My respected colleague Chuck Morse has never been afraid to take controversial positions and his column about Martin Luther King, Jr. shortly before the national holiday named for him is no exception.

Critics may miss the mark in their reaction to Chuck’s piece, "Was Martin Luther King A Communist?" The question of Dr. King’s relationship with some of the aides mentioned in the article has vexed conservatives for a long time. Nor should anyone question the motives behind his column. Chuck has been one of the few conservative commentators to outspokenly oppose racialism on the right, engaging this noxious idea in debate and upholding color-blindness rather than pretending there aren’t bigots trying to hijack the right for their own twisted purposes.

Nevertheless, I feel that my colleague’s analysis of Dr. King misses some key points. While we both agree that King accomplished many great things on behalf of racial equality in the United States and was far preferable to many of the extremists who could have assumed the leadership mantle in his community, it is important to place even the civil rights leader’s flawed ideas in their proper context.

First, it should not be surprising the Marxism appealed to many black Americans during the Jim Crow era. At that time, blacks were shut out of the power structures of this country by government-sponsored discrimination codified in law, massive private-sector discrimination and the denial of access to public accommodations. This contributed to poverty rates as high as 55 percent and noticeable inequality.

Inequality has always laid fertile ground for socialism and communism. To those who are victimized by forces of inequality, an ideology that claims to offer true equality is likely to appeal greatly. To those who are denied the ability to achieve according to their ability, redistribution has an intrinsic appeal. When you feel robbed and see your family going without, you are going to be less concerned about whether a political program amounts to robbing society’s producers.

Those on the far left realized this. Edward Brooke, who would go on to become the first popularly elected black US senator in history, found himself endorsed by the Communist Party in his first bids for public office in Massachusetts even though he was a Republican. That is because at the time the Communist Party had a policy of endorsing all black office-seekers. There were those who knew the appeal that Marxism would have to a community that had seen inequality. Knowing that blacks were a deeply religious people whose ties to the church would preclude extensive support for an atheistic ideology, advocates of collectivism pointed to aspects of the Bible (especially the New Testament) calling for self-denial in criticizing capitalism.

Such interpretations, incidentally, have not been limited to the left. Many individualists have criticized Christianity based on similar interpretations of the Bible, which they considered incompatible with rational self-interest or the profit motive within free-market capitalism. This has led to a rejection of Christianity by many objectivists and some libertarians on the right.

King himself was not immune to the appeal Marx had on the dissident class at that time of political turmoil. But it is worth noting that in the very book my colleague cites, Stride Toward Freedom, contains the reasons for King’s rejection of communism. "Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God… History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter. Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist, there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently, almost anything - force, violence, murder, lying - is a justifiable means to the ’millennial’ end. …Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state."

King’s own views were influenced by the Social Gospel, as was most of progressive Christianity at that point in time, and they evolved into something like Christian socialism by the time of his death in 1968. It is unfortunate that he did not recognize that even before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, black Americans were experiencing unprecedented economic progress within the free market - Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White has demonstrated the rapidity of black occupational advancement in the 1940s and 1950s. But ultimately, the question of his liberalism and even of defects in his character overlook the most important aspects of his work in much the same way the left attempts to denigrate the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution by pointing out that Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers owned slaves.

Looking at works like "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," King made - and ultimately won - the moral argument for black equality on the basis of two very American concepts: natural law, which from the time of the Declaration of Independence was an inherent part of the American creed, and formal equality before the law.

It was clear by the arguments and example of King and his movement that segregation was not a system designed for separate development of the races with ultimate equality in mind, as its intellectual defenders often alleged both in this country and in South Africa under apartheid. While King argued for an ethic that transcended race or skin color and appealed to a vision of a multiracial society with a common culture, he was jailed and brutally opposed. The American people thus heard a movement for equal rights making its case on the basis of judging individuals by their merits and respecting their God-given rights and watched it in contrast with Bull Connor, police dogs and fire hoses. They saw petty indignities like segregated lunch counters and colored drinking fountains which clearly could exist for no reason other than racial subjugation.

If King was not the man of the right neo-conservatives today make him out to be - and he surely was not, as he branched out in his political activism from civil rights advocacy to opposition to the Vietnam War (a defensible position that nevertheless is difficult to characterize as conservative within the context of the Cold War) and the promotion of income redistribution - his vision was an ennobling one for all Americans. If liberals are right that King would support racial preferences if he were alive today - and there are solid reasons to believe this to be the case - the fact is, such a position would still be a violation of the principles he laid out in his "I Have a Dream Speech," just as Abraham Lincoln’s early remarks in favor of racial inequality could not be reconciled with the Emancipation Proclamation.

In truth, Martin Luther King was a complex and interesting man. He was not the saint of our national mythology, the communist his right-wing critics portray him as or anything else that was easily politically categorized. But this country is stronger and better for his successes, and that is something truly worth remembering.

Jim Antle

You can e-mail your comments to Jim at Jimantle@aol.com.

About W. James Antle III.

Copyright © 2002 by W. James Antle III.
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-Published with permission