what the “santa clausification” of mar tin luther king jr ...€¦ · zaid jilani january 16...
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3/6/2017 What the “Santa Clausification” of Martin Luther King Jr. Leaves Out
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/16/whatthesantaclausificationofmartinlutherkingjrleavesout/ 1/11
Photo: Gene Kappock/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images
U N O F F I C I A L _ S O U R C E S
What the “SantaClausification” of MartinLuther King Jr. Leaves OutZaid Jilani
January 16 2017, 9:35 a.m.
T H E R E V E R E N D M A R T I N Luther King Jr. is celebrated annually on a
federal holiday on the third Monday of January. Politicians across the
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3/6/2017 What the “Santa Clausification” of Martin Luther King Jr. Leaves Out
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political spectrum put out statements praising his life’s work, and
children in classrooms across America are told the tale of a man who
stood up defiantly against racism and helped changed civil rights law.
But what they don’t mention is that King was not just a fighter for
racial justice, he also fought for economic justice and against war. And
as a result, he spent the last years of his life, before being assassinated
in 1968, clashing not just with reactionary Southern segregationists, but
with the Democratic Party’s elite and other civil rights leaders, who
viewed his turn against the Vietnam War and the American economic
system as dangerous and radical.
This “Santa Clausification” of King, as scholar Cornel West calls it —
the portrayal of King as a celebrated consensus seeker asking for
common sense racial reforms rather than as an anti-establishment
radical — downplays the risks one of America’s most revered activists
took to live according to conscience.
The Backlash Against King’s Opposition to the Vietnam War
While working alongside Democratic President Lyndon Johnson on civil
rights issues, King was also increasingly disturbed by the war in
Vietnam, and he would raise the issue privately with Johnson in White
House calls and meetings. In April 1967, King decided to publicly
denounce the war and call for its end. He gave a speech at Riverside
Church in New York City where he called the U.S. government the
“greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and denounced napalm
bombings and the propping up of a puppet government in South
Vietnam. He also called for a total re-examination of U.S. foreign
policy, questioning capitalist exploitation of the developing world.
Many in the civil rights community warned King to focus on black civil
rights and ignore the war so as not to alienate the Democratic Party. His
Riverside Church speech explicitly rejected that demand, arguing that
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3/6/2017 What the “Santa Clausification” of Martin Luther King Jr. Leaves Out
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what America was doing across the world could not be morally
segregated from what it was doing to African-Americans:
For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?”
and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I
have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our
motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we
could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but
instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free
or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were
loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. […] Now it
should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern
for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present
war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the
autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it
destroys the hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us
who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the
path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
The reaction from the American political establishment — much of it
traditionally associated with American liberalism — was swift and
harsh. The New York Times editorial board blasted King for linking the
war in Vietnam to the struggles of civil rights and poverty alleviation in
the United States, saying it was “too facile a connection” and that he
was doing a “disservice” to both causes. It concluded that there “are no
simple answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this
country.” The Washington Post editorial board said King had
“diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” In
all, 168 newspapers denounced him the next day.
President Johnson stopped taking meetings with King. “What is that
goddamned nigger preacher doing to me?” Johnson reportedly
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3/6/2017 What the “Santa Clausification” of Martin Luther King Jr. Leaves Out
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remarked after the speech. “We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on
Poverty. What more does he want?”
One Harris poll conducted after King’s Vietnam speech found that only
25 percent of even African-Americans supported him in his antiwar
turn — “only 9 percent of the public at large agreed with his objections
to the war.”
Many in the civil rights community split with King over the war. The
NAACP under the leadership of Roy Wilkins refused to oppose the war
and explicitly condemned the effort to link the peace and civil rights
movements. Whitney Johnson, the leader of the National Urban League
warned that “Johnson needs a consensus. If we are not with him on
Vietnam, then he is not going to be with us on civil rights.”
Jackie Robinson, the celebrated African-American baseball player and
civil rights advocate, wrote to President Johnson two weeks after
King’s speech to distance himself from the civil rights leader: “While I
am certain your faith has been shaken by demonstrations against the
Viet Nam war, I hope the actions of any one individual does not make
you feel as Vice President Humphrey does, that Dr. King’s stand will
hurt the civil rights movement. It would not be fair to the thousands of
our Negro fighting men who are giving their lives because they believe,
in most instances, that our Viet Nam stand is just.”
“Formula for Discord”
King had long considered himself a socialist, In 1966, he told staff at the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference that “there must be a better
distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a
democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it
democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth
within this country for all of God’s children.”
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3/6/2017 What the “Santa Clausification” of Martin Luther King Jr. Leaves Out
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The last years of King’s life saw him escalate his campaign against
economic inequality. He campaigned against the Oklahoma right-to-
work referendum and warned that increased economic competition
between whites and blacks would undermine civil rights — calling
instead for a “Grand Alliance” between working-class whites and blacks.
He sought to use many of the same tactics he deployed in the South —
boycotts, sit-ins, blockades — against economic injustice in inner cities
in the North where African-Americans were trapped in endemic
poverty. An article from the August 15, 1967, issue of The New York
Times writes up King’s desire to “dislocate” large cities to force them to
address these needs:
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The New York Times, August 15, 1967
The editorial board of the liberal Times was less than pleased with
King’s choice of tactics. The Times called the proposed campaign a
“formula for discord” and warned against mass civil disobedience,
writing that “once the spark of massive law-defiance is applied in the
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present overheated atmosphere, the potentiality for disaster becomes
overwhelming”:
The New York Times, August 17, 1967
In 1968, he launched the Poor People’s Campaign, aimed at providing
good jobs, housing, and a decent standard of living to all Americans.
Decades before American protesters took to the streets of New York
City and other locales to “occupy” space to protest inequality, King
proposed a massive tent encampment in Washington, D.C., to demand
action on poverty.
King was assassinated before he was able to set up the encampment,
called Resurrection City. His widow Coretta Scott King, as well as fellow
civil-rights leader Ralph David Abernathy, went ahead with the plan.
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The camp lasted six weeks until police moved in to shut it down and
evict all of its inhabitants, pointing to sporadic acts of hooliganism as
justification. Andrew Young, the young civil rights leader who later
went on to be Jimmy Carter’s U.N. ambassador and a mayor of Atlanta,
was horrified, saying the crushing of the camp was worse than the
police violence he saw in the South.
“It was worse than anything I saw in Mississippi or Alabama,” he said.
“You don’t shoot tear gas into an entire city because two or three
hooligans are throwing rocks.”
Top photo: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to the press outside of Riverside Church afterpreaching the morning sermon.
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Zaid Jilani
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