This review by Political Affairs board member Norman Markowitz originally was posted on H-Net in 2007.

We posted it last January in honor of Dr. KIng's birthday. It received a number of interesting comments at the time, and we repost it this year in the hope of generating more discussion and comment.

Thomas F. Jackson. _From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther
King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice_. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007. 459pp. Illustrations, notes,
index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8122-3969-5.

Reviewed for H-1960s by Norman Markowitz, Department of History,
Rutgers University/New Brunswick

A Vital New Look at Martin Luther King Jr. and His Place in History

Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the most revered American of the
second half of the twentieth century, an American who, like Abraham
Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, symbolized for people
throughout the world "another America" committed to the struggle for
social progress and social justice. This image stood in sharp
contrast to the way that many abroad have come to see the U.S, that
is, a nation whose cavalry at home and gun boats abroad cleared the
way for the "manifest destiny" or "American dream" of limitless
wealth and power without social responsibility.

King has also been honored in recent years in the United States, even
by those who fought against the civil rights movement that he led and
today "spin" his teaching to attack affirmative action as "reverse
racism" and abandonment of his "dream." In public schools and
through mass media, King is regularly praised as a "great man" who
preached and practiced non-violence--the "good" black leader,
because he was non-violent, measured against "bad" black leaders,
such as Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and others who are
associated with violence. The danger exists that King will become,
in the twenty-first century, what novelist Sinclair Lewis cynically
called Abraham Lincoln in the 1920s, "the Patron Saint of America," a
symbol to be honored and forgotten. Earlier generations of Americans
believed that once slavery had ended nothing more needed to be done
to promote racial justice; similarly, will later generations remember
King for helping to end _de jure_ segregation and
conclude that nothing more has to be done?

In _From Civil Rights to Human Rights_, Thomas Jackson deals with
King's economic social philosophy and the relationship of that
philosophy to ideas, ideals, and movements that have been called
socialism since the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike most other works
(with the exception of Manning Marable's treatment of King's
socialist leanings in his cogent and brilliant short history of
African Americans after the Second World War, _Race, Reform, and
Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America,
1945-2006_ [2007]), Jackson suggests that both a socialist
analysis of the African American condition and socialist solutions to
the larger problem of racism in U.S. society are central to an
understanding of King. Jackson's work, if it is read widely and its
insights and evidence "trickles down" into public education, will
help students understand King and both the American and global
context of events that both influenced him and that he helped to change.

In analyzing holistically King's economic social philosophy, Jackson
helps scholars and students see a much more fully rounded and
developed Martin Luther King. Like most successful leaders who
challenged powerful establishment forces, he
understood that successful political action is centered on
strategies and tactics to both win over and change the political
center; that successful actions are worth much more than emancipation
proclamations or revolutionary manifestoes; and that successful
"pragmatic" politics is always about maintaining both principals and
long-term strategies while shifting and adapting tactics to changing
conditions. Although the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the
influence of the tactics and strategies of the Indian National
Independence movement on King are widely and sometimes
ritualistically cited, Jackson connects both the international anti-
colonial context of the 1950s and King's application of
internationalism to U.S. institutional racism in a way that others
have not

Most biographers of King and historians of the Civil Rights movement
have portrayed him as a mass leader, but Jackson shows specifically
how King developed a socialist and internationalist oriented ideology
and applied it to American conditions. In effect, King became for
the mass movement something like a great "center" in basketball (to
use a sports metaphor), through which both offensive and defensive
action flowed. Others were the practical organizers, the playmakers
or point guards. But, without the center, without his ability to
absorb punishment and keep the action around him moving,
particularly the players without the ball (the masses of African
American people and their civil rights movement allies), and the team
would fail.

Although some historians have stressed the limitations of the
Southern based civil rights movement, especially its lack of any
program beyond the elimination of _de jure_ segregation and the
establishment of elemental citizenship rights that northern blacks
already enjoyed, Jackson shows clearly that King always viewed
economic and social rights as essential components of civil rights.
For King, the defeat and destruction of segregation in the South was
a necessary condition to the establishment of broad
economic and social rights for Northern blacks, other minorities, and
the white poor. King's larger socialist orientation, Jackson shows,
led him to understand that racism directed against African Americans
both obscured and intensified class oppression. While he always saw
himself as a southerner, he pointed to the poverty of the white South
which segregation and institutional racism had buttressed. Against
those who, in the 1950s and afterwards, saw poverty and public
assistance as a "Negro problem," King answered that it was a much
larger social problem, because the great majority of those on public
assistance were white.

Jackson portrays King both maneuvering politically and broadening his
philosophy of economic and social justice into the necessary
foundation of both domestic and international peace from the
mid-1950s to his murder in 1968. In the process, he examines King's
relationships with a wide variety of activists and allies, from
Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison to John Lewis and James Foreman, in
a fresh way. Unlike Taylor Branch and other King
scholars, Jackson transcends the Cold War framework of the time which
portrayed J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as an anti-Civil Rights police force
(which the evidence supports massively) and Communists and former
Communists as either marginal or self-seekers. Jackson shows King as
a mass leader who developed bonds with people of the broad left whose
experiences in the Communist Party, USA, and other socialist groups
and organizations had made them not only skilled and experienced
organizers, but coworkers and friends whom he could
trust because his larger vision and theirs had much in common, even
if their earlier social background, work, and political associations
had been very different. Jackson's framework, as he applies it to
the larger political narrative of King's life and work, helps
scholars and students to understand the worldview that King developed
as he led the most significant American mass movement in the second
half of the twentieth century. This movement whose achievements,
however however incomplete, continues is the subject of debate and
controversy today on such issues as the enforcement of civil rights
legislation, affirmative action, and equal justice under the criminal
justice system.
Let me conclude with some interpretive differences with Jackson,
which in no way should be seen as negative criticism of this major
work. Jackson mentions that King used anti-Communist "cold war
liberal" rhetoric to advance the movement, particularly in the early
years. As someone whose writing has been associated with the use of
that concept, I would not apply it to King, as I and others have to
politicians Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey; labor leaders like
Walter Reuther; postwar organizations like the Americans for
Democratic Action; and influential intellectuals like Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. King certainly maneuvered in a political landscape
where the support of the Cold War influenced a wing of the Democratic
party; labor leaders like Reuther, who by the late 1950s represented
the left of a purged AFL-CIO; and, at crucial times, the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations; but his vision and even his use of the
Soviet Union and the Communist movement as a negative reference group
in his rhetoric was very different from theirs. Cold War liberal
politicians and labor leaders in the 1950s and 1960s often paid lip
service to the New Deal heritage, while they fought the cold war,
managed "economic growth" centered on military spending, and saw
bargaining among the representatives of various interest groups as
the basis of an "open democratic society." In contrast, King used a
version of Cold War liberal ideology against its leading
practitioners in the Democratic Party. These practitioners said the
United States was a "free," rather than a "totalitarian," society.
King turned their rhetoric against them by insisting that if this
were Russia or China he might understand the brutal denial of basic
Civil Rights in the South; but in the image of the United States that
Cold War liberals claimed to believe in, all of that was
intolerable. When they emphasized the need to end segregation to win
over the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, King said over
and over again that we had to end economic and social injustice to be
true to our best selves, not as a political ploy to defeat
revolutionaries in
the Congo. Jackson also uses the term "democratic socialist" to
explain King's economic social philosophy in a way that no one else
has in a larger monograph. The analysis of King's egalitarian,
socialist, and internationalist orientation makes the use of this
term understandable and an advance over previous work, but it brings
with it some baggage when used in the American context. In the 1950s
and 1960s, those who called themselves members of a "democratic left"
or "democratic socialists" were in effect the left-wing of the Cold
War coalition, whom activists in groups like SNCC and SDS rebelled
against while they continued to respect King. These were the sort of
people who were captured brilliantly in the 1960s satirical song,
"Love me, Love me, I'm a liberal." They wrote for _Dissent_ magazine
and other publications that criticized U.S. mass society for its
consumption and conformity, rather than relating theory to practical
politics. Those who defined themselves as "democratic socialists" in
the 1950s and 1960s were overwhelmingly white and middle class. They
were also ambivalent to the sort of mass action that the civil rights
movement revived in the United States.

I would call King, like many of the people (black and white) who saw
him as both a great man and their most important leader, a "socialist
of the heart," a term used by the distinguished U.S. historian
William Appleman Williams. King believed in and sought
to live by the values and ethics of socialism, where personal
relations and political ends are merged in the attempt to achieve and
live social equality and social justice. Like King and the masses of
people who were the civil rights movement, "socialists of the heart"
are not sectarian preachers of one position, theory, or party that
the call the exclusion of all others. King saw socialism in both
egalitarian mass movements and in specific and focused commitments to
achieve economic social justice through policy.

Jackson's work gives scholars and students new insight into the
importance of Martin Luther King Jr. to U.S. history and his place in
the larger global context. No doubt some will challenge Jackson's
use of his broad definition of socialism as a central factor in
understanding King, but the author has made a strong and compelling
case. Many have speculated what the postwar world would have been
like if Franklin Roosevelt had not died in 1945; similarly, _From
Civil Rights to Human Rights_ should encourage
many readers to think what the United States might have been like if
King had not been assassinated in 1968. Were there possibilities
(with King continuing to play a leading role to end the cold war with
the Vietnam War and fight seriously the war on
poverty) to implement policies to eliminate, in deeds rather than
words, institutional and ideological racism and sexism, and lead the
American people toward a new politics in which egalitarianism, a much
higher level of economic and social security, and a
democracy based on popular participation, would become realities? Of
course no one can answer such questions. But Thomas Jackson has
shown that this was the course which King was on when he was
assassinated, one very different than the tragic hero using non-
violence to fight against all forms of prejudice in a polarizing
society which had already largely rejected him. The more widely
_From Civil Rights to Human Rights_ is read, the more students of
U.S. history will both understand Martin Luther King's philosophy and
work to keep his legacy alive.

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Photo: Dr. Martin Luther King at the 1963 March on Washington.   USIA