Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr. Show all posts

Thursday, August 12, 2010

MLK the human being


A review of Marshall Frady’s Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (2002)

(Rating 5 of 5)

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of those Americans like Ben Franklin, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and FDR, who, to me, were far too perfect to be interesting. When we learn about these people in grade school, we are taught about how awesome and nice they were to the point they become rather dull. When I got older and I started to read more about these people, I discovered their true greatness. King was probably the greatest American never to hold public office, yet, had had an effect on this country similar to that of Franklin Roosevelt or John Marshall. Unfortunately, like many great leaders of our past, King’s legacy now clouds the image of who the man was. When I read King's Autobiography, I felt I had come to a greater understanding of him as a person and his perspective on himself. Reading Marshall Frady's Martin Luther King: A Life has given me more of a clear image of who the man was and times that he lived. Frady's King is a man who, like all men, is flawed human being. Here he is presented as Oliver Cromwell once said 'with warts in all'. But even the 'sins' of Martin Luther King are very minor when compared to other American icons, and King clearly paid for them more then he should have in his war with J. Eager Hoover. The United States of America today is a very different place then it has been because King was a major player in his era.

In my very last post I had gone over some of the details of King's life and not wanting to be extremely redundant, I thought I would just go over what were, for myself, the highlights of this book. One of things America has learned since the sixties and seventies have become more history then memory for an entire generation of people, was the war between the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and Director of the FBI.


(A wife greets her husband)

J. Edger Hoover was a legend in the United States in the area of crime fighting. In 1924, Hoover was appointed Director of the Bureau of Investigation, which was the predecessor of the FBI, and he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935. He would still be the Director when he died in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover’s efforts had put a huge dent into organized crime operations during his tenure. If he had stuck to actual criminals, his legacy would be untouchable as some of his legendary G-Men were. However, convinced through very little evidence-and much more racism and paranoia-that Civil Rights organizations were communist plots against the government and he would have to stop them. He would go out of his way to wage an irrational campaign against them.


(J. Edger Hoover in his early days)


“While King still had no inkling of it, there had in fact commenced what was to become a prolonged shadow war between him and Hoover. Though it would take place mostly out of the public eye, the two of them were to be looked into an elemental conflict as figures reflecting—more, virtually embodying—two poles of the American character: that ethic lasting Plymouth's starch-collared society of probity, discipline, righteousness as a matter of a ruthless cleanliness of behavior, this rectitudinousness in schizophrenic tension with an unrulier urge lasting from the frontier, a restlessness with authority and convention, a readiness for adventure in exploring the farther, windy moral opens of life. Since assuming power as director of the FBI in 1924, Hoover had not appreciably changed his notion of what should be the character of the nation—sedate, sober, orderly, and properly segregated, like his FBI—and he had ever since applied all the energies of the institution he had created to keeping it that way, to preserve the plainer America of his nostalgias against alien contamination and the subversions of more diverse cultural weathers. By the fifties, he had become for much of the country—this stubby, pluggish, stern little pug-bull of a man with a cauliflower pallor and flat, blunt face—a kind of totem figure of law and uprightness. In the process, he had consolidated the FBI into perhaps Washington's greatest private preserve of official power ever, his intelligence files holding even many in the halls of government in fear.” p.81-2



(J. Edger Hoover at the height of his power)

The book also discuss the famous March on Washington in 1963. It discusses the event, the organizers, its purpose, and even some of the people who did not want it to proceed, including President Kennedy. Kennedy sometimes gets criticized for this but that is with hindsight being twenty/twenty. It is a great testament to those marched that day that not one act of violence occurred. Had there been a riot, it might have been a huge set-back for the movement. Fortunately the march was completely peaceful.


(King rallying the crowd)

“The mass pilgrimage into Washington had been entrepreneured by movement patriarch A. Philip Randolph, in concert with other leaders like King, and despite his crankiness about the SCLC's ascendancy after Birmingham, Roy Wilkins, to demonstrate the expanse and spirit of the movement with a colossal rally to appeal to Congress for passage of the public accommodations bill presented by Kennedy. The president himself, however, was more than a little edgy about it all, trying to dissuade the march's organizers with warnings, in a conversation with them beforehand, that thousands of demonstrators converging into the capital could be seen by Congress as an attempt at mob intimidation, resulting in their all losing the legislation he'd introduced, many on the Hill already looking for a pretext anyway to avoid supporting it. King offered the observation he had put to Birmingham's ministers: 'Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct-action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham ill-timed.' To which the president rejoined, with a small smile, 'Including the Attorney General.'” p.121-2



There is a focus on King and his main competitor of ideas in the African-American community, Malcolm X. Frady discusses how King and Malcolm came from two very different walks of life.

“They were, King and Malcolm, really projections of two entirely different cultures. King's was a ministry congenial to his mostly churchly, respectably middle-class black constituency, eager to join in a coalition of purpose with the nation's white liberal establishment. But Malcolm was a prophet of another America, having arisen out of a childhood of cold miser that could not have been more unlike King's snugly privileged upbringing, and the vicious and gaudy hustler society of the black underclass in those mammoth ghettos of the North's 'great cities of destruction,' in E. Franklin Frazer's phrase. Such inner exiles lived without any sense of connection to the rest of the country, bereft of that sense of their individual worth without which 'they cannot live,' as James Baldwin wrote during the time, and 'they will do anything whatever to regain it. That is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.'” p.129



(This famous picture shows the two famous leaders meeting, they were together only for a brief moment)

As time went on a new battles emerged, King would go on and face new challenges as younger and more militant generation were rejecting his message of love for a Black Nationalist ideology that he was completely repulsed by.

“Yet King was to cast himself against all this anyway. He may have arrived with Birmingham and Selma at his apotheosis as the Mosaic figure leading his people out of the old Egypt of their bondage in the South, but with this grander aspiration 'to confront the power structure massively' on a national scale, he was entering full into his tragic arch.”p.169


There is also discussion of his last uncompleted mission in which he was going to challenge the great economic forces of our nation, a mission that he would be slain before he could truly begin.

“Thus, in the summer of 1967, King announced what would be the most expansively radical adventure of his life: a national movement called the Poor People's Campaign. It would mobilize into one wide popular front not only blacks but all the country's disregarded and outcast—poor whites, Hispanics, Native Americans—in a great Gandhian crusade that would challenge the nation's entire custodial complex, not just its corporate citadels but its central institutions of government, to free the destitute of America from their generational ghettos of hopelessness.” p.194


I highly recommend this work it is a great and fascinating look into one of the greatest leaders of any age. This book captures the highs, lows, battles one and battles lost in a career that challenged and changed a nation, the American Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

{Video is from YouTube}

Monday, August 9, 2010

KING IN HIS OWN WORDS


A review of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998)

Edited by Clayborne Carson

(Rating 5 of 5)

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is an incredible work; however one needs to remember that it is not a real autobiography. Like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, it was written after he died. It was assembled by the editor, Clayborne Carson, who went over King's papers both public and personnel and edited his work into a biographical format. The book received the endorsement of Coretta Scott King in 1998. The book is a brilliant piece of literature. Carson is careful to let the reader know what the material is and is not edited. When he takes Dr. King’s words directly and unaltered he puts them in italics, so the reader knows for certain that he is getting pure primary material.


(Martin Luther King Jr.)

King is a combination of many influences though out his life, he begins by talking about his boyhood growing up in the segregated south, where his father was a preacher in the local church. Martin Luther King, Sr. was a take-no-crap-from-anyone type of guy, which was hard for a black man in the segregated south. His mother, Alberta Williams, he describes as being more of a gentle soul whom a lot of his patience would come from. As the Pastor's son he had a type of special status within the local community. He describes his first experience with racism at the age of six when his white friend told him that his (the white boy’s) father would not let them be friends anymore because he was black. As the book goes on King discusses his education and how the works of different scholars and philosophers had upon his world view, whether Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Marx or Mahatma Gandhi.


(King's parents Martin Sr. and Alberta.  Like her son Alberta also became a martyr.)

King discussed meeting his future wife, getting married, and the hard decision to go back to the segregated South. King would take the ministry at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and from there he would build an activist base. He encouraged his membership to register to vote and to join the NAACP. When the now internationally famous Rosa Parks refused to get from her seat, she started a movement. The Montgomery Bus Boycott did not even start out as a movement to end segregated bussing, just as a movement for more fair treatment. It was not until the outrageous response by those in power backed by the majority of the white community that caused the movement to push further. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a form of nonviolent protest that was inspired by the Mahatma Gandhi and Christian doctrine.


(Coretta Scott King)

“As the days unfolded, however, the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating thought the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom. About a week after the protest started, a white woman who understood and sympathized with the Negroes' efforts wrote a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser comparing the buss protest with the Gandhian movement in India. Miss Juliette Morgan, sensitive and frail, did not long survive the rejection and condemnation of the white community, but long before she died in the summer of 1957 the name of Mahatma Gandhi was well known in Montgomery. People who had never heard of the little brown saint of India were now saying his name with an air of familiarity. Nonviolent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating ideal. In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.” p.67



(Mahatma Gandhi)

After victory was achieved in Montgomery, King became internationally famous. This was both a blessing a curse at the same time. A blessing in the way he was now able to carry his message to a much larger audience, but a curse in the way that it set some impossible standards for him to meet in future struggles. King would travel the world eventually going to India, the home of his idol. He was very pleased by what he saw when he got there.

“That night we had dinner with Prime Minister Nehru; with us as a guest was Lady Mountbatten, the wife of Lord Mountbatten, who was viceroy of India when it received its independence. They were lasting friends only because Gandhi followed the way of love and nonviolence. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” p.125


At home things were heating up, as the fifties, which had seen some very positive developments such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Brown v. the Board of Education, rolled into the sixties things were going to began to move at a much faster pace. Also, 1960 was a presidential election year, with two candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were trying for the nation's top job.

“With Mr. Kennedy, after I looked over his voting record, I felt at points he was so concerned about being president of the United States that he would compromise basic principles to become president. But I had to look at something else beyond the man—the people who surrounded him—and I felt that Kennedy was surrounded by better people. It was on that basis that I felt that Kennedy would make the best president.

I never came out with an endorsement. My father did, but I never made one. I took this position in order to maintain a nonpartisan posture, which I have followed all along in order to be able to look objectively at both parties at all times. As I said to him all along, I couldn't, and I never changed that even after he made the call during my arrest. I made a statement of thanks, and I expressed my gratitude for the call, but in the statement I made it clear that I did not endorse any candidate and that this was not to be interpreted as an endorsement.

I had to conclude that the then known facts about Kennedy were not adequate to make an unqualified judgment in his favor. I do feel that, as any man, he grew a great deal. After he became president I thought we saw to Kennedys—a Kennedy of the first two years and another Kennedy emerging in 1963. He was getting ready to throw off political considerations and see the real moral issues. Had President Kennedy lived, I would probably have endorsed him in 1964. But, back at that time, I concluded that there was something to be desired in both candidates.” p.150



(Kennedy and Nixon who both sought King's support in 1960)

As the battles raged on they moved to a new and more dangerous front, Birmingham, it was here that a great amount of the famous images of dogs and people attacked with high pressure water hoses were captured. In this fight King would be imprisoned and while in jail, he had been criticized by a letter written by a group of white clergy. King responded with his famous 'Letter from Birmingham Jail.'

“First I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed in the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers the a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive which is the presence of justice, who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal that you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” p.195



(King in Washington)

“You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of 'somebodiness' that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist movement groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammed’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible 'devil.'” p.196-7




As his work continued things started to change. King’s main rival as the primary leader in the struggle for civil rights, Malcolm X, was becoming more popular. The primary difference between the two men was that Malcolm X was an advocate for violent resistance. In some ways he was a help to King, because he represented what the alternative to King's message was. However, as a proponent of violence, he attracted it in kind and otherwise alienated members of the white community who might have otherwise been sympathetic.

“Malcolm X came to the fore as a public figure partially as a result of a TV documentary entitled 'The Hate That Hate Produced.' That title points clearly to the nature of Malcolm's life and death. He was clearly a product of the hate and violence invested in the Negro's blighted existence in this nation. He, like so many of our number was a victim of the despair that inevitably derives from the conditions of oppression, poverty, and injustice which engulf that masses of our race. But in his youth, there was no hope no preaching, teaching, or movements of nonviolence. He was too young for the Garvey Movement, too poor to be a Communist—for the Communists geared their work to Negro intellectuals and labor without realizing that the masses of Negroes were unrelated to either—and yet he possessed a native intelligence and drive which demanded an outlet and means of expression. He turned first to the underworld, but this did not fulfill the quest for meaning which grips young minds. It was a testimony to Malcolm's personnel depth and integrity that he did not become an underworld czar, but turned again and again to religion for meaning and destiny. Malcolm was still turning and growing at the time of his meaningless assassination.” p.267



(Malcolm X)

As time went on the rise of Black Nationalism, which was abhorrent to King, was growing stronger. Even though the Civil Rights Movement had achieved incredible success, the Civil Rights Act in 1964 had been passed and was breaking down the wall of legalized segregation, some felt unsatisfied. The 'black power' movement, King felt was trying to undo what he had achieved. King began to envision a 'poor people's campaign' that would use the strategy of Civil Rights Movement to achieve economic justice for all citizens of all races. How successful he would have been is unknown because that is where his story untimely ends.

{Video was posted by MrCarlosBarrera on YouTube}