Clayborne
Carson
“Five score
years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed
the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon
light of hope to millions of enslaved Negroes who had been seared in the flames
of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of
their captivity.”[1]
Martin
Luther King
“Here comes
that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him
into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then
we’ll see what comes of his dreams.”
Genesis
37:19-21
The theory
of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated
individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears
particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. To create the
religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the
ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary
dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where
Mussolini had mainly borrowed from the Marxist theory of the class struggle.
Marxism itself is the fruit of the union among German philosophy, French
history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of
ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of
racism standing.
Leon Trotsky
Clayborne
Carson, PhD, was commissioned by Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott
King, to be the editor of the massive collection of papers that King had left
behind. The majority of these papers were held in the King Centre for
Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. When Coretta Scott King initially selected
him for the project in 1985, Carson estimated it would take around 20 years to
complete, a deadline that has long passed. It will take several historians to
complete the task. The King family will direct the long-term project of editing
and publishing Dr Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers.
Even a
historian of his statue must have baulked at the prospect of this challenging
task being handed to him by the King family. The offer to edit the King archive
came out of the blue. Carson had not written a single word on King, but jumped
at the chance. However, from the start, the role caused difficulties for Carson
as he was based at Stanford and wanted to stay there. Coretta King wanted him
to relocate to Atlanta, where most of the papers were located. However, a happy
compromise was made.
The work has
taken him well into the 21st century (Vol. 6 of the Papers was published in
2007. Clayborne Carson has not finished editing the complete set of Martin
Luther King Jr.'s papers. While he has edited and published seven of the
planned fourteen volumes, he has stated that the whole project will likely not
be completed in his lifetime.[2]
“I sometimes
wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t received the phone call, whether I
would have written something that was more mine,” Carson reflected. “The
best-selling book that I’ll ever publish is the Autobiography of Martin Luther
King, Jr. I can hardly take credit for piecing together his words. I’ll always
know that Martin Luther King will always outsell anything I write, and his
writings and speeches will be more lasting. But look, if you have to be
overshadowed by somebody, it might as well be Martin Luther King.”[3]
The work
done by Carson on this book is to be commended because it now enables us to
lift the large number of dead dogs that have been placed upon the historical
reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. As Helen Halyard wrote, “King was
unquestionably one of the most powerful orators of twentieth-century America
and a man of great personal courage. He was able to give voice to the
passionate strivings of millions of people to throw off the shackles of racial
discrimination. Unlike those in today’s official civil rights leadership who
seek to cash in on his memory, King was an honest man, not driven by financial
gain.”[4]
From an
early age, King knew he was living on borrowed time and that sooner or later
his life would be taken. Perhaps that’s why he crammed so much into his short thirteen-year
political career, which has filled his archive with so much documentation. King,
during his short life, was reviled, spied upon, and in the end was
assassinated. Over the last five decades, King's courageous struggle for social
equality has been politically undermined, and King himself has been turned into
a harmless icon.
King was an essential
part of what was a mass movement which fought against racial discrimination and
in defence of democratic rights for both blacks and whites. However, as Helen
Halyard correctly wrote, “ the leadership was characterised by a petty
bourgeois class makeup and a thoroughly reformist political outlook and
program. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was based on the
perspective that racial equality and social and economic justice for Black
people could be achieved without challenging the existence of capitalist
property relations or the existing government institutions. From the Montgomery
bus boycott through to the marches into Cicero, Illinois, King and the SCLC's
strategy was to mobilise nonviolent demonstrations and acts of civil
disobedience to pressure the government into enacting reforms.”[5]
There is no
denying King's leadership played an immense role in the struggle for civil
rights, and some limited reforms were achieved, notably the enactments of 1964
and 1965, which established the legal groundwork for a new era of civil and
racial equality in America. However, a lot has happened since the 1960s, and a
balance sheet is in order since King’s assassination in 1963.
The
limitations of the victories achieved by the movement he led are more apparent
today than ever. An objective assessment is warranted to critically examine the
political program that guided his movement. King rejected both Marx and Marxism
from an early age, writing, “With all of its false assumptions and evil
methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the
underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasised a classless society, and a
concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in
practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.”
King was not
a revolutionary, but he did have socialist sympathies. He understood that for
the civil rights movement to win, it had to have the collaboration of the
American working class.
He
recognised that under capitalism, workers were being oppressed regardless of
the colour of their skin. Writing in 1958, King drew on his own working
experiences, when he witnessed “economic
injustice firsthand, and I realised that the poor white was exploited just as
much as the Negro. Through these early experiences, I grew up deeply conscious
of the varieties of injustice in our society.”
King’s turn
to the working class, which probably got him killed, would be an anathema to
the current leadership of the struggle against racial and social inequality.
The leadership that is responsible for the New York Times' 1619 Project have
made it clear that they want no part of Martin Luther King and his “left turn”[6]
As Tom
Mackaman and Niles Niemuth point out, “the universal Enlightenment principles
King fought for and defended are under vicious assault. It is striking that in
the 1619 Project, the Times’ initiative to write the 'true' history of America
as rooted in slavery and racism, King’s contribution to the fight for equality
is totally ignored. This doesn’t represent a different interpretation of facts
or a mere oversight, but an outright historical falsification.[7]
To his credit
Eminent historian Professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King,
Jr. Research and Education Institute, opposed and criticised the 1619 Project. In
an interview for the World Socialist website, he noted that the ideals of the
American Revolution and the Enlightenment played a key role in the civil rights
movement and King’s own role as a political leader. “One way of looking at the
founding of this country is to understand the audacity of a few hundred white
male elites getting together and declaring a country—and declaring it a country
based on the notion of human rights,” Carson explained. “Obviously, they were
being hypocritical, but it’s also audacious. And that’s what rights are all
about,” he noted. “It is the history of people saying, ‘I declare that I have
the right to determine my destiny, and we collectively have the right to determine
our destiny.’ That’s the history of every movement, every freedom movement in
the history of the world. At some point, you have to get to that point where
you have to say that, publicly, and fight for it.”[8]
2025 marks
the fifty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.It is
perhaps remarkable still that the questions raised by the struggle of King and
the civil rights movement have lost none of their urgency in the past five
decades. There must be a serious discussion of this period to understand our
present predicament.
As Patrick
Martin says “The world we have today is not the outcome that King would have
desired, nor does it represent the strivings of the millions of working people
and youth—white as well as black—who joined in or were inspired by the civil
rights struggles of the 1960s. Those aspirations will only be carried forward
through the emergence, at a far more politically conscious level, of a new mass
movement of working people to challenge the capitalist system as a whole.”[9]
Notes
1. The King Centre-thekingcenter.org/what-we-do/king-library-and-archives/
2. www.archives.gov/research/mlk
3. King-Jonathan Eig
[4]
Thirty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/04/mlkz-a04.html
[6]
See www.wsws.org/en/special/library/nyt-1619-project-racialist-falsification-history/00.html
[7]
Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for social equality
Tom Mackaman, Niles Niemuth 23 January 2020.wsws.org
[8]
An interview with historian Clayborne Carson on the New York Times’ 1619
Project-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/15/clay-j15.html
[9]
www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/04/king-a07.html
