ESSAYS ON THE VISION OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING

 

Thursday, January 15, 2026

'"SOMEHOW THS MADNESS MUST CEASE"

 Harry Targ

 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Image from Dr. Martin Luther King.net.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

Making war overseas and advancing hunger at home

In April, 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City and made it crystal clear that wars elsewhere not only kill the designated enemies, but impoverish poor working people at home. Dr. King made a critical contribution to the discussion of the link between war and foreign policy and people’s lives. Killing in other lands is an immoral abomination. While that needs to be critically understood, the unequal distribution of wealth and income within the United States is stark and is intimately connected to foreign adventures. And, in fact, the more resources that are allocated for killing others, the less there are to serve the needs of those at home.

President Lyndon Johnson, who increased the U.S. troop commitment from 16,000 in 1963 to 540,000 in 1968 and who launched daily bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam in 1965 that went unabated until 1968 tried to create a “war” on poverty at home. Dr. King knew that this country could not do both: that there was an inverse relationship between war-making and domestic prosperity. As he put it: “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

And as the years unfolded and the United States shifted from a military draft to a volunteer army, there was an increase in the percentage of those who could not find jobs and earn a decent income and became the foot soldiers for future wars (maybe even recruits for ICE).

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday, May 7, 2023

REMEMBERING DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, THE LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL, AND HIS VISION OF A JUST SOCIETY

Harry Targ

Remarks prepared for participation in a panel discussion of The Letter  From a Birmingham Jail

Diversity Roundtable Summit

April 29, 2023

Lafayette, Indiana

 

Barbara Ransby wrote in a recent Nation article about the election of Brandon Johnson to serve as the new mayor of Chicago. Johnson, is an African American, a teacher, and a longtime Chicago Teachers Union activist. She reported  that “Johnson described his victory as the coming together of the civil rights and labor movements, much as Martin Luther King always envisioned.”

Reflecting on the corpus of Dr. King’s writings, speeches and activism suggests a continuity of his worldview and politics over a decade before the dramatic Letter From a Birmingham Jail was written, the seeds of which were planted when Dr. King was a graduate student. Given this approach, it can be argued that the Letter From a Birmingham Jail represents a piece in the puzzle of King’s work, not the initiation or conclusion of it.

Race and History, Economics, Politics, Culture, and Interpersonal Relations

To clarify we can identify racism as a multidimensional process, with causes that can be understood historically, economically, politically, culturally, and in social psychological terms. Using what may be called a “levels of analysis” approach we can identify the multiple causes and impacts of racism in the United States.

If we begin with the historical and political economy “level”, we see that racism emerges with the introduction of the globalization of capitalism in the fifteenth century. The countries of Northwest Europe, Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, France, Belgium began to traverse the seas, establishing colonies where they could by military conquest. The purpose of such expansion was the acquisition of land, people, and resources. In North and South America, indigenous people were killed and land and resources were appropriated for processing and transport back to the home country and then the world.

Along with technological advances, shipping and guns, and the occupation of land and resources, the colonial powers needed inexpensive labor to grow the crops and extract gold, silver, and rubber. Thus, with the globalization of capitalism came conquest and the enslavement of peoples, mostly from Africa. In this sense, modern racism begins with colonialism and slavery. Without slaves kidnapped from their homes and brought to the Western Hemisphere, there would have not been the appropriation and growth of cotton, sugar, coffee, and the extraction of other commodities such as silver and gold. Without land, resources, and slave labor there may not have been the industrial revolution.

Along with global economic realities, the slave system was institutionalized in new constitutions and the creation of military and police forces to control the slave populations. Scholar of white supremacy Theodore Allen noted that when indentured servants, Black and whites, rose up in opposition to the exploitation by large plantation owners in the seventeenth century, these owners “invented” the white race and the Black race. Race was a social/political creation designed to divide the exploited workers who produced the agricultural commodities and natural resources central to the economic system. Race forever was used to split the exploited so that they would not join together to overthrow an oppressive system. Again, political institutions were established to ensure the divisions between Blacks and Whites. Slaves were defined as three-fifths of a person in the United States constitution, for example. Furthermore, African Americans could not vote, Slave rebellions were crushed, and after the US civil war the system of Jim Crow was established.

In addition, economic and political order was rationalized repeatedly by culture. What was written in history books about economic and political institutions, about history, and cultural stereotypes in literature, the stage, radio, television and in virtually every transmission of ideas served to justify the economic and political systems based on race. Racist narratives found their way into science, religion, and educational curricula. And finally, the institutionalization of racism historically, economically, politically, and culturally was reproduced every day in interpersonal contacts. Here is where the word “discrimination” fits.

It is important to add that while each of these levels of racism reinforce each other to create a powerful system of white supremacy, they all are affected, shaped, and challenged by resistance. All these forces, economic, political, cultural, and interpersonal are not omniscient. And Dr King articulated and organized against these forces his entire life. And his Letter from a Birmingham Jail argues particularly for an ethical and political resistance against racism at all levels.

The Letter therefore is located in a community struggle, a political culture of racism, a regional institution of segregation, and the need for resistance. Also, it was implicitly about the history of slavery, systems of oppression based on “haves” and “have nots” and the common struggles of people of color all over the world.

 

The Importance of Class Struggle for Dr. King’s Project of Resistance

Dr. King’s thinking about the need for an alliance between the civil rights and labor movements was expressed many times. As far back as 1957 at a convention of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) he asserted that “organized labor can be one of the most powerful instruments in putting an end to discrimination and segregation.” During an organizing effort of the Hospital Workers Local 1199 in the fall of 1964, King was a featured speaker at a fundraising rally, He said of the 1199 struggle;

“Your great organizing crusade to win union and human rights for New Jersey hospital workers is part and parcel of the struggle we are conducting in the Deep South. I want to congratulate your union for charting a road for all labor to follow-dedication to the cause of the underpaid and exploited workers in our nation.”

Upon his return from Norway in 1964 after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, King returned to the picket line, this time in support of Black women workers of the Chemical Workers union at the Scripto Pen Plant in Atlanta. He said there: “Along with the struggle to desegregate, we must engage in the struggle for better jobs. The same system that exploits the Negro exploits the poor white…”

Dr. King recognized in the Letter that the Birmingham struggle paralleled the struggles of Black and Brown people going on all around the world to liberate themselves from the historical patterns of colonialization then just ending. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever, he wrote. “The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro….Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South /America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.”

And finally, the Dr. King of Birmingham connected the race and class issues at home with US imperial war in Vietnam in his famous Riverside Church speech of 1967: “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken,” He spoke defiantly of the need for a “radical revolution of values,” an unremitting commitment to “go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

The Relevance of Dr, Martin Luther King for Today

This Diversity Round Table Summit demonstrated the continued relevance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s work, protests, writings, speeches, for today. The material above reminds us that Dr. King was fully aware of the history, economics, politics, culture, and interpersonal relations of racism in his day. He was also cognizant of the connections of domestic political life and international relations. The struggles for social and economic justice, for King, were truly global.

Therefore we can conclude these brief remarks with the following conclusions about the relevance of Dr. King, and his writings, such as The Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

This relevance for today includes the facts that:

--he articulated what is today a global struggle against violence and war

--he articulated what we see today as the enormity of economic inequalities within countries as well as between them

--he emphasized that combatting racism, white supremacy, and neo-colonialism require alliances between the poor, the oppressed including women, and workers

--he correctly argued that a just society, local and global, a beloved community is one in which people's needs are met, cooperation supersedes competition, and every member of these communities is an active and equal participant in their development.

Today visionaries in the King tradition include Vijay Prashad, Medea Benjamin and members of Code Pink. And particularly Reverent William Barber and the New Poor People’s Campaign, and the thousands of young people, workers, who are struggling to acquire the right to form unions, and Black Lives Matter activists, are pursuing the King legacy.

Suggested reading: Michael K. Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice,W.W. Norton, 2018.

 

Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights and Labor Alliance
by Harry R Targ (originally posted on January 13, 2009)

Dr. King arrived in Memphis on March 18, 1968 to support the sanitation workers of that city who had been on strike for five weeks. These workers had many grievances that forced them to protest. Garbage workers had no access to bathroom or shower facilities. They were not issued any protective clothing for their job. There were no eating areas separate from garbage. Also sanitation workers had no pension or retirement program and no entitlement to workers compensation. Their wages were very low. Shortly before the strike began two workers died on the job and the families of the deceased received only $500 in compensation from the city. Finally, after Black workers were sent home for the day because of bad weather and received only two hours pay they walked off the job.

On March 28, 10 days after King arrived, violence disrupted a march led by him. He left the city but returned on April 4 to lead a second march. On that fateful April day, King told Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees or AFSCME: "What is going on here in Memphis is important to every poor working man, black or white, in the South." That evening Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper's bullet.

It was logical for King to be in Memphis to support garbage workers. Despite a sometimes rocky relationship between the civil rights and labor movements, King knew that black and white workers' struggles for economic justice were indivisible; that civil rights could not be realized in a society where great differences in wealth and income existed, and where life expectancies, educational opportunities, and the quality of jobs varied by class, by race, and by gender. The more progressive and far-sighted leaders and rank-and-file union members in the AFL-CIO knew it too. At the time of King's death working people were coming together to struggle for positive social change around the banner of the Poor People's Campaign.

Dr. King's thinking on the need for an alliance between the civil rights and labor movements was expressed many times. As far back as 1957 at a convention of the United Packinghouse Workers of American (UPWA) he asserted that "organized labor can be one of the most powerful instruments in putting an end to discrimination and segregation."

During an organizing effort of the Hospital Workers Local 1199 in the fall of 1964, King was a featured speaker at a fundraising rally. He said of the 1199 struggle," Your great organizing crusade to win union and human rights for New Jersey hospital workers is part and parcel of the struggle we are conducting in the Deep South. I want to congratulate your union for charting a road for all labor to follow-dedication to the cause of the underpaid and exploited workers in our nation." Shortly after, Dr. King left a picket line of Newark hospital workers on strike to fly to Oslo, Norway to receive the Nobel Prize.

Upon his return from Norway, King returned to the picket line; this time in support of Black women workers of the Chemical Workers union at the Scripto Pen Plant in Atlanta. He said there: "Along with the struggle to desegregate, we must engage in the struggle for better jobs. The same system that exploits the Negro exploits the poor white..."

At the Negro American Labor Council convention of June, 1965 King called for a new movement to achieve "a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children." In February, 1966, King spoke to Chicago labor leaders during his crusade for the end to racism and poverty in that city. He called on the labor movement which had provided techniques and methods, and financial support crucial to civil rights victories to join in the war on poverty and slums in Chicago. Such an effort in Chicago, he said, would show that a Black and labor alliance could be of relevance to solving nationwide problems of unemployment, poverty, and automation.

One year before his death, King spoke at another meeting of Hospital Workers 1199. He said a closer alliance was needed between labor and civil rights activists to achieve the "more difficult" task of economic equality. The civil rights movement and its allies were moving into a new phase to achieve economic justice, he announced. This would be a more formidable struggle since it was in his words "much more difficult to eradicate a slum than it is to integrate a bus."

In early 1968, Dr. King incorporated his opposition to the Vietnam War with his commitment to economic justice. He called for an end to the War and the utilization of societal resources to eliminate poverty. To those ends the Poor People's Campaign was launched. It demanded jobs, a guaranteed annual income for those who could not find work, the construction of 6 million new homes, support for employment in rural areas, new schools to train jobless youth for skilled work, and other measures to end poverty.

While preparing the Poor People's Campaign, King got a call to go to Memphis. Before leaving he sent a message to be read at the seventh annual convention of the Negro American Labor Council. He wrote that the Council represented "the embodiment of two great traditions in our nation's history: the best tradition of the organized labor movement and the finest tradition of the Negro Freedom Movement." He urged a black-labor alliance to unite the Black masses and organized labor in a campaign to help solve the "deteriorating economic and social conditions of the Negro community... heavily burdened with both unemployment and underemployment, flagrant job discrimination, and the injustice of unequal education opportunity."

Forty years later the social and economic injustices of which Dr. King spoke continue. But so does his vision of a working class movement united in struggle to survive, a movement of Blacks, whites and Latinos, men and women, young and old, and organized and unorganized workers. The times have changed but the importance of Dr King's political vision remains.

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Remembering the Great Society:
Addressing poverty and hunger in America

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

On Monday, September 26, the Reverend Jesse Jackson visited Ohio University, located at the northern edge of Appalachia. President Lyndon Johnson had introduced his vision of a “Great Society” in 1964 at this site and Jackson was returning 47 years later to call for the establishment of a White House commission to address poverty and hunger in America.

Jackson pointed out that Athens County, Ohio, where he spoke, represented “ground zero” as to poverty in America today. Thirty-two percent of county residents live in poverty.

The fact that increased poverty is a national problem was underscored in a September 13 press release from the United States Census Bureau. The Census Bureau reported that 46.2 million people lived below the poverty line in 2010, the highest number in 52 years. In 2010, 15.1 percent of Americans lived in poverty, the highest percent since 1993. The poverty line for a family of four was $22,314.

The New York Times (September 14, 2011) quoted Professor Lawrence Katz, economist, who said that “this is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

In a press release, the Census Bureau identified some additional data which reflects the economic status of large numbers of Americans:

·                The number of Americans below the poverty line in 2010 increased by 900,000 over 2009.

·                Proportions of Black and Hispanic citizens living in poverty increased from 2009 to 2010. Black poverty rose to 27 percent from 25 percent; Hispanic poverty 26 percent from 25 percent.

·                48 million Americans, 18 to 64 years of age, did not work at all in 2010, up from 45 million in 2009.

·                Median income declines were greatest among the young, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a 9 percent decline between 2009 and 2010.

·                Childhood poverty rates rose from 20.7 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2010.

Timothy Smeeding, Director, Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, was quoted in the New York Times article: “We’re risking a new underclass. Young, less-educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless.”

Arloc Sherman, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reminded readers that the level of poverty was higher and median income was lower in 2007 than 2001.

In this economic context, it was surprising that the calls by Reverend Jackson for a new Great Society largely were ignored by the liberal blogosphere as well as most of the mainstream media.

One impressive exception was an interview on Up with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, on Sunday, September 25. On this program, Jackson pointed out that if it had not been for President Johnson’s disastrous Vietnam War policy he would have been recognized as one of the transformational presidents in American history.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has pointed out in an interesting essay entitled “Race, Class and Economic Justice” that the Johnson programs, the “Great Society,” and its “War on Poverty,” were grounded in the civil rights struggle for jobs and justice. When LBJ’s program got mired in the escalating war in Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King launched the “Poor People’s Campaign.”

Both the Great Society and the Poor People’s Campaign need to be revisited as young people, workers, men and women of all races and classes, mobilize along Wall Street and in virtually every city and town in America to demand economic and social justice. And as the Reverend Jackson reminded students and citizens of Athens County on September 13, LBJ’s program was a comprehensive one linking government and community groups. Among its major achievements the following need to be celebrated:

 

·                The Food Stamp Act (1964) provided low income families with access to adequate food.

·                The Economic Opportunity Act (1964) created the Job Corps, VISTA, and other community-based programs.

·                The Tax Reduction Act (1964) cut income tax rates for low-income families.

·                The Civil Rights Act (1964) outlawed discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.

          ·                The Wilderness Preservation Act (1964) protected over 9 million acres of national forests from developers.

·                The Elementary and Secondary School Act (1965) provided federal aid to schools with low-income students, including the establishment of the Head Start program.

·                Amendments to the Social Security Act (1965) established Medicare for retirees and Medicaid for low-income health care recipients.

·                The Voting Rights Act (1965) ended racial discrimination in voting.

·                The Water Quality Act (1965) required states to clean up polluted rivers and lakes.

·                The Omnibus Housing Act (1965) provided for low income housing.

·                The Higher Education Act (1965) created scholarships for college students.

·                The School Lunch and Child Nutrition Act (1968) was expanded to provide food to low-income children in schools and day care facilities.

Between 1964 and 1968 the United States Congress passed 226 of 252 bills into law. Federal funds transferred to the poor increased from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion in 1968. One million workers received job training from these programs and 2 million children experienced pre-school Head Start programs by 1968.

Progressives should revisit this history and tell the story of the successes and failures of the 1960s vision and programs and work for the fulfillment of the dream articulated by Dr. King and LBJ. Both visions presupposed the connection between government, communities, and activists.
 

And, it should be made clear that the Great Society floundered, not because of errors in the vision or programs, or because of “government bureaucrats,” or because the “free market” could serve human needs better, but because of a disastrous imperial war that sapped the support for vibrant and needed domestic programs.

Slogans about Money for Jobs and Justice, Not for War, constitute the lessons for today. The Reverend Jesse Jackson should be supported in his efforts to revive the vision of the Great Society.

 https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jesse-jackson-is-keeping-hope-alive/