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As Selma opens in a number of
cities this week and expands to nationwide release in a couple of weeks, the
country is given a chance to assess the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and the civil rights movement.
Doing so is particularly relevant right now, in
light of boisterous protests against police brutality that have been going on
since the summer.
Selma has won nearly unanimous praise from
film critics – it is currently perched at
100% on Rotten Tomatoes with dozens of reviews in – partly for its
unflinching look at King as a true radical who upset not just a fringe of
racists in the South, but the entire political establishment. Writing
in Time Magazine, nonprofit leader Salamishah Tillet praises the film for
reclaiming “Hollywood's sanitized versions” of Dr. King as simply part of a
“simple story of American racial progress.”
In the conventional wisdom, King was a
beloved figure who worked with national politicians to defeat a fringe group of
Southern racists; Selma upends
this narrative by showing King facing off not only with Alabama governor
George Wallace but also the Democratic president Lyndon Baines Johnson and his
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
King, and all those who stood alongside him in
the demonstrations in the South, are shown not as conciliators looking to
simply make racial harmony through dialogue, but as both agitators and
lawbreakers – in the most righteous ways.
Selma's portrayal has irked
some, like Marke Updegrove, the director of the LBJ presidential library. He writes
that the film engages in a “mischaracterization” of the King-LBJ
relationship, and that “LBJ and MLK were close partners in reform.”
The truth is that MLK's movement
created even greater hostility among the political class than the film
portrays.
MLK vs. the FBI
One of the film's themes is the
conflicts between organized law enforcement and King. In the trailer, King jokes while sitting
in jail, “This cell is probably bugged.”
The FBI
aggressively monitored King and other civil rights leaders, fearing their
radicalism. “We loved the FBI,” joked Andrew Young at an event at the
University of Georgia I once attended. “Because we never kept notes and they
recorded everything.” Between the years 1963 and 1965, the FBI bugged at least
14 hotel rooms King stayed in, looking for “information concerning King's
personal activities” in an attempt to “discredit him.”
Hoover called
King the “most notorious liar in the country”; simultaneously, the FBI sent
the civil rights leader a letter threatening to expose extramarital affairs –
the letter closed with the words, “King, there is only one thing left for you
to do. You know what it is...You are done. There is but one way out for you.
You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the
nation.” This has widely
been interpreted as an FBI attempt to inculcate suicidal tendencies in
King.
Why did the FBI wage such a campaign
against King? Because the political leaders it worked for viewed him as
politically polarizing at best and dangerous to the political order at worst.
JFK Worried King Was His “Marx”
John and Robert Kennedy are today
viewed as standard bearers of Democrat liberalism, but in King's day their
support for civil rights was mixed at best.
They belonged to a Democratic Party
that valued its Southern power structure, a source of solid votes and
organizers. In May 1963 JFK held a meeting on the civil rights movement, and he
aired his complaints about King openly, worrying that he looked like a
Marxist radical:
I think we ought to have some of these
other meetings before we have it in the King group; otherwise, the
meetings will look like they got me to do it. ... The trouble with King is,
everybody thinks he’s our boy anyway. So everything he does, everybody says we
stuck him in there. So we ought to have him well surrounded. ... I think we
ought to have a good many others. King is so hot these days that it looks like
Marx coming to the White House, I should have—I’d like to have at least some
Southern governors or mayors or businessmen in first. And my program
should have gone up to the Hill first.
Robert Kennedy was Attorney General,
and on JFK's orders in 1963 he authorized
wiretaps of King's personal residence. The Kennedys and JFK wanted King to sever
ties with Stanley Levison, a Jewish attorney who helped organize the
Montgomery bus boycotts.
To the FBI, Levison was simply a Communist sympathizer,
and by extension, King was engaging in borderline-seditious activities by
enlisting his help. King's refusal to throw Levison was key to White House's
authorization of the wiretaps, part of a larger campaign against leftists that
took place in the backdrop of the Cold War.
The cascade of propaganda from the FBI
certainly won over JFK's wife, Jackie. In a series of oral interviews recently
released, she
is recorded as saying, “I just can't see a picture of Martin Luther King
without thinking, you know, that man's terrible.”
King Loses Johnson and Entire Political
Establishment By Standing For Peace
For years, King cultivated a close
relationship with LBJ, knowing he was essential to the passage of the landmark
Civil Rights Act. Indeed, the two spent many hours meeting not only in person
but frequently talked on the phone. In a phone call shortly after LBJ took power
following JFK's assassination, the
president assured King of his support for his civil rights causes.
Yet even though LBJ pledged his support
for the overall goal, the two often clashed over how quickly change could come
about. For example, King wanted the 1964 Democratic convention to recognize
only the integrated Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party; Johnson feared doing
so would lose Southern votes and opposed
the move.
Also at the convention, one of those Mississippi activists,
Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke passionately about her own mistreatment and the murders
of civil rights workers. Johnson didn't want her message to make headlines
about the Democratic Party, so
he called a press conference to try to divert news attention away from her.
Like JFK, LBJ desperately wanted to avoid alienating racist whites whose votes
the Democratic Party sought.
If King's anti-racist campaigns in the
South did much to alienate the FBI and JFK, it was his eventual turn against
the Vietnam War that finally lost him the rest of the political establishment,
including not only LBJ but also many within the civil rights movement itself.
In early phone calls with LBJ, King
would raise the issue of Vietnam, only to be rebuffed in his warnings about
the war. Eventually, MLK grew so impatient with Johnson that he gave a marquee
speech at Riverside Church in New York City blasting the war (ironically
Levison, whose radicalism brought about King's FBI suspicion, told
him not to give the address).
In the
speech, King called the U.S. Government the “greatest purveyor of violence
on earth,” and quoted a U.S. official who said America was on the “wrong side
of a world revolution.” He called for comprehensive peace talks aimed at
removing American forces from Vietnam and ending the bombing campaigns. The
real target of progressive campaigners, he declared, needed to be three evils:
racism, materialism, and militarism.
The response to King from the political
class was apoplectic. The New York Times editorial board, run by liberal
northerners allied to the Democrats, blasted
King for linking the war in Vietnam to the struggle for civil rights and
poverty alleviation at home, saying it was “too facile a connection” and that
the comparison was doing a “disservice” to both causes; it also accused him of
“slander” for accusing the United States's use of chemical weapons in
Vietnam and comparing them to the “new medicine and new tortures in the
concentration camps of Europe.” It concluded, “There are no simple or easy
answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country.”
Many of King's fellow civil rights
leaders refused to join his anti-war stance. This stance also put MLK on the
opposite side of America's
labor unions, to whom the war meant good wages and job security. But it was
the civil rights movement that provided the most internal fury over King's
antiwar turn.
In 1965, the
head of the NAACP Roy Wilkins refused to allow a resolution on the
Vietnam War to be voted on during the organization's national convention;
Whitney Young of the National Urban League told King that “Johnson needs a
consensus...if we are not with him on Vietnam, then he is not going to be with
us on civil rights.”
When the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), the youth arm of the civil rights movement, compared the death of a
civil rights activist in 1966 to the U.S. violations of international law
during the Vietnam War, Wilkins moved to dissociate the NAACP with SNCC – an
attempt to win the Johnson administration after it reacted with fury to SNCC
endorsing draft resistance.
By the summer of 1967, a
third of the staff of King's Southern Christian Leadership Council “had to
be laid off because of a lack of funds.” 168 major newspapers denounced
King's stance, and Johnson disinvited him from the White House permanently.
This total alienation from the
political class did not stop King. He spent the last years of his life devoted
to a cause few associate him with: labor activism.
The Poor People's Campaign
In November 1967, King devised what he
called the “Poor People's Campaign,” designed
to be “the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination
by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a
decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.”
It was this campaign that brought him
to Tennessee where he was tragically assassinated while campaigning
for striking sanitation workers. But his radicalism lived on in the
protests of the new SCLC president Ralph David Abernathy and his wife Coretta
Scott King.
The two set
up what they called “Resurrection City,” a series of tents and shacks on
the Mall in Washington, D.C. To make the reality of poverty real to the
politicians there. It lasted a month before the Department of the Interior
forced it to close.
A Renewed Telling Of The King Story?
While Selma focuses on King's
campaign in Alabama and does not tell the tales of resisting the Vietnam War or
the Poor People's Campaign, it is an important departure from the traditional
narrative about King: that he was an eloquent activist who brought people
together in order to overcome an extreme fringe of racists.
The movie is honest
in its portrayal of King as a radical and his movement as people who very much
wanted to upset the status quo and risk alienating the political establishment
to force progress. Perhaps the film will renew discussion and debate about the
necessary place of radicalism in our politics, radicalism that was so nobly
represented by MLK.
Source: http://truth-out.org
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