Telos 182 (Spring 2018), a special issue commemorating the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., is now available for purchase in our store.
I am most grateful to the publisher of Telos, Mary Piccone, the editor, Russell A. Berman, and the managing editor, Robert Richardson, for being willing to host this special edition of Telos in commemoration of the life and thought of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1968 was a tough year for the United States and for many around the world. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam started in January, and the My Lai massacre occurred there in March. In Paris, the student uprising started in May. The Prague Spring, during which Czechoslovakian activists sought a measure of greater freedom for their country from the Soviet Union, was crushed by Warsaw Pact military forces in August. Police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, beating student protestors indiscriminately in the streets. The Weather Underground emerged in October, and black American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their gloved Black Power salute as a protest during the Mexico City Olympics that same month. Richard M. Nixon was elected as president in November. And, there were two pivotal deaths: Robert F. Kennedy in June, and Reverend King in April. After King’s assassination, many U.S. cities erupted in flames as their African American residents protested his killing and the moribund state of civil rights progress at the time of King’s death.
Sandwiched between these two deaths, in May 1968 at SUNY-Buffalo, Paul Piccone and his fellow philosophy graduate students gave birth to Telos, ushering in what is now fifty years of distinguished authors, interviews, and translations to educate and inform an entire generation of students and scholars associated with the New Left, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and trends in postmodernism, before making a decisive change to discuss federalism, regional and cultural particularity, as well as the liturgical critique of modernity and the postsecular turn.
Under the leadership of Mary Piccone and Russell Berman, Telos in recent years has opened itself to new topics and new writers, including a small and growing number of African Americans. To help commemorate Telos‘s fiftieth anniversary, we focus on Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s intellectual contributions viewed fifty years since his death, with essays discussing his thought and drawing implications that might inform our conduct in the present. Another vital task of this volume is the recovery of Reverend King as a religious figure, especially in support of Telos‘s long-standing efforts to advance the postsecular turn, where theorists draw upon the religious and theological ideas in Western thought in order to illuminate the sources of current political and cultural ideals in our society.
Much contemporary academic scholarship has largely whitewashed and effaced King’s religious legacy, effectively secularizing and instrumentalizing him in order to appeal to the itching ears of some secular former SNCC veterans, New Class managerial intellectuals, and a new generation of young activists, some of whom are indifferent or hostile to religious belief and those who propagate it. The net effect has been a knowledge deficit about not only King but also the tens of thousands of ordinary people who joined him in movement building and who shaped his tactics and worldview to reflect a rootedness in local, particular traditions and norms, affording the opportunity for ordinary people to become architects of their own liberation, and to win big in the legislative struggles for voting rights, equal employment opportunity, and fair housing, on top of the slow but necessary efforts toward school desegregation.
More wins might have come, perhaps at great cost and over a more extended period of time, as King and his lieutenants decided to focus on what King described as the “giant triplets” of racism, militarism, and poverty, as King began to plan for the Poor People’s Campaign, for which his visit to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking African American sanitation workers was to begin the next phase of the struggle. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, to an overflow crowd, King gave his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” effectively preaching his own funeral, as he would be slain by an assassin’s bullet the very next day. 1968 was indeed a tough year.
And what of King as thinker? While he was indifferent to the standards and practices of academic production and citation in his doctoral dissertation at Boston University, nevertheless there and during his time at Crozer Theological Seminary for his divinity degree program, he did attend classes, participate in graduate seminars, and read the books assigned to him, thereby helping shape his views about religious experience, ethics, pragmatism, Boston Personalism, and notions about social justice and the Social Gospel as inflected by the Niebuhrian and Barthian trends then on offer in his divinity degree and PhD programs, while synthesizing these with his own religio-cultural understanding and practice in the Black Church tradition. King started out as a theological liberal, and early in his adolescence and as he grew to manhood, he disbelieved many of the classical tenets and truth claims of historic Christianity, including those of a metaphysical, supernatural, and miraculous nature. He progressed to neo-orthodoxy (especially that of Reinhold Niebuhr) with elements of existentialism, before recovering his own Black Church tradition, including many of the tenets of orthodox Christianity. Upon his graduation from Boston University, King was expected to have a choice of prestigious African American church pulpits in cities like Montgomery, Chattanooga, and Detroit, and to otherwise lead a quiet life as a member of the bourgeois black middle class.
King was recruited by activists in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 to lead the protest effort that grew into the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, which in turn led to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. These efforts engaged ordinary people, nearly all of whom were practicing Christians in the Black Church tradition, and who would transform King into an activist and further show him the value, power, utility, and resiliency of their supernatural Christian faith, to which King would finally, even if imperfectly, return later in his life when his elite theological formation no longer had the spiritual power to sustain and fortify him. By King’s own admission, he had less regard for the Protestant theological liberalism that he was taught, and he moved toward a more sophisticated fusion of the Social Gospel, Protestant social ethics, neo-orthodoxy, democratic socialism, and many of the supernatural elements of the Black Church tradition. In the face of credible and continuous threats to kill him and his family, he recovered that supernaturalism, even while growing more politically radical. It was that faith, rooted in the Black Church and the Christian Gospel, that sustained him in the end, even unto his death.
The writers in this volume are deliciously eclectic, representing different disciplinary approaches and starting points. This is by design. As his widow, Coretta Scott King, said in 1992 of her husband, there were few subjects about which he did not write or otherwise have an opinion, and as a Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr., was rarely at a loss for words and did not lack the gift of self-expression. Therefore, this is the beginning of a discussion about King, not its end. Readers will be treated to a diverse analysis of King’s legacy and its possible application for today, in support of Telos‘s ongoing mission to promote the postsecular turn and in the hope of healing our contemporary political and cultural moment.
Rufus Burrow, Jr., a scholar of the historical and philosophical legacy of Boston Personalism, and of King’s involvement with it, begins with a profile of King’s approach to leadership and the ethics that undergirded it. Burrow reports that King understood leadership as relational and reciprocal, between the leader and those led, with morality being the center of leadership. Training and practice of organizers, and in particular the practice of nonviolence, epitomized King’s approach, even while he also imperfectly retained some of the “autocratic and authoritarian tendencies” that were present then, and remain, in some African American churches and among some of its clergy. Contrary to contemporary efforts to secularize King, Burrow notes that “King himself frequently reminded his audiences that he was first, foremost, and last a Baptist preacher who had been called to ministry by God. It was not just a matter of choice of profession for King. What he chose to do was accept God’s calling, and he vowed to honor it for the remainder of his life.”
Burrow identifies as key to King’s understanding of leadership the practice of agape love, which is that love that God shows to humanity, a love that people are called to demonstrate toward one another, including one’s enemies. This King maintained, even while “the prophetic tradition of the Jewish and Christian faiths convinced him of the importance and necessity of both love and justice in the fight for human freedom and civil rights.” Burrow also lifts up the relation of power to love and justice in King’s ethical practice, stating King’s belief that “[o]nly power makes it possible to achieve the requirements of love and justice. The ethical leader understands the necessity of power in the leadership process and is determined to use it for the common good.” Burrow contrasts King’s thought and practice of leadership with the deficiencies of contemporary political leadership, illuminating the wide chasm between them.
Church historian David D. Daniels III opens a discussion about King’s economic democracy, that is, democratic socialism, with a historical narrative of how King came to his views. Daniels also outlines King’s sophistication in his handling of economic concepts, in that King declined to accept a command-and-control economy, like those of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. King instead believed that black consumer participation in a market economy was the surest path to the black community’s economic uplift. King held the concepts of economic sharing and market forces in a dialectical manner, and Daniels recounts episodes in the long history of black American self-help and entrepreneurship, even while showing King’s awareness of black economic exclusion from the American market economy. Daniels presents King’s understanding of economic democracy in a consumer-driven market system as the way to overcome this exclusion.
Social ethicist and theologian Gary Dorrien examines King in the context of the Social Gospel and his growing radicalism, which persisted to the end of King’s life, with a particular focus on how it related to King’s democratic socialism, something that was de-emphasized during his lifetime due to the fear of giving credence to allegations that King was a Soviet agent and closet Communist. Dorrien presents the Social Gospel in King as the logical outworking of a democratic socialist vision, as he had a long relationship with socialist concepts and trends (as did his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., “Daddy King”), including older movements like the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Socialist Party.
King kept his socialist sentiments quiet in order to avoid red-baiting and damaging the civil rights advocacy of the SCLC. Dorrien notes that for King, “[i]t was one of God’s mysteries why so many Communists and so few white liberals cared about black Americans,” and he highlights the roles of two of King’s closest advisors, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, who substantively influenced King’s thinking about socialism, with Rustin’s and Levison’s worldview that “[c]apitalism . . . played different roles in the northern and southern struggles for racial justice. In the North, blacks suffered primarily from the predatory logic of capitalism. . . . In the South, blacks suffered primarily from the tyranny of racial caste, where capitalism was increasingly an ally in the struggle against racial tyranny because capitalist owners experienced the demands of racial caste as a needless waste.” By linking democratic socialism to the Social Gospel, Dorrien allows King’s example to inform what could be a future revival of a political theology informed not by the commitments of Carl Schmitt but instead by a kinder and gentler political theology deeply rooted in an earlier tradition of Christian Socialism.
Susannah Heschel, a scholar of Judaism and of Jewish–Christian relations and daughter of a close friend and ally of King, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, paints a moving portrait of these two leaders’ friendship and collaboration, and retrieves the notion of the prophetic that was fully understood by Heschel and King due to their reading of the Hebrew Bible. King’s use of this prophetic strand, reflected and refracted through the preaching tradition of the Black Church, both in slavery and in freedom, made him a kindred spirit to Heschel and is a vivid reminder of what was at that time the long collaboration between blacks and Jews in the struggle for social justice. Heschel notes that her father’s presence in the march with King and other activists from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 “in the front row of marchers was a visual symbol of religious Jewish commitment to civil rights,” a legacy that has been sadly forgotten or ignored by many younger contemporary black activists today. It might well be said that the black freedom struggle would be unintelligible in the absence of the Hebrew Bible and its past and continuing influence in American black culture, including African Americans’ nearly four-hundred-year fight for justice. The collaboration between King and Heschel is an example of what can happen when the prophetic power of Judaism unites with the African American tradition of struggle.
Jamal-Dominque Hopkins, a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discloses some of King’s early theological commitments, including what was an initial rejection of classical Christian theological tenets and supernaturalism, a stance that King retained until at least up to the time of the early formation of the SCLC in 1957. Hopkins also revisits King’s presence in Southern California to lend support to civic rights activists there and elsewhere in California, even while himself being influenced by other black religious thinkers that were present in the state, especially the clergyman, peace activist, and black Quaker mystic the Reverend Howard Thurman, whose teachings, along with the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, formed the basis of King’s commitment to nonviolence. King’s presence in the state helped form a cadre of activists that would have a major role in desegregation efforts throughout California.
Harriett Jernigan, a scholar of German literature and a translator of German texts, provides a contemporary observation of how the King legacy is being implemented in Germany today, specifically in the naming of certain kinds of public schools as “Martin Luther King schools.” These schools are often the last alternative for pupils who have not been accepted in other divisions of the German pre-collegiate education system: primarily students who have been excluded due to socioeconomic status, race, language, and immigrant and refugee status. The founders of these special schools have an explicit commitment to nonviolence, inclusion, and multiculturalism in the German context. However, Jernigan reports the contradictions built into this aspiration, as these schools’ students find it difficult to enter the mainstream of German society even though the “Martin Luther King” schools aim precisely to help these students attain some measure of equality in German society.
Vincent Lloyd, a religious studies scholar, discusses hope and its deformation due to stereotypes associated with African Americans. Lloyd finds that rather than having the range of human emotions and reasons for action, the notion of black Americans as “naturally talented hopers” makes a mockery of hope itself and relegates African Americans’ intellectual and rational capabilities to a stereotyped and inferior status. King’s hope differs from that commonly on offer today, as Lloyd notes: “Now that we have seen King’s own account of hope in the sermon where he offers a systematic presentation of this account, it appears quite different from the soft, spiritual language of hope that circulates around him. Hope is neither cheerfulness nor vague inspiration, but rather grave resilience that makes possible clear perception and right action.”
Adrian Pabst, a political philosopher in England, reflects on King’s legacy for the renewal of the Labour Party and a politics of solidarity in the United Kingdom. He notes that “[c]ultural liberalism and liberal market economics are mutually reinforcing in ways that undermine both national identity and the wealth of nations, as both liberalisms privilege minority politics and favor vested interests.” Pabst argues that over against the hegemony of the elites of cultural liberalism and neoliberal markets, King invoked “some of America’s best traditions to articulate a vision of national renewal that has universal significance precisely because it emerges from a particular place with people bound together by a shared purpose.” Pabst also finds traces of the political philosophy of Edmund Burke, in that King seemed far more interested in the organic bonds connecting people in society and mediating structures, and the cultural particularism that serves as the basis for political community in America, rather than the formal bureaucratic structures that characterize the modern state. This contrasts with much of the identity politics and divisive ethno-nationalism present today in the American polity, as well as that in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Marcia Pally, a scholar of multicultural studies, recovers the roles of Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, exponents of American Pragmatism, as resources for understanding the philosophic outlook of King and its roots in American (Boston) Personalism. While many contemporary thinkers continue to look abroad for an understanding of our cultural moment, Pally valorizes the role of these American philosophic traditions as sources for thought and action. Peirce, Royce, and King all stand within that tradition, and it aligns well with the aspiration of the founder of this journal, Paul Piccone, to create an American critical theory that could examine and offer resources for healing our contemporary political and cultural condition.
Kenneth A. Taylor, a philosopher of language and of mind, is a professed atheist. However, he is appreciative of King’s moral and ethical stance toward human and civil rights, even while not sharing King’s metaphysical and spiritual commitments. Taylor asks: what place and role is there for non-theists in acts of resistance in the presence of existential despair? He applies this question to himself as he reflects on King’s moral courage and unrelenting resistance to the forces of injustice and evil. Even though the number of atheists in black America is a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the black population, the question remains: how should atheists be welcomed into the struggle for justice, even if they do not share the spiritual commitments of the majority? Taylor provides a possible path for this.
Finally, we feature an extended interview between myself and historian David J. Garrow, one of the foremost chroniclers of King’s life and the author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), as well as of a recent biography of Barack Obama, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017). We touch on developments since Garrow’s 1986 book, King’s intellectual formation, and the relevance of King’s legacy to contemporary politics and society.
