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{1} “If a soul is left in the dark, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.” – Victor Hugo
Forty-five years ago, during a summer that saw both the passage of the Voting Rights Bill and the riots in Watts, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech, “Next Stop: The North,” in which he expounded on Hugo's quote. I think of this, when I listen to reports that Glen Beck is planning to hold a rally in Washington, DC, in which he plans to ape the mantle of King, upon the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Those who listen to Glen Beck inhabit a great darkness, a region where the human potential is subject to the decay of fears and anxieties, prejudices and hatreds. While MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, usually a solid judge of Beck's lack of character, believes the plan is a book-signing event, I am convinced that it is more. Beck certainly seeks to make money, yet he is morally bankrupt. He flirts with potentially explosive phrases and images, because he is as attracted to violence as a fly is to a pile of dog feces on a hot summer's day.
Beck definitely understands the core lesson of all tyrants: that one can exploit a mass of people by getting them to “hate” a common enemy. He is accomplishing this by keeping his followers in the darkness of ignorance. History shows that there is always a consequence to such behaviors, which can include the range of violence from the internal self-destruction of the Jim Jones community, to the savagery of the Manson “family.” And, yes, Glen Beck is far closer to Jim Jones and Charles Manson, than he is to Martin Luther King.
The reasons that Beck dares to attempt to present himself as a King-like figure are two-fold: first, Beck is emotionally disturbed and morally diseased; and second, Beck knows that in the decades since King's death, there have been concentrated attempts to either discredit him or to make him a plaster saint. Even within the liberal community, there are fewer and fewer people who know much about Martin beyond the Birmingham bus boycott and the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Thus, I believe that it is important today to take a look at some of the influences on King's thinking, and to examine some of the goals that he was working towards.
{2} “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” – U.S. Declaration of Independence
Those seven words, which are the most recognizable part of our nation's Declaration of Independence, are frequently quoted in King's writings and speeches. It is safe to assume that Beck will quote them in his speech in August, because the Tea Bag Party is big on the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution – although they mistake the promise of a just society based upon the brotherhood of man for a frantic call for fratricide. King, not surprisingly, viewed these words in a very different manner.
In King's writings and speeches, he speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the context of good housing, a proper diet, adequate health care, educational and employment opportunities, and the right to live life without social restrictions based upon hatred, and the fear of violence that is a part of all of marginalized people's daily existence.
King was in his mid-twenties when he ventured onto the national stage as the leader of the 1955 Birmingham bus boycott. The civil rights movement had a long history in Birmingham. As a Baptist minister, King had studied that – and other, related history. Today, most people know that King was a student of the tactics that Gandhi used to confront British colonialism in India. In a June, 1957 speech titled “The Power of Nonviolence,” for example, King noted that “a boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame” in one's oppressor.
What many people do not realize, however, is that King – often as the result of his relationship Coretta – was also studying other political thinkers, such as Reinhold Niebuhr. In his 1932 book “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” Niebuhr had advocated boycotts of those banks that financed violence and oppression. The Tea Bagsters won't hear about that from Glen Beck, of course, because he is an investor in this system.
{3} “I count no sacrifice too great for seeing God face to face. The whole of my activity, whether it be called social, political, humanitarian, or ethical, is directed to that end. And as I know that God is found more often in the lowliest of his creatures than in the high and mighty, I am struggling to reach the status of these. I cannot do it without their service. Hence, my passion for the service of the oppressed classes. And as I cannot render this service without entering politics, I find myself in them.”
--Gandhi
In 1959, King made a pilgrimage to Gandhi's India. It is important to appreciate the influences that were part of this trip. The most obvious was, of course, that the American Friends Service Committee invested the money to make the trip real. But there were others.
King had read “Enough and to Spare,” the 1944 book by Harvard geologist Kirtley Mather. Dr. Mather had helped prepare Clarence Darrow for his confrontation with William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes Monkey Trial, and is thus unlikely to be someone that Glen Beck would quote. King, however, grasped the meaning of Mather's saying that “Mother Earth can nourish every man in freedom,” and agreed with Mather's conclusion that famine is unnecessary in the modern world.
King was also studying the works of Henry George at this time. George was a 19th century journalist, economic theorists, and politician. As a teen, he had traveled to Calcutta, and witnessed the poverty there. As an adult, he noted that the poor in New York City lived in worse conditions than the poor in California. He concluded that “the reason for advancing poverty (is) advancing wealth,” and viewed the American tax system that favored the owners of industry as oppressive.
George lived in an Irish nationalist community in NYC. He ran for mayor twice: the first time on the Independent Labor Party ticket (he got more votes than Teddy Roosevelt); the second time as an Independent Democrat.
In 1878, George published the book “Progress and Poverty,” which sold over three million copies. In it, he wrote that land and all natural resources belonged to society, not to individuals. He noted that the concentrated wealth of industrial leaders was capitalizing on the poverty of millions of citizens.
The concepts that served as the foundation of Martin Luther King's philosophy were, quite obviously, the exact opposite of what Glen Beck subscribes to.
{3} “Freedom has always been an expensive thing.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the mid-1960s, King's campaigns began to evolve in nature. He had grown beyond the belief that civil rights alone could allow black citizens to participate in a healthy democratic society. The right to eat at a public lunch-counter is meaningless if one cannot afford a meal. The right to buy a home in any neighborhood means nothing if one cannot afford adequate housing.
King began to advocate for an economic bill of rights that called for, among other things, a guaranteed income for every adult. Some questioned if this was not a form of “welfare” that would damage the poor in the long run. In August of 1967, for example, King appeared on the program “Face to Face,” and was asked if the guaranteed income would “deprive the recipients of the human dignity that (King) seeks to give them?”
King responded that “if one has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then he has a right to an income.” He noted that he was not advocating that the able-bodied poor be given money for nothing, but rather, for a radical redefinition of the word “work.” He used the examples of housewives and college students as people who are working. He also made clear that welfare, which provides the lowest of incomes, does keep people from participating in society. He spoke of housing, education, and jobs programs. He said that “the curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” and said that it was as cruel as cannibalism, and was consuming our nation's moral fiber.
{5} “The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
In his final year, King attempted to organize another march on Washington, one that would have been the polar opposite of Glen Beck's dream. It was the proposed Poor People's Campaign, something that I have written about numerous times on this forum. He wanted to create a “tent city” in the Capital City. He wanted to have organized labor help fund a movement of 3,000 poor people – including black, brown, red, yellow and white, children and the elderly – to inhabit Washington and the nation's conscience.
He had connected the military industrial complex's investing millions of dollars in the violence in Vietnam, with poverty in America. He said that the international community needed a redistribution of wealth, as the current economic aide by wealthy nations was merely a means of control and a neocolonial exploitation of the world's poor. More, he advocated a radical redistribution of wealth in the USA. This, as a Lakota Elder who called me as I am writing this essay noted, was the point where the power structure in the United States determined that King had to be gotten rid of.
{6} “I have found out that all I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain..... I am trying to getto the roots of it to see just what ought to be done. ….The whole thing will have to be done away with.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.; November 11, 1967
Most members of this forum are familiar with King's “A Time to Break Silence (Beyond Vietnam” speech. He delivered this powerful address on April 4, 1967, to the Clergy and Laity Concerned, at the Riverside Church in NYC – exactly one year before his death. In the speech, King called “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism” the stumbling blocks to a just society.
It would be nice if only Glen Beck and the Tea Bag Party were clinging to a perverted version of King's philosophy. Or, if the republican party alone stood against true progress. But, as it happens, that is not the case. It's not even close.
I appreciate the forum members who support King's true dream. And I hope that our moderate and conservative democratic friends will take the time to study what that dream actually was.
Thank you,
H2O Man
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