In the Wake of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Legacy
BY LATHRAM BERRY, COMMUNICATIONS LEAD
This 5-minute read is adapted from an Instagram post.
Over the course of King's short life, his politics mostly traversed rights-based work, but he was murdered as an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. As the Civil Rights Movement moved beyond the Jim Crow South, King's politics sharpened to see all of the constructed ways of the state. He began to refer to the "interrelated flaws: racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism."
A week before his murder, King told Jose Yglesias with the New York Times magazine, "You could say we are engaged in the class struggle, yes. It will be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power." He often referred to the economic problem as the most serious problem of Black Americans, and to the entirety of working class and poor people.
This came around the time of the Sanitation Worker Strike of Memphis in '68 that was ignited when two Black men were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. King joined the workers, who were already on strike, encouraging them to keep striking and call for a city-wide general strike. In March of that year, King met 25,000 labor activists in Memphis for the largest indoor meeting during the Civil Rights Movement.
The Vietnam War encouraged his development of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. He began to speak loudly about the priorities upheld by the state, calling us into a complete revolution of values, particularly in his 1967 speech "Beyond Vietnam."
"When machines and computer, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth...A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." He was killed before he could deliver his “10 Commandments on Vietnam.” Instead, Coretta Scott King delivered them three weeks later.
As he started to speak out about anti-war publicly, beginning in 1965, he was met with claims of trying to connect "two disparate issues," (war and civil rights). We know these claims are an attempt to keep the people removed from global struggles, which are always connected. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered as anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-war leader engaging in class struggle. This must be remembered in the wake of his legacy.