf of People’s Park. Most everyone is at least aware of the 1970 attack at Kent State in Ohio in which National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds at demonstrators, killing Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, and Allison Krause. One hears considerably less about the deaths of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green less than two weeks later at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, or about Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, and Henry Ezekial Smith who were shot and killed by police in 1968 at South Carolina State in Orangeburg while protesting a segregated bowling alley. The victims in Mississippi and South Carolina, needless to say, were black.
     Many people remember television news reports of the dramatic suicide of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon in 1963. The evening news on the American networks showed the monk maintaining his meditation posture as his body burned. A few might recall the self-immolation of Quaker Norman Morrison in 1965 below Secretary of Defense McNamara’s Pentagon office. The fact is that a bit before Morrison’s act, Alice Herz, an eighty-two year Holocaust survivor, had similarly emulated Thích Quảng Đức in Detroit in 1965. A little later that year Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself in protest in New York City as did Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles in 1967, Bruce Mayrock in New York City in 1969 (protesting Biafran War policies), George Winne, Jr. burned himself in San Diego in 1970, as did Gregory Levey in Amherst in 1991 (protesting the Gulf War), Kathy Change in Philadelphia in 1996 (protesting “the present government and economic system”), and Malachi Ritscher in Chicago in 2006 in reaction to the Iraq War. [5]
     It is difficult to calculate the precise number of wholly unjustified killings of Black Panthers by law enforcement. Their attorney Charles Garry claimed that police had wantonly murdered thirty Panthers between January of 1968 and December of 1969 alone. A hostile journalist challenged the circumstances of many of these killings, conceding only the deaths of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark as altogether unjustified. [6] Considering the state’s interest in lying or obscuring the facts in many of these cases and the unquestioned program by the government to foment violence among black activists, it may never be clear what happened in many of these cases.
     The case of Hampton and Clark is particularly egregious. In one of the clearest examples of political assassination by the state in American history, the Chicago police with the aid of the FBI and an informer in the Black Panther organization drugged Hampton with secobarbitol and then burst into the Panthers’ apartment with guns firing in 1969, killing the two while they lay in bed and wounding four others. No one was ever prosecuted for the violence though the families of the dead and injured won a civil suit years later due to the overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the government.
     Throughout history the wealthy have held the power. They have never ceded a penny to others unless they had no choice, while the poor are regularly sent off to the front lines of imperialist wars and other military adventures. Through organization, struggle, strikes, and demonstrations the masses have gained a modicum of comfort in the developed world. If today slavery and child labor have ended, women have the vote, labor unions have won some measure of shorter hours, job safety, and a piece of the economic pie, albeit far smaller than workers deserve, it is only because of those who have championed the people’s causes. If you and I appreciate what we have of leisure, a portion of the fruits of our labor, and a bit of space in which to raise the next protest, it is only right that now and then we devote a moment’s thought to those who have been willing to put their bodies on the line in defense of us all.



1. West India Emancipation speech in Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857.

2. The Irishman Jim Connell’s song has been an anthem of the British Labour Party and the IWW, among other organizations. It was recently sung by those celebrating the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party Leader.

3. I do not include many righteous activists who were themselves wielding deadly force such as the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970 or Americans such as priest James Carney and former Green Beret David Arturo Baez who had joined insurgents and were killed by the Honduran military in 1983. In the case of Black Panthers the record is often obscure though the government’s desire to eliminate the organization is certain. (See note 6 below.)

4. Their list is available at https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs.

5. The New York Times story on Levey’s death in 1991 mentions two other self-immolations protesting the Gulf War and eight in protest to the Vietnam War but provides no further details.

6. See Edward Jay Epstein “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?” in The New Yorker for February 13, 1971.

Two Exemplary Anecdotes from the Sixties Student Movement

     Most movements for social change are generated among the oppressed and aggrieved: women demonstrated for suffrage and workers for unions. Local homeowners get together to declare “not in my back yard” or to campaign for a stoplight. The student and youth movements of the 1960s are unusual in that those who took up the cause of African-Americans and of the Vietnamese people were relatively privileged members of the crest of the great American middle class, created largely by the labor movement of the thirties and the GI Bill of the forties. As white college students they enjoyed comforts and expectations rather greater than the norm even for their own affluent postwar country.
     People speak loosely about “the sixties” as an era of psychedelics and political protest. As a ’67 graduate of the University of Illinois, I can testify that protestors (and dopers) were a marginal group throughout my undergraduate years. When I manned the Students Against the War table in the student union, I could count on arguing with fellow students all day long. My wife was called a dyke for marching in a demonstration against parietal hours for women. I felt I knew all the people in the small coterie involved with leftist protest.
     The fact is that when I arrived at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1963 the Old Left groups had vanished. I believe the only progressive group on the Champaign-Urbana campus of tens of thousands of students was the NAACP, to be followed later by a Friends of SNCC chapter. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 inspired Students for Free Speech and Student Committee on Political Expression.
     About this time several others and I – I believe it was perhaps six students that one needed to create an official organization – started an Independent Socialist Club. Like the Port Huron authors, we wanted to avoid the historic entanglements of the Stalinists, Trotskyites, and followers of Norman Thomas (who spoke at the U. of I. in the spring of ’65). We could be punctilious if we liked as there were so few of us and we did no organizing, no demonstrations, indeed, no political work at all. Our meetings were as good as private though a few drifters passed through.
     Inconsequential as we were, we found we constituted a tempting bait for the very groups of which we had been wary. An older Communist, a YSA rep from miles away, and a local Socialist each in turn asked us to affiliate. Even as a discussion group we meandered. One of our original crew began pushing SWP tapes of Raya Dunayevskaya. Another thought we could best contribute to progress by intensive discussions of What is to be Done?
     Mercifully, in the fall of 1965, Students for a Democratic Society organized. At that point SDS was a broad popular front organization with many Democratic Party activists as well as socialists, anarchists, and wholly non-ideological individualists, perhaps even a stray liberal Republican or two. The Independent Socialist Club disbanded after a scant year of existence.
     The New Left Movement is often said to have begun with the February 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in in Greensboro and the subsequent founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but until SDS there was no large and inclusive student organization pressing for social justice and peace. Veterans of the Southern Movement, both white and black, were influential leaders in the years that followed as were the “red diaper” babies whose families had been socialist in earlier decades, but each of these groups was small in numbers. The increasingly massive numbers of people willing to stand up against the system arose from the “youth revolution” element which grew exponentially following the Haight-Ashbury Summer of 1967 and the continuing threat of the draft which affected most men (though virtually all those who sought to wiggle out of the military obligation were able to do so).
     My second anecdote concerns a friend I will identify only as D-------- K------ as we have been out of touch for some time, and I have not discussed my account with him. It is, however, simple and sketchy enough that I am confident of its accuracy and, I hope, significant enough to warrant telling.
     In the junior year of his studies at a prestigious private university K------, who had considerable personal charm, a gift for rabble-rousing, and a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, moved to establish a DuBois Club on his campus. The DuBois Clubs were in fact essentially the youth group of the American Communist Party, as the Young Communist League had been (and would again be – the old name came back in 1984). Universities often found such groups unpalatable, particularly schools with endowments that count on the continuing patronage of wealthy alumni. Many in higher education doubtless feared publicity arising from even the smallest of revolutionary contingents and tried to ban such clubs.
     The membership of a DuBois Club might have been little larger and its impact little greater than my Independent Socialist Club had it been permitted, but it was not. Virtually all the students agreed that this decision was undemocratic, and they rallied energetically against it. My friend K------ had the opportunity to exercise his considerable abilities as a debater, entertainer, and wit in an ongoing series of demonstrations that attracted ever-increasing crowds. The celebrity he won in this cause led to his election as student body president the following year (1967-8). I doubt that the DuBois Club ever had a real meeting. K------‘s psychic jiu-jitsu had caused the university administration to defeat itself and elevate him to prominence. As a result of their bungling and the movement of history, the critical mass of participants for truly disruptive sit-ins and rallies had arrived. Though most of the students were simply believers in what K------ might have called bourgeois democracy, that alone was enough to set them on his side against the powers that be.
     A revealing sequel occurred the following spring. As K------ tells it, he was delivering a rousing anti-war speech on campus when he was interrupted by cries of “Talk is bullshit!” We want action, not talk!” and eventually, “To the ROTC Building!” He was left standing at the podium with a mere remnant of his audience. When those who had left destroyed the ROTC Building, he was charged with having incited a riot, though the claim was sufficiently absurd that it was later dropped.
     These experiences suggest, first, the simple truth that political protests of the sixties occurred, for the most part, during the last few years of that decade (and the first months of 1970). When students did become active, they were often moved by non-political motives. When political, their values were generally not radical and, indeed, rarely went beyond the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The most dramatic actions were generally not the result of traditional labor union-style organizing and careful planning, but rather were spontaneous, sharing as much of the character of post-football disorders as of sit-down strikes. When the draft no longer threatened most young men, they ceased protesting. There were from the start dedicated advocates for social justice who sought to question America’s foreign and domestic policies and to suggest radical alternatives, but their numbers were never great. Both those who would trivialize the movement of the sixties and those who would idealize it might well recall these home truths.

March in Cicero

     By the summer of 1966 many Americans, moved by the moral clarity of the photos in Life magazine, were sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement’s struggle for voting rights and against Jim Crow. But that year Martin Luther King came north, and, with a grand rally in Chicago’s Soldiers Field, launched a series of open housing marches that provoked a fierce racist reaction, forcing many to recognize that the legacy of slavery was not peculiar to the South.
     At the same time, the movement was itself evolving. Earlier that year in Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) raised the cry of Black Power. That same summer he sent his white progressive allies out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and into their own communities, and the righteous old liberal-radical-religious coalition against racism was shaken.
     After marchers were attacked on Chicago’s west and southwest sides, King decided not to venture into Cicero, where a black man had been killed when he stopped to make a telephone call. Bob Lucas, the local leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (at that time still a genuine civil rights organization) led the march. The National Guard was called out to protect the small group of demonstrators.
     The marchers included black ministers and long-time activists singing “Eyes on the Prize,” but there were also restless members of Chicago’s powerful youth gangs, as well as at least two college students from an affluent, all-white suburb. The roar of the mob of counterdemonstrators was audible long before we passed under the rail line that marks the city’s western boundary. As soon as we emerged in Cicero we saw the twisted faces of the white working-class youth screaming insults. The minuscule band of cranks in the local branch of the American Nazi Party had seized their opportunity and had distributed racist posters with huge swastikas and slogans like White Power. Some of the Cicero residents folded the posters to obscure the Nazi symbol their fathers had fought to defeat in WWII, but others waved it unabashed.
     The National Guard looked frightened (and the students at South Carolina State and Kent State were to learn how dangerous a frightened Guardsman or cop with a gun can be). They were doing their best to hold the racists back under a barrage of rocks and firecrackers from the tops of buildings and the rear of the crowd. The more volatile marchers surged toward the sidelines, and macho challenges and obscene taunts went both ways.
     It would be difficult to claim that anything was settled that day, but history moved, perhaps, a bit of a step forward. We knew that civil rights had come north, and that the Black Liberation Movement was being born. And American racism was further unmasked: in Cicero it was potent enough that some people waved fascist emblems while others were mobilized, educated, and radicalized. The struggle continues.