As the leader of the movement that ultimately toppled segregation, Martin Luther King Jr., stands among the likes of the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln as a champion of American ideals. His commitment to the principles of the American founding is universally admired and has rightfully earned King a national holiday.
However, a contrasting element exists in King’s thinking. While he never completely abandoned his commitment to traditional American principles, towards the end of his life King embraced views which were more in line with progressives like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson than Abraham Lincoln or the Founders. For example, King advocated for extensive anti-poverty and wealth redistribution programs.
In light of this tension in King’s thinking, what are we to make of his political teachings and, ultimately, his legacy?
Peter Myers, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, explains in “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Dream,” that the key to properly understanding King is to distinguish the two phases of his activism.
The first phase began in the mid-1950s and culminated in the mid-1960s with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The driving force behind this phase was King’s “dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed … of a land where men no longer argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character.”
Phase one of King’s activism was firmly grounded in what he referred to as “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” which had not yet been fully realized in America.
It is King’s first phase advocacy, particularly his unwavering commitment to the American tradition of natural rights, that has made him so widely admired today and which ultimately solidified his place in American history.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, King’s focus shifted from racial inequality and natural rights-based advocacy to a broader conception of socioeconomic inequality and the modern progressive notion of positive rights-based advocacy. This marked the beginning of the second phase of King’s advocacy, which lasted until his death in 1968.
The animating sentiment of this second phase was accurately captured by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 when he stated that, “freedom is not enough … We seek … not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
Perhaps owing to the overwhelming and rapid success of the first phase, King applied the same kind of thinking and rhetoric to his second phase objective: eradicating poverty and socioeconomic inequality in America. King proved to be, as Myers states, “inevitably disillusioned” in this regard.
It isn’t difficult to understand why. During the first phase of his advocacy, King combated unjust laws and immoral actions that deprived blacks of their human dignity and natural rights. With regard to the second phase of King’s advocacy, however, his moral authority is far less clear. This is because the causes and effects of, and the solutions to, socioeconomic inequality and poverty are considerably more complex than those issues presented in the first phase.
Despite the tensions in King’s thinking, they should in no way detract from his legacy of promoting universal freedom, dignity and equality, a cause for which he ultimately gave his life. As Myers points out, “we take note of the limitations of his thinking not to diminish but rather to advance his good works.”
