1-19-06, 9:12 am
On a global scale, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr is the most revered American of the second half of the twentieth century. His I Have a Dream speech, given at the August 1963 National March on Washington, is the most praised and admired speech by an American in modern history. His 'Letter From Birmingham Jail' is perhaps the most widely read American essay in modern times. The 'Letter From Birmingham Jail' was composed on the margins of a New York Times newspaper while he sat in jail during the battle of Birmingham, which was to the non-violent peoples army which King led in 1963 what the battle of Gettysburg was to the Civil War in 1863. It was the victory that turned the tide of conflict and eventually sealed the doom of the de jure segregationist South, just as Gettysburg turned the tide and eventually sealed the doom of the slaveholder’s rebellion and the Confederate government they had established to preserve and protect slavery.
But what is King’s legacy today, as Samuel Alito waits to be confirmed to the Supreme Court to join Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, and a California conservative Republican to the 'left' of that ultra-right trio, Anthony Kennedy. Alito, if he is confirmed, will significantly strengthen the far right’s influence on what has long been, from what King knew in his lifetime, a conservative Supreme Court sitting atop a conservative federal judiciary.
Today, right-wing legal theorists like new Chief Justice John Roberts, after generations of espousing states rights and judicial 'self-restraint,' begun to advocate a new 'federalism,' that would justify the great expansion of presidential and federal government power over the states, which is exactly what the Bush administration is doing in practice. Most of the states have more progressive judiciaries than the federal judiciary today, not to mention to a lesser extent governors and state legislatures, and all of whom must cope with the costs of administering public education, social welfare, infrastructure and environmental policies that right-wing national administrations and Republican controlled Congresses have largely either abandoned or massively under funded for a generation.
As an historian specializing in general U.S. political history since I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan nearly forty years ago, not to mention a Marxist historian since you really don’t have to be a Marxist at all to understand these points, it seems to me that the rightwing establishment, after decades of idle chatter about 'Reagan revolutions' and 'conservative movements' really believes that it can go back to the nineteenth century and make the federal judiciary into an 'iron curtain' of defense for corporate power and the privileges of the wealthy if all else, including the actions of reactionary and corrupt national administrations, fails.
From the 1880s to the 1930s,the federal judiciary played that role, declaring unconstitutional state law after state law initiated by populists, progressives, trade unionists and other people’s movements concerning the regulation of business and the protection of farmers and workers. The same courts destroyed the effective application of both the fourteenth amendment and post Civil War civil rights legislation and condemned four million former slaves to the tyranny and lawlessness of a system of segregation enforced by racist terror.
When the populist movement influenced the federal government to pass the Sherman anti-Trust act (1890) the court exempted corporations from it by contending that it concerned only commerce, not manufacture (this is an industrial country) and used it against unions, interpreting strikes as 'combinations in restraint of trade.' A law passed as a section of a tariff bill in the midst of a national recession in 1894, establishing a minimal income tax, actually a two percent surcharge on very high incomes, was declared along with all income taxes unconstitutional by the court, necessitating a constitutional amendment to institute an income tax two decades later. A federal law abolishing child labor in 1916 was declare unconstitutional two years latter. While scholars rarely make the connection, these judicial decisions in defense of 'capitalist rights' were made over generations by a judiciary that also proclaimed the hypocritical doctrine of 'separate but equal' where the human rights of African Americans were concerned and then turned a blind eye to the complete flouting even of that doctrine—that is the segregated facilities given to blacks were never remotely 'equal' to those available t o whites and whites could not be maimed and killed with impunity because of the color of their skin.
It wasn’t until 1938, thanks to the struggles of Communists and the broad left through the industrial unions of the CIO and the New Deal government of Franklin Roosevelt, which rose out of the collapse of the Great Depression to establish an informal but crucial alliance with the left which made possible mass union organization, social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and major jobs programs for the unemployed along with federally supported public assistance for families with dependant children.
In order to keep the Supreme Court from declaring its labor program unconstitutional (which the present court I have no doubt would) the New Deal government and its allies on the left fought to re-organize the Court by expanding its number from nine to fifteen, a campaign that failed but did help to pressure two moderate conservative Republicans, chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Owen Roberts (no relation to the present Chief Justice and not so far to the right as he) to shift their votes to support the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and other vital pieces of legislation in order to protect the court as an institution.
In the aftermath of that struggle, the New Deal government, and subsequent administrations appointed federal and Supreme Court judges in significant numbers who supported the right of state and federal governments to regulate business and protect labor, in effect retreating from the old 'freedom of contract' doctrine by which the court 'defended' the 'freedom' of workers to work in unsafe and unsanitary conditions and earn starvation wages, not to mention the 'freedom' of parents to send children ages 10-14 to work in mines, mills, and factories, as the core 'freedom' guaranteed by the constitution.
The federal judiciary also raised the bar in a series of cases involving state and federal laws to protect the civil liberties of minorities, the poor, and political and religious dissenters from punitive laws, searches and seizures, denial of right to counsel and placed restrictions on police interrogations from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s.
This lengthy history may not seem to have much to do with Martin Luther King Day, but it actually does. The long-term changes in the federal judiciary, in both the personnel of the courts and judicial philosophy which took shape in the late 1930s would be a necessary factor for the movement that King would lead in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the 1950s at the height of the cold war, what was in effect a new Center-Left coalition would be forged. King was the most important leader of what in effect were the broad left forces of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, including Communists hand former Communists working in the movement often under into great stress and harassment from the FBI and other political police agencies. J. Edgar Hoover particularly sought to institute purges within civil rights organizations and use anti-Communism and the cold war political context to both strengthen and justify his own strong support of and commitment to racism and segregation.
In 1962, Hoover essentially blackmailed his superiors into permitting him to designate Martin Luther King 'a Communist' and proceeded to use intense surveillance, wiretapping, forged documents, and other provocations of the kind the FBI used against CPUSA leaders in its Cointelpro program in an effort to destroy King for the rest of his life. At a particularly low point for King, Hoover’s agents even used false letters to try to encourage him to commit suicide.
In spite of this long-term persecution, King and the Civil Rights Movement forged a de facto but much more open Center-left coalition, with a branch of the federal government, not the executive and sections of congress as the labor movement had in the 1930s, but the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court, which had turned in a progressive direction thanks to the struggles and victories of the 1930s.
In 1954, the Supreme Court declared school segregation and in principle all other forms of segregation unconstitutional, reversing the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
Plessy v. Ferguson had been the legal basis of segregationist brutality and tyranny for fifty-eight years when the Supreme Court ended its reign. But the Brown decision in itself did not end school segregation, or segregation in any other area of life, or provide African Americans with elemental civil rights, such as the right to vote, serve on juries, be members of police forces or hold any public or civil service position beyond working in the segregated school system in the South.
President Eisenhower, who earlier as a general quietly resisted the integration of the military, did nothing except say public ally that people should obey the 'law of the land' and privately that he would not have appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice if he knew he would make such a decision.
Congress did nothing also as the NAACP fought in the courts to gain desegregation rulings and also to block laws in Southern states that compelled teachers in segregated schools to sign oaths that they were not members of the NAACP, oaths modeled after the 'affidavit' that trade union officials had to sign under the original Taft-Hartley law (1947) that they were not members of the Communist Party, USA.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 represented a new direction of the movement, a mass strike against segregation, led by activists like Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon, state leader of both the NAACP and the Sleeping Car Porters Union, with a long history of involvement in mass struggles. The young Martin Luther King became the voice of the boycott, its intellectual leader, and its unifying symbol. King applied the doctrines of non-violent civil disobedience most associated with Mohandas K. Gandhi, the most important organizer and leader of the Indian anti-colonial revolution, to the struggle of the African-American people against segregation and all forms of racism and social and economic oppression.
From the beginning King interpreted the struggle broadly, as one encompassing the best of American history, the necessity of protest to advance and make freedom and democracy real for all people and the positive effects that the removal of segregation would have on the nation’s white majority and all other people. A federal court decision eventually compelled the segregationist power structure of Montgomery to accept integration.
King became in the aftermath of the boycott the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), representing progressive forces among the Southern African American clergy to spear the non-violent war against segregation. While institutions of the multi-ethnic Northern and Southern left which had survived cold war repression worked with King and the SCLC, including left led unions in the North, the Highlander Folk school in the South and many CPUSA activists through the country, the federal judiciary continued to serve as the Civil Rights movements most important ally, issuing desegregation decisions that inspired both militant action and racist backlash in the Little Rock high school desegregation conflict of 1957, the lunch counter and other sit-ins of 1960, the CORE led Freedom rides of 1961 to integrate Southern bus terminals, an the desegregation of the universities of Mississippi and Alabama in 1962 and 1963.
When the SCLC launched what was in effect a mass strike against the whole system on segregation in the steel city of Birmingham, an industrial center of importance to national capital, the victory compelled the Kennedy administration to introduce comprehensive Civil Rights legislation, which the Johnson administration enacted in 1964.
The forces seeking to make the U.S., as one white female civil rights worker, said years before, 'an actual democracy,' had broken through. Barry Goldwater, the rightwing Republican presidential candidate who had opposed the Brown decision in 1954 on 'states rights' grounds and voted against the Civil Rights act of 1964 on similar grounds went down to a crushing defeat, as did the entire Republican ticket at all levels in the 1964 elections.
Although Strom Thurmond, the leading segregationist Democrat in the Senate joined the Republican party, as most of the segregationist political power structure would do throughout the South, the ability of the conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans was broken in the mid 1960s,
The alliance of a militant Civil Rights movement with a liberalized judiciary, which began at the height of the cold war when legislation like the McCarran Internal Security Act and a political culture of blacklists, censorship, and self-censorship appeared to have crippled or at the very least effectively contained peoples movements, had not only carried forward the struggles which ended segregation but which created the conditions and political context which created the conditions for major economic and social reforms.
A partial 'war on poverty' which produced Head Start, the Jobs Corps, an Office of Economic Opportunity, a revival of the Food Stamp Plan, a Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a short-lived Community Action program were along with major Federal Aid to Education legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, and the first federal clean air, clean water, and endangered species legislation legacies of the civil rights movements.
When the Johnson administration retreated from its Great Society domestic program to pursue escalation of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King organized a multi-ethnic Poor Peoples’ Movement and prepared for a national march on Washington to resist the forces of reaction that were trying to kill the Great Society social programs within three years of their birth.
Today the forces that fought Martin Luther King all of his life, did everything they could to destroy him while he lived and resisted for years the establishment of Martin Luther King Day, pay lip service to his memory. They would like King to be remembered as a modern day Uncle Tom, as a Black leader who rejected violent resistance to segregation, and didn’t threaten whites, unlike Malcolm X, with whom he is paired in the mass media official story. They fight to eliminate affirmative action entirely, staff civil rights agencies with opponents of civil rights, and sneer at criticisms of racist ideology and practices as 'political correctness.' They even twist King’s words to suggest that he stood for a 'color blind' society which they claim we have today (and which the judges who established Plessy v. Ferguson we should remember claimed they were representing).
If King could come back to earth, he would remind everyone of his doctrine of positive peace, peace with social justice. Peace is not just the absence of violence, but the elimination of the social conditions and inequalities which create violence and tempt many to see violence as a solution to those problems. King would condemn the occupation of Iraq as vigorously as he did the Vietnam War. He would understand that the federal judiciary because of right-wing dominance is becoming an enemy, not an ally, of peoples’ movements. I believe he would say as he did at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that peaceful protest, using the 'weapon of love' for the people, even those misguided by reactionary leaders, must be carried forward in the streets, in the institutions, in the communities, to turn unreason into reason, callousness into compassion, and injustice into justice.
2006 begins on a darker and more dangerous note than 1956, when the Boycott was on and beginning slowly to stir public attention. Yet, we have the progress of the past, the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, its methods and achievements, which we must use creatively to oppose the policies of an administration which in practice represents the world-view and the policies of J. Edgar Hoover rather than Martin Luther King.
--Norman Markowitz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
