Like Lincoln, King urged his followers to refuse any
compromise with injustice but to combine militancy with moral forbearance and
forgiveness. Having grown up under an intolerably oppressive system of race
relations, he understood the equally dangerous temptations of acquiescence and
revenge. When he first experienced the full impact of segregation, as a boy, he
found himself ‘determined o hate every white person,’ and ‘this feeling
continued to grow,’ he later said, even though his parents told him that he ‘should
not hate the white man, but that it was his duty, as a Christian, to love him.’
The only way to overcome hatred of your enemy, however, was to stand up to him:
such was the first principle of militant nonviolence, as King came to
understand it as an adult. Black people had to overcome their deep feelings of
inferiority, to confront their oppressors as equals, and to challenge
segregation head on. They could no longer be content, like Daddy King, simply
to stake out a subordinate position of relative security in a permanently
segregated society. But they had to declare war on segregation –here was the
second principle underlying King’s position, even more difficult to grasp than
the first, let alone put into practice – without appealing to their history of
victimization in order to claim a position of moral superiority. That King
should have come to see that racial hatred feeds off self-righteousness and
acquiescence alike testified to his capacity for spiritual growth. What is even
more remarkable is that he was able to implant this understanding in the heart
of the civil rights movement and to hold the movement to its difficult course
through ten years of rightful tribulations.
Inspired leadership alone, of course, does not explain the movement’s notable
combination of militancy and moral self-restraint. Its triumphs rested on the
more humble achievements of people like King’s father who had managed, over the
years, to build a vigorous black community in Southern towns and cities, under
the most unpromising conditions. The core of that community was the church, and
the civil rights movement was ‘strong,’ a Bayard Rustin pointed out, because it
was ‘built upon the most stable institution of the southern Negro community –
the Church.’ The church furnished institutional as well as moral support. In
Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, it was the organizational structure of the
church, as much as its vision of the promised land, that sustained the
movement. The clergy provided indigenous leadership, and the churches served
both as channels of communication and as sources of funds. During the boycott
of segregated buses in Montgomery, the churches raised most of the money that
sustained a carpool for twelve months. The success of the boycott also depended,
initially at least, on the willingness of black cab companies to charge
passengers the standard bus fare- a reminder that the black community had other
institutional resources besides the church. It had stable families, businesses,
newspapers, radio stations, and colleges; and enough buying power, in some
localities, to make boycotts an effective economic weapon. “The Negro has
enough buying power in Birmingham,’ King noted, ‘to make the difference between
profit and loss in a business.’ He attributed the failure of his campaign in
Albany, Georgia, partly to the community’s lack of economic leverage.
The movement achieved its greatest success wherever it could build on a solid foundation of indigenous institutions and on the middle class ethic of thrift and responsibility that made them work. Recognizing the importance of an institutional infrastructure in the struggle to achieve dignity and independence, King urged the black community to organized cooperative credit unions, finance companies, and grocery stores. Boycotts of segregated businesses, he pointed out, not only undermined segregation but encouraged Negro enterprise, bringing ‘economic self-help and autonomy to the ‘local community.’ He preached the dignity of labor and the need to achieve ‘painstaking excellence’ in the performance eve of the humblest tasks. He reminded his followers that too many black people lived beyond their means, spent money on ‘frivolities,’ failed to maintain high standards of personal cleanliness, drank to excess, and made themselves objectionable by ‘loud and boisterous’ behavior. ‘We must not let the fact that we are victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives.’ If he has ben accused of upholding petty bourgeois values, King would have probably have taken the accusation as a compliment. He did not hesitate to call rock and roll as ‘totally incompatible’ with gospel music, on the grounds that it ‘often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths. Andrew Young did not misrepresent the civil rights movement when he describe it, ‘up until 1965, anyway,’ as ‘ really a middle-class movement,’ with ‘middle- class aspirations’ and a ‘middle-class membership, . . . it was still essentially a middle-class operation.’
The movement drew its strength not only from
the lower-middle-class culture of
Southern blacks but also from the regional culture of the South itself, to
which it bore a complex and ambivalent relationship. Since the dominant view of
the Southern way of life included a determination to keep the South a ‘white man’s
country,’ the movement might have been expected to swear an eternal enmity to
everything Southern. Instead it was informed by an understanding that the
history of Southern blacks was intricately intertwined with that of their
oppressors. Explaining his decision to return to the South after completing his
studies in Boston, King spoke not only of a ‘moral obligation’ but of the positive
attractions of the land of his youth. “The South, after all, was our home.
Despite its shortcomings we loved it as a home and had a real desire to do
something about the problems that we had felt so keenly as youngsters. In his
famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he declared his intention to
‘return to the South’ with his ‘dream’ of deliverance and racial brotherhood.
Among the considerations that led to his decision to involve himself in the
strike of garbage workers in Memphis, where he met his death in 1968, the one that
laid most heavily, in all likelihood, was the plea of the civil rights workers
there that King belonged in the South and the Southern blacks still believed in
nonviolence. He always spoke of himself as a Southerner. In his “Letter from the
Birmingham Jail,” he referred to ‘our beloved Southland.’ He honored the best
in the Southern heritage and insisted that ‘we Southerners, Negro and white,
must no longer permit our nation and heritage to be dishonored before the
word.” The diehard segregationists, he claimed, did not represent the real South.
‘One day’, he said in the Birmingham letter, ‘the South will recognize its real
heroes’- the ‘disinherited children of God’ who were standing up for what was
best in the American dream.’
By addressing their oppressors not only as fellow sinners but also as fellow Southerners,
King and his followers exposed the moral claims of the white supremacist regime
in the South to the most damaging scrutiny; and the appeal to a common regional
past was probably just as important, in the eventual victory over segregation,
as the appeal to ‘profound and ultimate unities,’ in Niebuhr’s phrase. King
always believed, even in the face of what must have seemed overwhelming
evidence to the contrary, that ‘there are great resources of goodwill in the
Southern white man that we must somehow tap.’ When Lyndon Johnson became
president, it was important to King to point out that Johnson was a ‘fellow
Southerner’ who was ‘concerned about civil rights.’ Sympathetic Southern whites sensed that King spoke not
only for black people but for the soul of the entire South. Hence the
‘admiration,’ as Lillian Smith told King, of ‘thousands of white Southerners’
for what he was doing.
Leslie Dunbar, a white participant in the civil rights movement, attended a White
House reception for civil rights advocates, listened to the ‘Southern accents
buzzing hungrily’ around a plate of barbecued ribs, and found himself touched
by the ‘fraternity of white and black that for the moment makes every Northern
white man and every Northern Negro .
. . an outsider.’ With all her
sins, Dunbar wrote, ‘the South inspired her sins and daughters, even her suffering
black ones, to love her.’ Many white Southerners had come to love her, however,
with an uneasy conscience, and King knew how important it was to keep up an
unremitting pressure on the ‘conscience of the community.’ He did not expect
segregationists to give up without a struggle, but neither did he expect the
struggle to accomplish anything unless it was based on a ‘great moral appeal.’ That this appeal was not lost on those to whom
it was immediately addressed – conscience-stricken Southern moderates – is indicated
by a minister’s remark that white clergymen had become ‘tortured souls.’ Very
few of them, he said, ‘aren’t troubled and don’t have admiration for King.”
Dunbar described the civil rights advocates as ‘strange revolutionaries,’ who
‘come as defenders of the land and its values. They come, as one prominent
white Southerner once put it to me, to give us back our country.’ The movement’s
claims could be interpreted in this way only because it was able to recognize
itself as the product of the culture it was seeking to change – the product,
specifically, of the ‘characteristically theological cast of Southern thought,’
as Dunbar put it, with its habit of ‘seeing all lives as under the judgment of
God and of knowing, therefore, with certainty the transience of all works of
men.’ . . . Even in his harshest indictments of the
United States, King invoked the Constitution and the Bible, embodiments of its
shared political and religious traditions. “Our beloved nation,’ he said in
1967, when he finally began to show signs of running out of patience, ‘is still
a racist country’; but it was beloved nevertheless.
. .
. . .
. . .
. . .
After ten years of successful agitation in the South, culminating in the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the
movement rapidly disintegrated when it ventured into the North. The usual
explanation of its failure in the North – that the struggle against legal
discrimination in the South raised ‘clear and simple moral issues,’ in President
Johnson’s words, whereas de facto discrimination could not be easily dramatized
as a contest between good and evil – misses a good deal of the truth. No doubt
the difficulty of staging the kind of confrontations that stirred up public
opinion against Bull Connor, Sheriff Clark, and other symbols of Southern
racism diminished the chances of attracting favorable attention from the media.
The plight of the Northern ghettos, moreover, did not lend itself to simple
legislative solutions. But a more important difference between the North and
the South lay in the demoralized, impoverished condition of the black community
in cities like Chicago, which could not support a movement that relied so
heavily on a self-sustaining network of black institutions, a solidly rooted
petty-bourgeois culture, and the pervasive influence of the church. The
movement sought to give black people a new dignity by making them active participants
into the struggle against injustice, but it could not succeed unless the
materials of self-respect had already been to some extent achieved.
As he toured the Northern ghettos after the first wave of riots, in 1965, King
was staggered by the desperate poverty he found, but he was even more
discouraged by the absence of
institutions that would sustain the black community’s morale. He did not join
the criticism directed by black militants and newly radicalized white liberals
against the Moynihan Report, accused of shifting attention from poverty to the
collapse of the family and thus of ‘blaming the victim’ for the sins of white
oppression. ‘The shattering blows on the Negro family,’ he argued, ‘have made
it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic
. . Nothing is so much needed as a secure family
life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty and backwardness.” Institutional
breakdown was a cause as well as a consequence of poverty, according to King.
Whereas some observers tried to picture
the ghetto as a workable subculture, he took the position that ‘jammed up, neurotic,
psychotic Negros’ in Northern cities were
‘forced into violent ways of life.’ These conditions led him to demand the
abolition of the ghetto through open-housing ordinances and massive federal action against
poverty. His advocacy of such programs constituted a tacit admission that the
North lacked the stable black communities on which the civil rights movement
rested in the South. Hosea Williams made the same point more openly. “I have
never seen such hopelessness,’ he said after a moment in Chicago. ‘The Negroes
of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than any I ever saw. They don’t
participate in the governmental processes because they are beaten down psychologically.
We’re used to working with people who want to be freed.’ This last remark
summed up the contrast between the North and the South. . .
Once the scenes of his activities shifted to the North, he no longer addressed
a constituency that cared to hear about self-help, the dignity of labor, the
importance of strong families, and the healing power of agape; spiritual discipline against the power of resentment.
According to black militants, honkies would listen only to gunfire and the
sound of breaking glass. Faced with the boundless rage of the ghetto and the
growing influence of leaders like H. Rap Brown, who urged blacks to arm themselves
against a white war of extermination, King became increasingly discouraged and depressed.
Towards the end of his life, he told Ralph Abernathy that ‘those of us who
adhere to nonviolence’ might have to step aside and let the violent forces run
their course.’
see also:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-new-segregation-by-ben-crump.html
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2017/10/simone-weil-and-mlkjr-by-robert-coles.html
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2015/05/formal-and-substantive-human-and-civil.html
