Martin Luther King Jr. was transformed from a private citizen into a public figure one afternoon in early December 1955. He told his wife Coretta when he arrived home at 6 p.m. that he wouldn’t have time for a meal. He’d come from a meeting and was going to another and then one more later on. He had a speech to prepare. The young pastor was relieved that his spouse was fully accepting of his news — he’d been drafted as the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.
King, one could say, emerged as a compromise leader, the public face of the Montgomery bus boycott, which the MIA would coordinate. Of the established civil rights leaders in the Alabama city, the 56-year-old labor firebrand E.D. Nixon was considered too radical and the more senior Christian ministers too cautious. Only the 26-year-old King was nominated, and historian Taylor Branch wrote that, looking back, some said “his chief asset was his lack of debts or enemies.”
Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat for a white woman on Dec. 1. Her story is told often, but much less is heard about the poorest employees of Montgomery, about the maids and the day laborers, for example, who refused to use public transport for an entire year. The successful navigation of this campaign would push King on the road to national prominence and eventually international recognition. Eight years after the boycott had begun, he received the Nobel Prize for Peace; another four years on, at age 39, King was assassinated.
Parks, the leaders decided after she was arrested, would make a good impression in any court. In previous months, two other women had been arrested on Montgomery buses in similar protests; but one was a mere teenager and the other had a troubled family upbringing as the daughter of an alcoholic. The community could get behind the taciturn Parks, the 42-year-old seamstress wife of a barber. The couple also shared a long history of activism.
Experienced civil rights leaders had to be savvy about public relations. They understood that vulnerabilities could and would be exploited to the fullest, both by the authorities and the press. The campaign by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to undermine King, using knowledge of his extramarital liaisons, now make for shocking reading. That aspect of his life is still being invoked more than 50 years after his martyrdom.
In “The Dark Queen” Netflix special, standup comic Adrienne Iapalucci refers to King’s sexual relationships, but in particular those with white women. Like almost all comedy meant to offend and provoke, her act is basically harmless. If you don’t like it, switch it off. She might be described as a right-wing nihilist, and one likely to annoy conservatives more than liberals. Still, her MLK commentary could be taken as indicative of a cultural shift.
Conservative activist and the founder of Talking Point USA Charlie Kirk expressed admiration for King as recently as 2022, but he has done an about-face and now describes him as a "mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s,” and “awful” and “not a good person.”
Kirk, who is friends with Donald J. Trump Jr. and was appointed in 2020 by Papa Trump to a commission dedicated to fostering “patriotic education,” now condemns the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a “huge mistake.”
A Wired magazine article a year ago said that Blake Neff, a producer on Kirk’s radio show, “has also been publicly laying the groundwork for rewriting the history on King, attempting to link him to violent unrest after the passing of the Civil Rights Act.”
It quoted a spokesperson for Kirk’s organization TPUSA, Andrew Kolvet, saying that Americans have been fed a “fake history” that glosses over the unrest of the later 1960s caused by civil rights agitation.
Has it really been glossed over? Isn’t it usually mentioned in conjunction with the wider anti-war upheaval on the campuses? And what counts as unrest? The violent reaction to the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s was unrest, as was the bombing of the church in Birmingham that killed four girls, the physical attacks on media covering the civil rights campaign, the attacks on people asserting their right as Americans to sit at a lunch counter, the turning of police dogs on protesting children and the assassination of Medgar Evers. All happened before the passing of the 1964 act.
The Brown v. the Board of Education decision back in 1954 had pointed the way toward integration in the classroom and so one might have said the Supreme Court was fomenting unrest.
Black men who had fought the Nazis couldn’t vote at home for their own president, senator, member of the House, or governor in the segregated South. That denial was inevitably leading to unrest.
When a nine-year veteran of U.S. Air Force James Meredith applied to study at and was admitted to the University of Mississippi, it took 31,000 troops to quell the disturbances, AKA the Ole Miss riot of 1962, that ensued.
Influenced by thinkers like the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King advocated for a non-violent way for people to shape their own history.
At a time when the United States was claiming to lead the free world, King’s slogan “Freedom Now” was making the radical case for full citizenship and inclusion of Blacks in the life of the nation.
In his book, “How Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” King recalled discussions with Stokely Carmichael and others about the strategy and direction of the movement. The context was the shooting of Meredith on his one-man freedom march from Tennessee to Mississippi in 1966. From his hospital bed, the air force vet allowed the main civil rights organizations to continue the march, which was to highlight the lack of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; but Carmichael wanted to use the slogan “Black Power” rather than “Freedom Now” and to place less emphasis on the participation of whites.
“Power is the only thing respected in this world and we must get it at any cost,” Carmichael said. “Martin, you know as well as I do that practically every other ethnic group in America has done just this. The Jews, the Italians and the Irish did it, why can’t we?”
“This is just the point,” King replied, “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power. Through group unity, determination and creative endeavor they have gained it. The same is true of the Irish and the Italians. Neither group has used a slogan of Irish or Italian power, but they have worked hard to achieve it. That is exactly what we must do.”
He argued that the demand for “black consciousness” or “black equality” would describe better what they were about, but Carmichael felt that neither had the same appeal as “Black Power.”
King wrote that “it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment. The Black Power slogan did not spring full grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus. It was born in the wounds of disappointment and despair. It is a cry of daily hurt and persistent pain.”
He continued later, “It is no accident that the birth of this slogan in the civil rights movement took place in Mississippi — the state symbolizing the most blatant abuse of white power. In Mississippi, the murder of civil rights workers is still a popular pastime. In that state, more than 40 Negroes and whites have either been lynched or murdered over the last three years, and not a single man has been punished for these crimes. More than 50 Negro churches have been burned or bombed in the last two years and yet the bombers still walk the streets surrounded by the halo of adoration. This is white power in its most brutal, cold-blooded and vicious form.”
King said, “when people came to see that in spite of progress their conditions were still insufferable, when they looked out and saw more poverty, more school segregation and more slums, despair began to set in.”
While “Black Power,” could be proclaimed usefully in certain contexts, from a practical political and moral stance, it offered no way forward.
“Our most fruitful course is to stand firm, move forward nonviolently, accept disappointments and cling to hope,” King wrote. “Our determined refusal not to be stopped will eventually open the door to fulfillment.”
He returned to the issue of ethnic success. “In a multiracial society no group can make it alone. It is a myth to believe that the Irish, the Italians and the Jews — the ethnic groups that Black Power advocates cite as justification of their views — rose to power through separatism. It is true that they stuck together. But their group unity was always enlarged by joining in alliances with other groups such as political machines and trade unions.”
Blacks needed organized strength, King said, “but that strength will only be effective when it is consolidated through constructive alliances with the majority group.”
