Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy

Two fightback conferences will be held, in New York City on Jan. 17 and in Los Angeles on Jan. 24, in order to organize around the current economic crisis. In Detroit on Jan. 19, the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. rally and march will take place again. This demonstration over the last five years has consistently linked the ongoing wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq with the growing crisis in the cities.

Dr. King in Memphis, Tenn., 1968.

Many activities will cite the recent U.S. presidential election of Barack Obama as a fulfillment, at least in part, of the goals of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.

Nonetheless, in this important year of commemoration of the 80th birthday of the late civil rights and anti-war martyr, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the ascendancy of the country’s first African-American president, the U.S. is experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

During 2008, 2.6 million workers were thrown out of their jobs. Workers lost trillions of dollars through the theft of their jobs, homes, health care programs, forced taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions and the evaporation of their pension funds.

A wave of repressive attacks is being launched against the nationally oppressed, women, LGBT communities and organized as well as unorganized labor. The coldblooded fatal shooting of Oscar Grant by Oakland transit police Jan. 1 symbolized the state’s response to the people in the current period. Another African American, Adolf Grimes III, died the same day after being shot 14 times by the New Orleans police, with 12 of those shots in the back.

Memphis, Tenn., sanitation workers on strike, 1968.

The funding and passage of Proposition 8 in California illustrated how the right wing will use popular demands for equality as a target not only to attack the rights of all working families, but also to divide workers who need a united approach to fight the current assault on their living standards. After handing over $750 billion of workers’ tax dollars to the bankers last fall, the U.S. Congress has set strenuous conditions on a loan to the auto industry, conditions that are designed to break the UAW and reverse the gains won over the last several decades.

Consequently, the 2009 MLK Day activities take on added significance despite efforts to distort and conceal the true legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the African-American social movements of the 1960s.

After World War II, the struggle against Jim Crow racism and lynching intensified. Even during the war, organizations within the African-American community fought against discrimination in the war industries and within the military itself. By the conclusion of the 1940s, African Americans, particularly those in the labor movement, were demanding an immediate end to job discrimination, inferior education and residential segregation.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Civil Rights Congress and the National Negro Labor Councils and others were labeled as subversive and subjected to the wave of anti-communist hysteria that swept the country during this period. These militant groups had firm ties to the left, including the Communist Party, and were destroyed along with many others during the “McCarthy era.”

Nonetheless, a new wave of civil rights activities emerged after the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Topeka, which declared segregated educational systems as unconstitutional. In 1955, the lynching of a 14-year-old Black youth, Emmett Till, in Mississippi created the political conditions for the Montgomery Bus Boycott struggle in 1955-56.

Then came the appearance of civil rights leaders such as Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon, both of whom had worked in the labor movement through the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Within this context Dr. King emerged as the principal spokesperson for the civil rights movement.

National oppression, class struggle, fightback today

Between 1957 and 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was won after the struggles in the South demanding universal suffrage, the movement out of necessity had to shift toward economic exploitation and oppression in both the rural and urban areas.

However, what is often not acknowledged is that King, labeled by bourgeois writers as middle-class, in actuality came from a working-class background.

A working-class historian, Michael K. Honey, points out in his book “Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign,” that “White journalists may have seen the well-dressed, highly educated, eloquent ‘Dr. King’ as the quintessential middle-class leader, but he came from a line of people, including slaves, who struggled fiercely against poverty and Jim Crow. His grandmother took in washing and ironing for whites but was not afraid to beat up a white man who had assaulted her son, Martin’s father. Martin’s grandfather on his maternal side, A.D. Williams, lost his thumb in a sawmill accident. He escaped from plantations and peonage in the countryside by migrating to Atlanta and turning a minuscule congregation of former slaves at Ebenezer Baptist Church into one of the city’s largest black churches.” (pp. 23-24).

In June 1966, King marched with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Mississippi when the slogan for Black Power was raised by SNCC leaders Willie Ricks and Stokely Carmichael (a.k.a. Kwame Toure). King did not fully accept the new slogan but stated that if the cry for Black Power meant “amassing political and economic power to achieve our goals ... a belief in ourselves and our heritage,” then he would support it. (Honey, p. 89.)

Despite King’s continued belief in the possibility of social change through nonviolent direct action, according to Honey, “King did not blame the Black Power movement for riots, as many whites did; he blamed riots on the wall of white indifference and ‘winters of delay’ by the government in the War on Poverty.” (p. 89).

In Chicago, where King joined the ongoing struggle for open housing and equal employment during July 1966, the agitation around these demands would set off rebellions on the city’s West Side. The racist and violent response of white residents of segregated communities in Chicago that summer illustrated that resistance to fundamental change was not confined to the South.

By early 1967 King no longer remained silent in his opposition to the U.S. war against the Vietnamese people. He saw that the escalating defense budget of the Lyndon Johnson administration took vital resources away from the purported War on Poverty. Moreover, he understood that the struggle for civil rights and economic justice could not be won when the federal government waged wars of occupation against people struggling for national liberation and sovereignty.

Once King made the link between racial injustice, economic inequality and imperialist war, he became an even greater threat to the U.S. ruling class. In 1967 more urban rebellions occurred revealing the social inadequacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By late 1967 King and his cohorts in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had drafted plans for a National Poor People’s Campaign that would occupy Washington, D.C., until action was taken to eradicate poverty and create a guaranteed annual income in the U.S.

Dr. King supported the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis during the early months of 1968. Over 1,300 African-American employees of the public works department had walked off the job in February 1968 demanding union recognition under AFSCME. The strike had been prompted by the deaths of two workers, crushed in a garbage truck after being denied the right to wait inside a city office during a thunderstorm.

The strike galvanized Memphis, leading to the formation of a broad-based strike committee. King came to Memphis in mid-March and immediately recognized that the strike represented the emerging phase of the African-American struggle that joined the fight for economic justice with the efforts to end racism completely. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4.

King’s martyrdom sparked rebellions in 125 U.S. cities. Even though the Poor People’s Campaign did occupy Washington that summer, it was eventually crushed at the aegis of the Johnson administration. When the Richard Nixon administration took power in early 1969, political repression escalated and effectively criminalized the African-American struggle for political and economic power.

All indications suggest that 2009 will be a significant year in the struggle to build an effective U.S. fightback movement. Even bourgeois economists are predicting that up to 10 million jobs may be lost in the coming year. More workers will lose their homes through evictions and foreclosures. The police apparatus will intensify repression aimed at suppressing the mass actions that occur in response to the worsening crisis.

This is why the fightback conferences in New York and Los Angeles, along with other mass actions, take on added significance. The U.S. ruling class will continue its wars abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Colombia as well as its support for Israel in its genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people. The most militant and organized sections of the movement must take up the challenge to build broader alliances that link the fight against the economic crisis with the anti-imperialist and anti-war struggle.

The contradictions of capitalism should be emphasized and the need for a socialist alternative can be advanced. Capitalism provides no real solutions for reversing the declining quality of life for the workers and the oppressed. This political crisis within the ideological foundations of the exploitative system provides an excellent opportunity for the propagation of bold ideas and political initiatives.