A Dr. King for Our Time

A review of Thomas F. Jackson,
From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice.
University of Pennsylvania Press. 459 pp

January 7, 2008

Next week’s official observances of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday will focus, as in years past, almost exclusively on Dr. King’s struggles against segregation. Dr. King’s devotion to justice in the economic realm will go largely unnoted.

None of this surprises historian Thomas Jackson. The “culture of celebrity,” he writes in this thoughtful new bio, had “compressed King into a narrow civil rights frame even before his death.”

Jackson has set out to bust that frame, to show us a Dr. King who “challenged racial and class inequalities in the economy” as fervently as he “pursued civic equality and political citizenship.” And Jackson succeeds.

We see here a Dr. King who draws deeply from global egalitarian thought, both religious and secular, who finds in his reflections, as Jackson notes, “ample grounds for opposing the corruptions of wealth and the exploitation of the poor.”

Jackson dives into the dozen years, from 1956 to 1968, of King’s public ministry, showing time and again how the young preacher struggled to expand the freedom movement’s focus. But the book’s best pages cover King’s formative years.

Jackson, in these passages, quotes heavily from King’s academic papers and early sermons. The Dr. King he presents us comes across as incredibly relevant to our starkly unequal 21st century.

In 1952, for instance, King roots injustice in “the concentration of power and resources in the hands of a relatively small wealthy class.” A year earlier, he had told his new girlfriend, Coretta Scott, that a small elite should not "control all the wealth.”

“A society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people's needs,” he adds simply, “is wrong.”

King preaches, early on, for a world where “privilege and property [are] widely distributed, a world in which men will no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

“Even in the 1950s,” Jackson sums up, “King was never simply a ‘civil rights’ leader unconcerned with the national political economy.”

Dr. King’s economic concerns, we can now hope, will no longer go ignored.

— Sam Pizzigati

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the weekly online newsletter on excess and inequality. For updates on inequality-related trends, stats, and books, just check here for a free weekly Too Much subscription.