An Issue with Dr. King’s Legacy

On the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s historic address, there has been much public commemoration and reflection.   The esteem in which the country holds Dr. King is warranted.  Nearly 100 years after the Civil War bloodily redressed America's original sin of slavery, the persistence of pervasive racism, particularly in the south, was unconscionable.   Today, I believe a majority of Americans consider Jim Crow a disastrous historical anomaly, and few, even in the deep south would want to return to those policies, even as de-facto segregation often persists.

Dr. King deserves a great deal of credit for getting to this consensus as completely as is case today, and with less violence than may have been.  Nor do Dr. Kings personal weaknesses detract significantly from his legacy.  His philandering is a personal matter and have no real relevance, and the plagiarism of his PhD thesis, though more problematic in King’s capacity as a role model, pales in significance  compared to his legacy.

Some criticisms King made of the US were, at a minimum, overblown, but also don’t really have much to do with legacy.  (Though you don’t have to be sympathetic to American foreign policy to conclude King’s famous assertion about the US as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” is absurd considering what was happening in China and the Soviet Union at the time.)

So what’s the qualification implied in the title of this post?   

Dr. King bears great responsibility for the conflation of social democracy with civil rights and racial equality.  He came to believe that “If we are to achieve a real equality,” (as King wrote from the Selma, Alabama jail in 1965,) “the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”.  Note that I’ve not seen any credible evidence that King was an agent of foreign powers, or that he was working for any foreign led communist or socialist movements.  He consistently opposed violent means to achieve socialist ends.  Rather, he advocated a peaceful reorganization of the US along socialist lines, and to this day, that position has become inextricably tied to the civil rights movement.  This has hurt the country as a whole and the black community in particular.  King was not wrong to attack the poverty he saw afflicting African Americans and others, but to advocate socialism as redress.  It is not often emphasized today, that was clearly and specifically what he had in mind:  “"the roots" of the economic injustice he sought to overcome "are in the [capitalist] system rather [than] in men or faulty operations".  As early as 1952 King wrote “today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

To this day, the close association of socialist ideology and the movement King led has undermined the ability of market-based solutions from making inroads in the civil rights circles.  

This is debate worth having.  If it is possible that a market based allocation of the resources is necessary to develop from developing to a first world standard of living, that view should be considered.  For example, check out this synopsis of Hernando de Soto of Peru, who believes that a deeper penetration of capitalist institutions and property rights are the best way to help the poor around the world- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar

I’m not unbiased in this proposed debate.  I don’t believe new wealth can be generated unless there are strong capitalist institutions and the majority of resources are allocated by market mechanisms. As a group, those most in need of a functioning market economy are those with the least.  Those already well off are better poised to game a more politicized system.  This does not mean an anarchic  free for all.  Such an arrangement is necessary for enough wealth creation to support programs for those truly necessitous of them. 

King was a great man who accomplished great things and paid the ultimate price in the service of a noble cause.  However, until the socialist component of his agenda is abandoned, or at least seriously debated within the movement he led, those he most wished to help will suffer for it, and his legacy be clouded.