martin luther king jr philosophy essay

Martin Luther King Jr declaring the Freedom Rides will continue at a press conference in Montgomery, Alabama, June 1961. Photo by Bruce Davidson/Magnum

All that we are

The philosophy of personalism inspired martin luther king’s dream of a better world. we still need its hopeful ideas today.

by Bennett Gilbert   + BIO

On 25 March 1965, the planes out of Montgomery, Alabama were delayed. Thousands waited in the terminal, exhausted and impassioned by the march they had undertaken from Selma in demand of equal rights for Black people. Their leader, Martin Luther King, Jr, waited with them. He later reflected upon what he’d witnessed in that airport in Alabama:

As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood.

In the faces of the exhausted marchers, King saw the hope that sustained their hard work against the violence and cruelty that they had faced. It is worth asking: why was King moved to try to create a better world? And what sustained his hope?

A clue can be found in the PhD dissertation he wrote at Boston University Divinity School in 1955:

Only a personal being can be good … Goodness in the true sense of the word is an attribute of personality.

The same is true of love. Outside of personality loves loses its meaning …

What we love deeply is persons – we love concrete objects, persistent realities, not mere interactions. A process may generate love, but the love is directed primarily not toward the process, but toward the continuing persons who generate that process.

King subordinates everything to the flourishing of human persons because goodness in this world has no home other than that of persons. Their wellbeing is what makes the events of our lives and of our collective history worthy of effort and care. In order to demonstrate that we are worth the struggle within and among ourselves, King sought to find love between the races and classes on the basis of philosophical claims about personhood. A decade after his dissertation, he was at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, marching to Montgomery.

Can we still grasp and live the hope that King found? Capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, racism – like iron filings near a magnet, all these historical forces seem to be pulled together today into one fatal, immiserating direction. They teach us hateful ways to behave and promote heinous vices such as pride and greed. Desires flee beyond prudent limits and rush toward disaster. It seems we are not worth all that we used to think we are worth. Can we replace our narcissism with a virtuous self-regard? The philosophical tradition of personalism tells us that we can and do have hope for our future.

K ing’s hope came from his understanding of Christianity through the philosophy of personalism. He largely acquired this line of thought during his graduate studies at Boston. His advisors in Divinity School had been students of Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910), the first philosophy professor at Boston University. Bowne founded Boston personalism, which, with William James’s pragmatism , was one of the two earliest American schools of philosophy. For Bowne, personhood is not the bundles of characteristics we call ‘personality’. Instead, it is the intelligence that makes reality coherent and meaningful. The core of his thought is that personhood is ‘the deepest thing in existence … [with] intellect as the concrete realisation and source’ of being and causality.

Bowne says that if we dismiss abstractions because they are static and have no force in the world, what is left is solely the ‘power of action’. Action for Bowne is intelligence understood as a force that activates the concrete reality of things. This reality is not static substance but the ceaseless business of the effect that entities have on other entities. Personhood is the non-material and non-biological power of relations among things, which activates all the processes of the world. Reality itself is thus deeply personal. Without personhood, it would be atomised and inactive – and therefore unintelligible. In Bowne’s view, only the concept of intelligent selves is adequate for explaining how things are constituted and inter-related. Being is nothing without causality; causality is nothing without intelligence. Reality is nothing without idea; idea is nothing without reality. This intimate connection of mind and the world means that nothing can be understood apart from the intelligence that perceives and understands it, replacing inert substances with the ever-flowing labours of our human need to find meaning in life as we encounter it.

Personalism always begins its analysis of reality with the person at the centre of consciousness

Bowne’s ideas had many predecessors, from Latin Christianity through Immanuel Kant, using many different theories and concepts, about what a human being is and about the personhood of God in its relation to our own personhood. His forceful argumentation influenced James, who helped found the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism shortly after Bowne’s first books were published and who drew increasingly close to personalism, as did the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce. Bowne was at the centre of this troika of canonical American philosophers at the turn of the 20th century. His teaching rippled out through personalist philosophers on the West Coast and through his students at Boston, notably Edgar S Brightman and Harold DeWulf, both of whom later became teachers of King.

Many other forms of personalism had been developed in Europe in the previous century: theistic and non-theistic, socialist or communitarian and libertarian, abstractly metaphysical and concretely ethical. It is more an approach to thinking than a method, doctrine or school. Personalism always begins its analysis of reality with the person at the centre of consciousness, to which it attaches the most profound worth. Some versions develop this through ontology or metaphysics; some, through theologies associated with most denominations of the Abrahamic religions; and some, through the intersubjective and communitarian nature of human life. My own version makes the structure of moral meaningfulness the first step and first philosophy, as I will explain below. All versions seek an integrated, ethically strong comprehension of personhood as the heart of the life of humankind.

Though personalism continues to be a field of robust philosophical research, in American academic philosophy after the Second World War it faded under the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But in King’s hands it became forceful as a practice for justice and other moral ends. Its resources have not been exhausted. Careful revision and updating can make it a source of illumination and hope in the circumstances we face a half-century after King.

W hy should we update personalism, and what useful purpose will this serve? Our ideas about the nature of human beings are today undergoing a severe challenge by the new philosophies of transhumanism. Through personalism, we can understand and appreciate our purposes and obligations, as well as the dangers posed by transhumanism.

The best known of these transhumanist philosophies is effective altruism (EA). The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded at the University of Oxford in 2012 by Toby Ord and William MacAskill; largely inspired by Peter Singer’s utilitarianism, EA has been an influential movement of our time. As MacAskill defines it in Doing Good Better (2015):

Effective altruism is about asking, ‘How can I make the biggest difference I can?’ And using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good.

This is not as clear cut as it might seem, and it has often led to the uncomfortable conclusion that the accumulation of capital by the wealthy is morally necessary in order to affect the world for the better in the future, largely regardless of the consequences for living persons. Its proponents argue that society does not sufficiently plan for the distant future and fails to store up the wealth that our successors will need to solve social and existential challenges.

Other transhumanist theories include longtermism , the idea that we have a moral obligation to provide for the flourishing of successor bioforms and machinic entities in the very distant future, at times regardless of consequences for those now living and their proximate next generations. There is also a kind of rationalism that justifies the moral calculations on which provision for the future instead of for the living is based; cosmism , the vision for exploration and colonisation of other worlds; and transhumanism , which aspires to assemble technologies for the evolution of humankind into successor species or for our replacement by other entities as an inevitable and thereby moral duty. All of these, including the various versions, are sometimes named by the acronym TESCREAL (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism). Here I refer to these as ‘transhumanism’.

The core argument common to these lines of thinking, according to the philosopher Émile Torres writing in 2021, is that:

[W]hen one takes the cosmic view, it becomes clear that our civilisation could persist for an incredibly long time and there could come to be an unfathomably large number of people in the future. Longtermists thus reason that the far future could contain way more value than exists today, or has existed so far in human history, which stretches back some 300,000 years.

From this point of view, human suffering today matters little by the numbers. Nuclear war, environmental collapse, injustice and oppression, tyranny, and oppression by intelligent technology are mere ripples on the surface of the ocean of history.

This idea of the agency of the inorganic is one of the key arguments for decentring the human

Each element of these transhumanist ideologies regards human personhood as a thing that is expiring and therefore to be replaced. As the longtermist Richard Sutton told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2023: ‘it behooves us [humans] … to bow out … We should not resist succession.’ Their proponents argue for the factual truth of their predictions as a way to try to ensure the realisations of their prophecies. According to the theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, by ‘internalising the lessons of probability theory’ to become ‘perfect Bayesians’, we will have ‘reason in the face of uncertainty’. Such calculations will open a ‘vastly greater space of possibilities than does the term “Homo sapiens”.’

A personalist approach deflates these transhumanist claims. As the historian of science Jessica Riskin has argued, a close examination of the science of artificial intelligence demonstrates that the only intelligence in machines is what people put into them. It is really a sleight-of-hand; there is always a human behind the curtain turning the wizard wheels. As she put it in The New York Review of Books in 2023:

Turing’s literary dialogues seem to me to indicate what’s wrong with Turing’s science as an approach to intelligence. They suggest that an authentic humanlike intelligence resides in personhoo d, in an interlocutor within, not just the superficial appearance of an interlocutor without; that intelligence is a feature of the world and not a figment of the imagination.

Longtermists’ notions of future entities lack everything we know about conscious intelligence because they use consciousness or living beings as empty black-box words into which even meaningless notions will fit. Effective altruists dismiss the worth attributable to every human, squashing it by calculations that cannot prescribe moral value, whatever these proponents claim. As we can see in the theories of longtermists such as Nick Bostrom and effective altruists such as Sam Bankman-Fried, instead of working with human ethical values, they work with numerical values, ignoring the massive body of thought from anthropologists such as Webb Keane and from phenomenologists such as Rasmus Dyring, Cheryl Mattingly and Thomas Wentzer showing that values are neither empirical nor quantifiable but nonetheless real forces in human affairs. Transhumanism as a whole assigns agency to alien beings and electronic entities that do not exist – and perhaps are inconceivable.

This idea of the agency of the inorganic is one of the key arguments for decentring the human. Consider, for example, salt. Salt affords certain effects in certain conditions: it produces a specific taste, it corrodes other materials, it serves certain functions in organisms. But it is humans who organise these events under the concept of causality. What salt does, it does without consciousness. Consciousness neither starts nor halts its effects, broadly speaking. What sense is there, then, in saying that salt has agency when it is more illuminating to say that it is a cause of effects under some conditions?

In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It leaves us unaware when a more toxic and cunning human drives to take control because we are busy trying to control the world rather than ourselves. Although some people think that machines or ideas are in control of them, it is really other humans. If we overlook this truth, we accept an untruth – an untruth that condemns us to the mercy of our worst drives and behaviours. When we devalue humanity, we unleash our self-destructive drives, thereby turning reason into destructive irrationality. In this way, we are in fact governed by our own human drive for self-destruction.

This drive seems to differentiate us from other animals as much as language or historicity do. If we provoke this drive too much, we shall have nowhere else to turn in our struggle to flourish in the natural world. We must, instead, search out our integrity and worth because the alternative is despair.

The great and encompassing thing that humans create is our story: human history, the sum of our behaviour and our deeds. We create it with and amid the world around us out of our need to make sense of the world. This need, which builds our moral life, is part of what drives everything we do. It drives the ways we pursue survival, for, without a sense of meaning, we have little will to survive. The pursuit of survival can lead us to meaningfulness but, if it fails to do so, the pursuit itself ceases. We guide ourselves by the stories we choose, for storytelling inhabits all ways of knowing and acting. If the meaning we seek as human persons is overtaken by the story that our self-destructive drive presents in the form of transhumanism, we shall not survive.

P ersons are worth more than even justice and goodness are, because it is for the sake of persons that we fight for justice and goodness. In the face of possible profound changes, it often seems we must choose between being good and just to ourselves, and being good and just toward nature. The possibility of these radical changes legitimately requires that we profoundly deflate our anthropocentrism, since overblown self-regard has served us poorly. But how do we do this while encouraging our fraught capabilities and appreciating the worth of our flawed species?

The kind of personalism that I have developed out of Bowne’s ideas as a response to this and other questions I call moral agency personalism. Moral agency is the activity of judging and choosing between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. In my view, every thing that has such moral agency is a person, and all persons are moral agents. (The evidence that some nonhuman species make moral choices , sometimes based on memory and history, has been accumulating.) Adding this possibility to personalism formally recognises worth in all persons, nonhuman as well as human. As a belief and a practice, it can ground a virtuous, as opposed to vicious, self-regard that human and nonhuman persons can exercise for themselves and for other persons. This kind of self-regard is distinct from self-importance.

We can develop a moral agency personalism that has some of the resources we need in facing the human future. We can find these by altering some fundamental concepts of personalism. These updates include: accepting the fact of nonhuman moral agents or persons; including the body in our understanding of individual lives and of interpersonal relations; and rethinking the idealist ontology in personalism in order to make it an ethics-as-first-philosophy approach, with less emphasis on ontology. The guiding idea of these changes is that, in making moral sense out of experience, personal moral agency enlarges our relations to the whole range of our lives and our care for all beings.

We need to respect ourselves as persons with the power to decide not to continue to harm

Personalism gives us robust resources for identifying our worth and for believing in it. It can encourage us to enhance our worth by our acts in seeking goodness, compassion and justice, and guide us to the richest possible moral life. Because our personhood is the home base of our point of view, there is no way forward other than to maintain our integrity while learning what we must in order to thrive.

The initial and most basic of these resources we should tap is the strength not to do more harm. We are the ones who deploy transhumanist projects into the only world that sustains us. We are the ones degrading the environment. And we are the only ones who can stop us from doing both. For this, we need to respect ourselves as persons with the power to decide not to continue to harm. This is the minimum we must do.

Respecting the moral worth of persons also ignites our capacity to care for others. We respond with aid to calls for help when we learn to recognise moral obligation pertaining to every person, including ourselves, and toward every other person. Furthermore, our humanitarian disposition is frequently a sure way to developing sympathy for the natural world and the life within it.

Understanding our personal moral agency enables a wise combination of the two general forces of moral action: power and compassion. Power is the logic by which we carry ideas and lines of thought to fulfilment in activity. Compassion is the potentially unbounded lovingkindness with which we temper power and extend love to widening spheres in our lives. So far as we know, we are the only living beings who can use these forces in moral decision-making. But even if other beings have moral personhood, nothing of the sort relieves us of the moral obligation that our possession of these two capabilities makes it possible to accept and to follow.

We possess our history, just as we make it – another resource that is unique to us, so far as we know. History is the engine of self-awareness. As the substance of all that we have done and the actual conditions for the possibility of all that is and will be, historical consciousness serves us as the indispensable locus of reflection and deliberation. No unchanging and antiquated images of ourselves restrain our understanding of history because we create the past anew whenever we study it and reflect on it. It is therefore the great endowment for a renewed humanistic extension of personhood to all humankind and to all life.

T here are two more resources, pointing to opposite ends of the spectrum of our concerns. The first is that the personalist grasp of what we are worth supports democracy. Democracy has depended on a powerful conception of personal agency and responsibility that cultural and political changes now challenge, in addition to the material issues of human life in the Anthropocene era. These social and natural developments closely reflect each other. Learning to live together is the worthy goal of democracy. But if we are to pursue concord and peace by that road, we must value ourselves, accept our moral nature with its obligations, submit our desires to what the moral worth of every living being requires of us, and work in response to present and patent human suffering and real human joy.

At the opposite end, on the cosmic scale, lies another possibility for virtuous human self-regard afforded us by personalism. Simply put, it is this: it might become clear to us that the universe is constitutively pervaded by consciousness, or is conscious in all its parts, or is inside of a super-consciousness. These are versions of the notion of cosmic consciousness called panpsychism. Panpsychism is not just about what we can know or do but about reality itself. This appeals to those who have for a moment felt the life of the universe in a small experience and do not want to dismiss what that feeling says and means to them just because it is not empirically verifiable. In our best moments, our lives feel epiphanous.

The moral agency of persons thrives when agents act in obligation to their individual and collective selves

At the same time, however, panpsychism can conflict with the empiricism that is so valuable because it is used to make things that work well for us. And yet other kinds of things, such as erotic love and spirituality, also work well for us and are not conducive to the usual demands of empiricism. For now, it is easy to think that a universal consciousness makes our consciousness unimportant, but there might be ways of getting the opposite outcome. Current advances in physics and biology are starting to support the belief that our consciousness affects reality by working with reality as a consciousness that includes ours. That is, our observing and predicting are inside, not outside, the phenomena we encounter. We are not the crown jewels of creation, but our self-referentiality, our critical awareness and our moral lives form personhood as an important part of a universe that is thereby less alien and cold.

If a suitable form of panpsychism is true, human personhood means more to reality than is usually thought. This kind of personalism puts us into a community or, rather, into many communities made up of conscious beings capable of moral responsibility. The moral agency of persons thrives when agents reflectively act in obligation to their individual and collective selves rather than in seeing themselves through the needs of imagined others in the undetermined future.

What King observed in Montgomery airport in 1965 was actual persons developing their moral purchase with each other. He saw this as the processes of goodness and love at work in their proper sphere: our common existence. King wanted us not only to recognise the unique and infinite value of every person, but to understand it so powerfully that we would feel ourselves obliged to take the action that this recognition requires. As he wrote, we need only look around us at the struggles for a decent and free life that others wage to sense the profundity of human worth and to see that we all depend on one another. That this has the power to inspire us to fight for change sustained his hopes.

We face an urgent present choice. We might prefer that algorithms or despots act for us because our own power of judgment is too explosive to manage. That would suit the purposes of infomaniacal hypercapitalism, which seeks to control consumers rather than to enrich persons. But turning over our judgment to machines does not lock away our power to destroy ourselves and others. We must govern ourselves even as we evolve. This requires an enduring connection to our humanity and a willingness to work hard with one another. This can be successful only if and when we hold fast to all that we are.

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The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr

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Martin Luther King Jr wasn’t just a brilliant orator and organizer. He was also a groundbreaking thinker.

Martin Luther King Jr addresses a crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Wikimedia

Martin Luther King Jr is often remembered for his soaring oratory. But the commonplace emphasis on his rhetoric rather than his ideas too often allows conservatives to domesticate him, or worse, use his taken-out-of-context words to bolster the very forces of oppression that King struggled to defeat.

A new book on King’s political philosophy — To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr , co-edited by Brandon M. Terry and Tommie Shelby — takes seriously King as a thinker, not simply an orator or activist. Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin Radio’s  The Dig ,  recently had the chance to speak with the Harvard scholars about King’s rich political philosophy. The following is a condensed and slightly edited version of their conversation.

The Whitewashed King

Your new book is premised on the argument that King has never really been taken seriously as a political philosopher. Explain why this has been the case, and how King has been framed.

The tendency is not to focus on him as a systematic thinker and to explore his ideas, but to focus on his social history mode, to focus on his role within the Civil Rights Movement , or occasionally you’ll get emphasis on his rhetorical practice. You certainly get a lot of emphasis on his role within the church and theology.

But within the broader discipline of political philosophy and political theory and even within some elements of intellectual history, people don’t tend to spend a lot of time exploring his ideas in detail and working through his various books and essays and speeches and sermons to try to draw out his systematic worldview and situate him within the history of political philosophy more broadly and in the black political tradition , in particular.

By not considering him as a thinker but considering him as rhetorician or kind of heroic activist, we reduce him to those elements and basically go from the premise that he is not telling us anything new — he’s just reiterating the deep wells of our democratic political culture, the American creed. We don’t even think to look to him as a source of new ideas or as a source of anything challenging. He seems altogether too familiar.

This is a complex issue. I mean, on the one hand it’s natural when you’re trying to persuade people to change — even when that change is quite fundamental — to draw on things that they already believe, things they already accept and maybe even cherish or regard as sacred. King does this — he draws heavily on the Bible, he draws on the Declaration of Independence, on the Constitution, and familiar ideas from the broader Western tradition so he can push you along by drawing on things that you ostensibly are already committed to.

But I think it’s important to see the ways where King thinks he needs to, as he will often say, push for a “revolution in values” — to try to point out that maybe not every idea, moral principle, or value we need is already found in, say, the Constitution.

So I think he’s walking a fine line there between drawing on these resources that might make him seem conservative, like invoking the American dream in some cases, while at the same time trying to push the nation and the world in what he regards as a more just, progressive direction — which might mean departing from some of the things that they’re committed to.

And so there’s a sort of dynamism in his relationship to the material of American political culture. He’s not making a clean break from it, but there is this dynamism there that’s flattened in conventional historical accounts.

Yeah, I think that’s right. Again, if all you’re expecting is for him to reiterate what’s familiar and try to dramatize the key exclusion of race, I think you miss a lot. As Tommie just pointed out, King had all sorts of ideas about what would be needed to actually make this a just society that would require some pretty dramatic adjustments to the Constitution, whether they’re things like a guaranteed annual income or a more expansive framework for collective bargaining that would extend into things like tenant organizing , welfare-rights organizing, or even something like the critique of militarism — which would have dramatic implications for how power is organized in the United States.

Does racism facilitate this pervasive idea that Martin Luther King had words instead of ideas?

I think so. Quite frankly, we still don’t give African American thinkers or thinkers of color the kind of respect they deserve in the academy and in the public sphere. They’re seen as people who add a rhetorical flair or experiential supplement to the existing ideas of more well-known white thinkers.

The last misuse of King that I want to ask about is perhaps the most dangerous and pervasive, which is the frequent conservative invocation of King’s dream for a colorblind society. Tell me a little about where this misuse comes from, because I think it’s been very powerful for the Right.

Because his stature is so enormous in the American pantheon of heroes, and because people don’t know King’s thought very well or think that there is no thought to know, these cynical appropriations can be effective. And it flatters the conceit of the people deploying them because they don’t want to think of themselves as racists or contributing to racial injustice.

But, of course, when you’re looking at King’s actual thought, there’s just simply no question that although he envisions a beloved community where people’s social networks and opportunities for flourishing won’t be structured by race (and certainly not a racial caste system), he recognizes that in order to get toward anything like that, you’re going to have to take race into the forefront of your considerations. There’s going to be questions of corrective justice to remediate inherited historical disadvantages. There’s going to be a need for aggressive anti-discrimination efforts by the federal government, by local governments. There’s going to need to be an active public sphere and civil society organized around preventing systematic humiliation and discrimination in housing, in welfare bureaucracies, things like that.

Even King’s vision of integration, I think, has so much more teeth in it than people tend to recognize. They quote the piece of “I Have a Dream” where it’s kids holding hands, but King thought you would have to uproot the metropolitan boundaries and radically reorganize how we do schooling, municipal funding, mass transit, things like that, to bring about the kind of integration that he thought would be an ultimate good, and more properly facilitate justice in American society.

So it’s just such a radically different vision than the conservative misappropriation, but that can only get off the ground if we don’t know the contextual King.

I’d add one small note. Danielle Allen, a political theorist, contributed to our volume a piece on integration, and she explores some of the more radical ideas that are a part of King’s vision of integration. One part of that is the idea that true integration involves the sharing of political and economic power. It’s not just about being friendly to members of other racial groups. It’s about being incorporated into the society in a way that allows black people to share equitably in how society is governed and how economic resources are distributed and how they’re used.

Integration is so often put forward as a matter of an ideal of diversity — you just want lots of people of different races all together in the same space or the same institution. But it’s very important for King — who wrote an essay on the ethical demands for integration where he explores this in some detail — that we see this as a matter of the empowerment of racialized groups that have been previously stigmatized and subordinated. That’s the true ideal of integration that he’s really advancing.

Nonviolence and Black Power

I wanted to ask you, Brandon, about the challenge that the Black Power movement posed to King. Can you say a little bit about that debate?

It was a really wide-ranging debate, I think one of the most interesting in the history of black political life. You have Black Power critics moving against King on a lot of different dimensions. Some were skeptical of the appeal of nonviolence. For a couple of reasons some thought it was a corroding influence on what I would consider a masculinist sense of dignity and self-respect. I think King was right to dismiss and deflate those criticisms.

Others, I think, pointed out more correctly that King’s nonviolent direct-action politics often drew upon an implicit threat of black uprising from below, but I think they often did not draw the correct implications from acknowledging that fact. Simply the threat of black uprising from below wouldn’t change things for the better. What you really did need was a nonviolent movement of the sort that King was leading in order to actually achieve those gains and manage that threat.

Because there’s a majority problem.

There’s a majority problem, and there’s a problem with the moral witness of these movements. If you’re in a moment of contentious politics in a society severely marked by racial injustice, you really don’t want to give a lot of grist to your most reactionary opponents, the white supremacists, to launch an all-out suppression and repression campaign against black communities. You really want to try to maintain the moral high ground as best as you can, and when it starts to just become an explicit war of all against all, it’s not likely that blacks can survive that kind of descent into madness.

King was quite supportive of many of the Black Power contentions — things like the idea that it was important to cultivate a race pride. But he was very wary that that would turn into chauvinism. He thought it was perfectly fine to organize black voting, certain kinds of institutions, but that those shouldn’t preclude you from pursuing alliances with the broader society because you didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that political economy was also important and not simply reducible to race.

In terms of King’s debate with the Black Power movement over violence, one thing I think that you argue — if I have this right — is that King’s theorization of nonviolence is often oversimplified, both probably at the time and definitely today. Can you talk about how King actually thought about nonviolence and how that compares to the conventional wisdom?

I’ll just say two things really quickly. One is that I think “ Letter from a Birmingham Jail ” has an outsize influence on how we think about King’s theorization of nonviolence. People tend to reduce his thinking on the question to simply one where you don’t obey unjust laws because they are in some way in violation of a higher moral law.

It can be coercive, and it is coercive. It’s a way in which you can try to bring the normal functioning of an unjust social order to a halt, or at least some state of disruption — where you can either reinvigorate the democratic processes and salvage some sense of justice from them, or you can really draw the underlying tensions to the surface and try to push the broader society toward a recognition of just how complicit we are in an intolerable state of affairs.

One sense in which disruptive nonviolent protests can be coercive is even in this good cop, bad cop sort of way — of presenting the nonviolent struggle as the alternative that the powers that be need to deal with if they don’t want to deal with urban riots. Can you talk a little about that and how King thought about the emergence of riots?

King was very sympathetic to the plight of urbanized blacks in the North, Midwest, and in the West, and their frustration at being locked out of the best jobs, out of the best housing, inadequate educational opportunity, and so on. And he could appreciate the ways in which their frustration could sometimes lead to despair.

But he’s pretty consistent in being against riots both on grounds of principle and pragmatism. Hope for him is very much a kind of political virtue, it’s very much what sustains us in the long struggle for justice. He also didn’t think that they would lead anywhere good. Rioting invites political repression , invites the police to put down the struggle, and invites people who might’ve been allies to turn against you and might be willing to turn a blind eye to the violence of the state in repressing the struggle when it takes that form.

“The riot is the language of the unheard” — sometimes people who think of themselves as on King’s left or think of themselves as more radical will invoke that to suggest that he thought this could be a justified mode of resistance. He did not think that.

But it was important for him to understand that you don’t want to condemn that spontaneous rebellion in isolation. You’ve got to understand the broader structural situation, where most of that blame is on the broader public and on government officials who fail to respond to the legitimate concerns of those who are engaged in, in this case, an inappropriate mode of resistance.

The urban uprisings of the mid-1960s changed a lot about black political culture in American politics writ large. King predicted that they would strengthen the fascist elements in this country and bring severe right-wing repression. They did do so. But they also injected a really transformative element into African-American political life, which is that many Black Power activists claimed the riots as a kind of warrant for their own political ideas and as the harbinger of a political revolution that they would lead. They narrated the riots as a coherent, substantive political project, linking it to their own political philosophies in a way that is extremely difficult to work out from the rioters themselves.

If you actually look at the sociology of rioting, it’s really fascinating because most analysts separate different waves of participants. So there are a group of participants who usually start the uprising, and they may have a more political grievance, straightforwardly, responding to a particular act of, usually, police malfeasance. And then you have other people join in. But by the third wave of participants, they’re people who are really just trying to use the anarchic moment to redress their own poverty and needs. That’s not to say that’s not political, but it looks very different.

There is a politics to a poor person without an explicitly formed political ideology looting and defying the state in doing so — but there’s a big difference between acknowledging that and saying that these people are all just a few steps away from being members of a guerrilla army.

Right, exactly. And so I think one of King’s most effective arguments against Black Power was exposing the conceit in that. It was really problematic for the Black Power movement, as well, because they claimed to have a lot of authority over these rebellions or really to be connected with these rebellions in a way they just simply weren’t. They couldn’t start a riot. They couldn’t control a riot. Once it became clear that that was the case, I think the state was much more willing to enact severe repression against them, and again, in ways that King, I think, rightly predicted.

Socialism and Economic Justice

Tommie, you write that King’s fight for economic justice was more challenging than the first phase — abolishing Jim Crow . Can you talk about the different class politics at work here?

He thought that the first phase, the southern movement, was largely to get rid of Jim Crow ordinances, laws that prohibited people from participating in public life, laws that prevented people from exercising their right to freedom of association.

But he thought you needed to deal with issues of poverty, with employment discrimination, with joblessness, the threat of automation to people’s living standards, and access to non-menial work that paid a living wage.

People need access to good schools. People need access to decent housing, the freedom to chose where they want to live, the economic power to enable them to exercise that freedom. Those things require significant resources to be transferred to people who were previously impoverished and economically marginalized. And if you’re going to really allow people to be equals in what’s supposed to be a democracy, then they do need to be economically empowered to make good use of their various liberties and opportunities. That clearly is going to mean a shift of resources — really, ill-gotten gains, gains extracted from an unjust social order — to marginalized and dispossessed populations.

Naturally, people who are affluent don’t want to give those resources up. Persuading them that this is what justice requires, persuading them you can’t achieve justice without some sacrifice, without it costing you something, was going to be very difficult. It would mean that many people who might’ve been very sympathetic to the southern campaign against Jim Crow might be much less militant about the second phase.

And the second phase did not meet with the same successes. He was stymied in Chicago and was assassinated as the Poor People’s Movement was just getting off the ground.

That’s right. He didn’t expect people to be terribly enthusiastic, but he thought that there could be a combination of persuasion plus pressure through boycotts and disruptive actions and alliances between a range of actors who do have a stake in a more egalitarian society.

One point you make was that he believed things like the guaranteed income were not just an important tool to alleviate poverty and to effectuate redistribution, but to de-commodify society — so that people’s standing is not measured by their labor-market success. It’s a pretty radical critique but you also make it clear that King did not consider himself a socialist.

If you use a Marxist conception of capitalism and socialism, then I don’t think you can suggest that King was a socialist because he’s not calling for the abolition of private property in land, technology, resources, or finance. He’s not saying — not in his public writings — that wage labor is inherently exploitative. These are things that Marx would insist on.

As much as he’s in favor of the labor movement and defends it, you don’t see King say anything like that. Now, maybe he thought it, somewhere, and he said it to someone, but it’s not in his public writings. He’s not defending it out front. Nor do you see him attacking the property question in that kind of militant way.

I can understand people wanting to use King to advance a socialist cause, a cause I’m sympathetic to. But I don’t think it’s a good idea really to invoke him in this way without due care for what he actually says in his various writings and public speeches.

People are really just drawing on, for the most part, a few remarks here and there that can be interpreted in a wide range of ways.

So I suppose if you think Denmark is a socialist country, then I guess he’s a socialist. I do not myself think Denmark is a socialist country. But if you mean socialism in the sense that Marx and his allies meant, then I think it’d be pretty hard to make the case for that.

So fair to settle on left social democrat?

I myself am perfectly comfortable with that. I think that’s a perfectly respectable position.

King and Gender

Brandon, you and Shatema Threadcraft co-authored an essay in the book on King and gender. To put it bluntly, he had, especially I think earlier in his career, some pretty retrograde views. Tell me a little bit about what King believed.

It’s not a topic that has received a lot of attention, and we were able to uncover some interesting archival materials — his old advice column in Ebony Magazine .

That is remarkable.

Yeah, it’s amazing reading, if you ever get the chance. There are people writing in asking for advice about all sorts of things like, “My husband’s cheating on me, and he drinks too much, what do I do?” But you actually learn a lot about how he thinks about the family from those. And then some of his sermons.

One way you can think about it is King is sort of working at cross-purposes. So on the one hand, he’s got these defenses of nonviolent direct actions and civil disobedience as having a magnificent universal quality, that it’s more inclusive than forms of violent rebellion. He’s extremely critical of the idea that politics shouldn’t include a wide range of people, that it should be the province of experts or those who have the capacities for violent action.

He also endorses things like basic minimum income as being constitutive of our dignity and respecting a wide range of our capacities, not just those that are going to receive compensation as wage labor.

But on the other hand, he’s got these really retrograde views about sex and gender. Often the Southern Christian Leadership Conference meetings are organized in such a way that women, basically, aren’t allowed to speak or introduce new items on the agenda. When they are organizing major events, women often are not invited to speak.

When he writes about what the family is supposed to be, he writes that basically the family’s got to be organized so that everyone takes joy in each other’s pursuits and flourishing, but that all that needs to be tethered to recognition of the nature of man and woman. Man is active. He needs to be outside of the home. He’s always got to measure himself against the achievements of other men. Woman, even if she has these interests outside of the home, really achieves her most fundamental flourishing in the space of the home and raising a family.

One of the things that Shatema Threadcraft and I try to do is not only critique those things, but also show how the other elements of his thought can be really robust elements of a left feminist vision.

You have to “read King against King,” is the way you put it.

Exactly. And at that point, that’s not King’s thought. King himself is a sexist. But there are resources that can be reconstructed.

One thing that I took from that essay was that he was at his most feminist, even if accidentally, when he was most focused on economic justice.

I think that’s right. I think he’s also got some interesting moves as a critique of Black Power masculinity. So much of what the Black Power movement is up to revolves around the rhetorical deployment of certain kinds of performances of masculinity, and to the extent that King manages to deflate those things, I think that’s really useful as well. But certainly, I think that the biggest resources for feminist reconstruction are in this realm of political economy.

On the black power debate question, you pull a really powerful quote from King: “One of the greatest paradoxes of the Black Power movement is that it talks unceasingly about not imitating the values of white society, but in advocating violence it is imitating the worst, the most brutal, and the most uncivilized value of American life.”

What he’s getting at there is that if there’s going to be a revolution in values, it can’t just be performed at the level of rhetoric. One of his critiques of the Black Power movement is that for all of this rhetoric about creating a new black society or re-founding the world upon the different ontological character of blackness — which was also quite mythic but people believed in — that really we need to have an incisive attunement toward what practices have created the world that we live in.

We often treat it as reflexive that we should respond to insult with violence or violence with more violence. And not only is that corrosive in protest politics, but it’s corrosive at the level of geopolitics and gets us embroiled in wars like Vietnam , which have such severe consequences for democracy, for human flourishing, for global justice. You really want to jettison the kind of pernicious cultural norms that lead you to think things like that are rational when they’re obviously not given all the other things you’re ostensibly committed to.

Hope Against Despair

In Cornel West’s contribution to the book, he writes about how isolated King was at the time of his assassination. Can you both talk about where King was at this point and what lessons that might offer for black scholars and activists and other scholars and activists today?

I really like Cornel West’s contribution on this question, partly because I think he’s exploring the question of hope in a constructive way: that hope is not just a matter of faith and waiting and expecting things to work out because of what we do. Hope is really supposed to be a kind of moral strength. It’s the thing that sustains us when we’re up against formidable odds, but are powering through to see a more just and peaceful world.

For him the contrast is with a kind of despair and hopelessness and a resentment that either leads to inaction or to retaliation and a tendency to construe those who act unjustly as less than human. It sees them as people that are incapable of change, who lack a sense of justice at all, and who are really kind of moral monsters. That way of regarding others is, King would say and I think Cornel would agree, is really immoral, it’s a dehumanization of your opponents. These are vices that you sometimes find among the oppressed — not just blacks but many groups — when their backs are against the wall and you’re in a moment of retrenchment.

I think it’s extremely important to attend to that feature of King’s thought in our moment where there’s so little to feel optimistic about. And when you really are up against quite formidable odds, it’s important to not give in to the vice of despair and retaliatory rhetoric and action.

I’d just add to that two things. One way to think about hope, too, is that it’s a way of training judgment. King has the view that social oppression is structured by lots of different inputs — so there’s political economy, there’s questions about race, questions about militarism, nationalism, pathologies of federalism, so on. What a stance of pessimism often does, particularly racial pessimism, is reduce all of these inputs to one, which is race or white supremacy. It can be corrosive over time because it trains you to not even look for openings or seams for action because you don’t expect there to ever be any. You think that everything is already fixed, that every revolt is already going to be futile or cynical in some way.

The other thing I point to — and one of the things that Cornel emphasizes in his piece, that really captures where King is at the end of his career, at the end of his life — is his kind of frank speech: not being willing to compromise or curtail one’s commitment to real principled action and speech for popularity or wealth or political access.

I think in our moment, there is something quite inspiring about being willing to take unpopular stands, particularly as an intellectual. That’s what it’s for. That’s the vocation.

So, again, understanding King not just as somebody who’s a courageous activist, whose courage is exemplified only in Birmingham or Montgomery, but seeing him as a courageous intellectual committed to that vocation of truth-telling — even when he is alone on a dangerous road toward the end of his life.

MOVING SALE — Save 50% Off Select Books This Month

To Shape a New World

Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry

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ISBN 9780674980754

Publication date: 02/19/2018

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Martin Luther King, Jr., may be America’s most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King’s writings and political thought remains underappreciated.

In To Shape a New World , Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write that the marginalization of King’s ideas reflects a romantic, consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative—an effort not at radical reform but at “living up to” enduring ideals laid down by the nation’s founders. On this view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of universal (white) heroes, but produced little original thought. This failure to engage deeply and honestly with King’s writings allows him to be conscripted into political projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious form of “color blindness” that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome.

Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King’s exciting and learned work, the authors find an array of compelling challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.

Fascinating and instructive…Shelby and Terry may offer the best solution to the pain of thinking about King and our loss of him…King’s philosophy, speaking to us through the written word, may turn out to constitute his most enduring legacy. —Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Review of Books

To Shape a New World firmly situates Dr. King in the canon of American political thought. An extraordinary group of scholars grapple with the subtlety and nuance of King’s political philosophy, and they set the stage for a renewed engagement with his broader work. This is a must -read in our time. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Princeton University

The collection brings together a series of impressive scholars—Cornel West, Martha Nussbaum, and Robert Gooding-Williams among them—to look at King’s understudied writings on economic inequality, just-war theory, and voting rights… To Shape a New World is a compelling work of philosophy, all the more so because it treats King seriously without inoculating him from the kind of critique important to both his theory and practice. —Shivani Radhakrishnan, Los Angeles Review of Books

To Shape a New World is a milestone in the study of Martin Luther King, Jr., essentially a sanctified figure in American life, whose actual ideas are rarely interrogated in any depth, either in the public realm or in academic circles. What makes this volume particularly striking is the exceptionally high quality of the essays, which are analytically rigorous, impressively researched, and often profoundly original. They highlight the limits of common narratives about King and the civil rights movement, showing the shifts in his own thinking and the unconventional nature of many of his arguments. This is a path-breaking book. —Aziz Rana, Cornell University

This is a powerful and invaluable collection of essays on Dr. King. I hope it will inspire an entirely new generation of readers to go back and immerse themselves in Dr. King’s language and thought and hear and heed his prophetic voice. —Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children’s Defense Fund

King’s theology, philosophy, and nonviolent prophetic engagement are needed now more than any time since his death. In his last speech, Dr. King said that when it comes to the struggle for love and justice, ‘nothing would be more tragic than for us to turn back now.’ We must embrace his challenge in this moment and commit to go forward together, not one step back. —Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

While his birthday has become a national holiday and schoolchildren across the nation and the world know the words of his most famous speeches, there are still many aspects of his life and work that remain lesser known. —Time

Looks at the work of Dr. King as a philosopher, rather than a political figure. By examining some lesser-known writings, the authors draw the conclusion that Dr. King was a much more radical thinker than his watered-down legacy would suggest. —Vox

King was not simply a compelling speaker, but a deeply philosophical intellectual…King drew on theological, economic, and historical ideas to inform his philosophical thinking…We still have much to learn from him. —Olivia Goldhill, Quartz

King’s own scholarship is refreshingly illuminated in To Shape a New World . —Colin Grant, Prospect

[An] ambitious, illuminating volume…The collection facilitates rigorous engagement with King’s thought in its own time and place but also presses the question of what we ought to do with it in this current ‘age of impunity and mendacity.’ —Erin R. Pineda, Journal of the History of Philosophy

Reimagines King as a political thinker for our—and for all—time. —The Point

This book demonstrates the necessity of revisiting King’s philosophy and creed of nonviolence…Perhaps most importantly, this collection gives us a clear look at the mechanisms of the nonviolent approach, a different option to discrimination instead of submission or violent resistance. —Kirkus Reviews

[A] robust and wide-ranging collection...The book as a whole displays the pliability and dynamism of King’s thought, applying it to circumstances both recent (Barack Obama’s presidency) and far in the past (the practice of slavery in 18th- and 19th-century America). Throughout, King’s voice is placed within a community of philosophers…As the nation approaches the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, this work demonstrates, for anyone who needs convincing, the continued and vital importance of his thinking. —Publishers Weekly

• Tommie Shelby is Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. In addition to Dark Ghettos he is the author of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity and coeditor with Brandon M. Terry of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the coeditor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and editor of Fifty Years Since MLK .

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Professors Brandon Terry (left) and Tommie Shelby discuss a new book they co-edited on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s political thought.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Beyond ‘I Have a Dream’

Harvard Staff Writer

Essay collection co-edited by Harvard scholars amplifies Martin Luther King’s political and economic philosophy

Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy as a political thinker has long been overshadowed by a romantic view of the Civil Rights Movement he led until his assassination on April 4, 1968, say Harvard scholars Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry , co-editors of the new book “To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Fifty years after King’s death, Shelby, the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy, and Terry, an assistant professor of African and African American studies and social studies, discussed King’s contributions as a political philosopher and his relevance in the era of Black Lives Matter.  

Tommie Shelby & Brandon Terry

GAZETTE: You say that a romantic view surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and King hinders our understanding of both the movement and of King’s legacy. Can you explain? TERRY: We tend to tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement through romantic tropes, in which it becomes a story about unity built from the heroic sacrifice of great men. It’s a nationally bounded story. It’s a story that is heavily moralized about the transcendence of good over evil, in which all we were waiting for as a nation was to hear someone like Martin Luther King and the scales would fall from our eyes and we would see the errors of the past 300 years. It also tends to be a story about “becoming who we already were” — distilling our most deeply held values and bringing them up to be fully realized. The resonance with the sacrifice and redemptive suffering of the Christ story is really important as well. This can become problematic because we lose many of the movement’s radical ideas about economic justice, democratic experimentation, and overhauling the constitutional order. None of those things are on the table. They don’t even become questions we ask because we’re already telling ourselves a story where they don’t fit; even the geopolitics of the civil rights struggle fall out. We don’t understand that King always saw the Civil Rights Movement as part of a global struggle in a Cold War and anticolonial context. King was a global figure. He was traveling to India to meet with Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s, and attended the presidential inauguration of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. That all falls out of our conventional narrative.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in an undated photo.

GAZETTE: Can you give examples of King’s ideas that have been obscured by the dominant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement? TERRY: One example is the “I Have a Dream” speech. Often people would listen to the speech and fixate on a powerful image of children holding hands as a way of thinking about the project of racial integration and racial justice without taking measure of where that kind of image fits in the broader architecture of King thought. For King, to have real integration meant sharing political power, uprooting metropolitan boundaries, rethinking how American federalism works, and rethinking school districting — not just busing programs. There is also King’s argument of using radical forms of political disobedience and direct-action protests to push the movement’s agenda. And that kind of experimentation with political coercion, even in Northern cities, to achieve justice is not the Martin Luther King people really know that well. SHELBY: Another aspect that is not well known is that King is part of a broader tradition of black political thought that is grounded in a commitment to political ethics and to thinking about the values that should guide the response of the oppressed to injustice. King is in a tradition that goes back to slavery that focuses on values of self-respect and solidarity, avoiding hate and a whole set of principles that is supposed to guide a dignified response to unjust conditions. GAZETTE: What were King’s views on war and racial injustice and economic injustice? TERRY: King thought that Vietnam was an unjust war, and that it was a continuation of the French imperial project that America took up for retrograde reasons. King thought that our nation’s military conflicts reflect on us as citizens and that we’re accountable in part for the kinds of injustices our nation might conduct in the course of militaristic adventure if we don’t stand up in dissent. King also thought that having an imperial militaristic culture would have consequences that deepen other forms of structural injustice; it would take away from the commitment to a war on poverty and increase racial hatred by training people to kill people of color on the other side of the world. SHELBY: It’s also important to remember that King pretty early on thought of the fight for racial justice and the fight for economic justice as deeply linked. King thought of the first phase of the Civil Rights Movement as focused on questions of racial justice that had to do with the fight against Jim Crow, humiliation, segregation, discrimination, and the denial of voting rights. But he thought it was important after securing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to begin to develop a movement focused more deeply on economic injustices, particularly those that beset urbanized blacks in the Northeast, Midwest, and the West. That struggle was going to be partly about jobs and fair wages, but also about how we share the gains of our economic cooperation and technological advancement. A lot of the problems we see in ghettos, such as crime, unstable families, and juvenile delinquency, King thought were rooted ultimately in economic injustice.

Professor Terry carries a framed piece of art depicting a King sermon into his office.

GAZETTE: If he were alive, what would King think of the Black Lives Matter movement? SHELBY: King was very much aware of, and obviously condemned, police brutality and wrongful convictions, which are well-known aspects of the black experience in America. There have been some developments since he died, though, such as the dramatic growth in the number of people incarcerated. Drawing on his insights, I would emphasize the importance of the economic marginalization of many black and brown people and why that makes them vulnerable to aggressive police action and to being drawn into the underground economy and be incarcerated as a result. So, there is an issue of civil rights that needs to be connected to broader questions of economic justice. On the question of how to prosecute that struggle, King would always emphasize the importance of working in alliances or coalitions that cut across civil rights advocacy and labor movement advocacy to win over people who could be won. GAZETTE: It has been 50 years since the assassination. How do you think King will be remembered 50 years from now? SHELBY: Some of what we want to achieve is to bring King into both political philosophy and political theory as a subject of academic study and to put him in conversation with canonical classical figures who are wrestling with the same questions King was wrestling with, such as the justification of political authority and the distribution of economic goods, resources, and services. If we’re successful, we’d find King’s writings on syllabi across the curriculum in political philosophy and theory years from now.

More like this

When King came to Harvard

TERRY: Amen to all of that. I’d add two things. First, it’s important to treat black thinkers’ ideas as ideas and avoid thinking that their arguments can be reduced to tactics, or some other explanation about their class or group identity. We have to wrestle with the fact that they’re living with weighty questions of “What do we owe to each other?,” “How do we live?,” “What’s worth fighting and dying for?” The other thing is that we’d like to see King’s legacy among activists live on in an increased commitment to serious critical thinking, and in justifying one’s actions in public. Arguing about ideas in good faith with sympathy and charity to your opponents and those you disagree with is part of good political practice, and good as in virtuous, and King was an extraordinary exemplar of this commitment. If our collection of essays can help achieve that, we’d be thrilled.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

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The Political Philosophy Of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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• Meghna Chakrabarti
• Zoë Mitchell

Dr. King's intellect and the specifics of his radical politics often go unexamined when celebrating his legacy.  A new essay collection — " To Shape A New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. " — presents a full analysis of King’s work and recasts him as the radical thinker that he was.

His political and economic ideas are clear in his speeches against the Vietnam War and his  call  to work toward economic equality. But his radicalism can also be found in some of his most well-known writings, like the "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" (listen to a full recording of King reading the letter  here ).

"To Shape A New World: The Essays on the Political Philosphy of Martin Luther King, Jr." is available for preorder here .

Tommie Shelby , Caldwell Titcomb Professor at Harvard University and editor of "To Shape A New World." He tweets @tommie_shelby .

Brandon Terry , assistant professor at Harvard University and editor of "To Shape A New World." He tweets  @brandonmterry .

This segment aired on January 15, 2018.

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An Experiment in Love: Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Six Pillars of Nonviolent Resistance and the Ancient Greek Notion of ‘Agape’

By maria popova.

Nowhere does he transmute spiritual ideas from various traditions into secular principles more masterfully than in his extraordinary 1958 essay “An Experiment in Love,” in which he examines the six essential principles of his philosophy of nonviolence, debunks popular misconceptions about it, and considers how these basic tenets can be used in guiding any successful movement of nonviolent resistance. Penned five years before his famous Letter from Birmingham City Jail and exactly a decade before his assassination, the essay was eventually included in the indispensable A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. ( public library ) — required reading for every human being with a clicking mind and a ticking heart.

In the first of the six basic philosophies, Dr. King addresses the tendency to mistake nonviolence for passivity, pointing out that it is a form not of cowardice but of courage:

It must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight… The way of nonviolent resistance … is ultimately the way of the strong man. It is not a method of stagnant passivity… For while the nonviolent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and his emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong. The method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually. It is not passive non-resistance to evil, it is active nonviolent resistance to evil.

He turns to the second tenet of nonviolence:

Nonviolence … does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.

In considering the third characteristic of nonviolence, Dr. King appeals to the conscientious recognition that those who perpetrate violence are often victims themselves:

The attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is the evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by the evil. If he is opposing racial injustice, the nonviolent resister has the vision to see that the basic tension is not between the races… The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness…. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.

Out of this recognition flows the fourth tenet:

Nonviolent resistance [requires] a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back… The nonviolent resister is willing to accept violence if necessary, but never to inflict it. He does not seek to dodge jail. If going to jail is necessary, he enters it “as a bridegroom enters the bride’s chamber.”

That, in fact, is precisely how Dr. King himself entered jail five years later . To those skeptical of the value of turning the other cheek, he offers:

Unearned suffering is redemptive. Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.

The fifth basic philosophy turns the fourth inward and arrives at the most central point of the essay — the noblest use of what we call “love”:

Nonviolent resistance … avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.

Here, Dr. King turns to Ancient Greek philosophy, pointing out that the love he speaks of is not the sentimental or affectionate kind — “it would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense,” he readily acknowledges — but love in the sense of understanding and redemptive goodwill. The Greeks called this agape — a love distinctly different from the eros , reserved for our lovers, or philia , with which we love our friends and family. Dr. King explains:

Agape means understanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object… Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor. Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes . It is an entirely “neighbor-regarding concern for others,” which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friends and enemy; it is directed toward both. If one loves an individual merely on account of his friendliness, he loves him for the sake of the benefits to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend’s own sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.

This notion is nearly identical to one of Buddhism’s four brahmaviharas , or divine attitudes — the concept of Metta , often translated as lovingkindness or benevolence. The parallel speaks not only to Dr. King’s extraordinarily diverse intellectual toolkit of influences and inspirations — a high form of combinatorial creativity necessary for any meaningful contribution to humanity’s common record — but also to the core commonalities between the world’s major spiritual and philosophical traditions.

In a sentiment that Margaret Mead and James Baldwin would echo twelve years later in their spectacular conversation on race — “In any oppressive situation both groups suffer, the oppressors and the oppressed,” Mead observed, asserting that the oppressors suffer morally with the recognition of what they’re committing, which Baldwin noted is “a worse kind of suffering” — Dr. King adds:

Another basic point about agape is that it springs from the need of the other person — his need for belonging to the best in the human family… Since the white man’s personality is greatly distorted by segregation, and his soul is greatly scarred, he needs the love of the Negro. The Negro must love the white man, because the white man needs his love to remove his tensions, insecurities, and fears.

At the heart of agape , he argues, is the notion of forgiveness — something Mead and Baldwin also explored with great intellectual elegance . Dr. King writes:

Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action… Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community… It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community…. If I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love.

With this, he turns to the sixth and final principle of nonviolence as a force of justice, undergirded by the nonreligious form of spirituality that Dani Shapiro elegantly termed “an animating presence” and Alan Lightman described as the transcendence of “this strange and shimmering world.” Dr. King writes:

Nonviolent resistance … is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Consequently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future. This faith is another reason why the nonviolent resister can accept suffering without retaliation. For he knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. It is true that there are devout believers in nonviolence who find it difficult to believe in a personal God. But even these persons believe in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness. Whether we call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahman, or a Personal Being of matchless power of infinite love, there is a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.

A Testament of Hope is an absolutely essential read in its totality. Complement it with Dr. King on the two types of law , Albert Einstein’s little-known correspondence with W.E.B. Du Bois on racial justice , and Tolstoy and Gandhi’s equally forgotten but immensely timely correspondence on why we hurt each other .

— Published July 1, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/07/01/martin-luther-king-jr-an-experiment-in-love/ —

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What did Martin Luther King, Jr., do?

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Baptist minister and social rights activist in the United States in the 1950s and ’60s. He was a leader of the American civil rights movement . He organized a number of peaceful protests as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , including the March on Washington in 1963. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and, at the time, he was the youngest person to have done so. Learn more.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is known for his contributions to the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. His most famous work is his “ I Have a Dream ” speech, delivered in 1963, in which he spoke of his dream of a United States that is void of segregation and racism. King also advocated for nonviolent methods of protest, and he organized and staged countless marches and boycotts.

Martin Luther King, Jr., influenced people around the world. He advocated for peaceful approaches to some of society’s biggest problems. He organized a number of marches and protests and was a key figure in the American civil rights movement . He was instrumental in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike , the Montgomery bus boycott , and the March on Washington . The holiday honoring King is often celebrated as the MLK Day of Service, a reflection of his legacy of addressing social problems through collective action.

Martin Luther King, Jr., grew up as the middle child of Michael (later Martin Luther) King, Sr., and Alberta Williams King. His father was the minister of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—the same church where Martin Luther King, Jr., would eventually minister. In 1953 King married Coretta Scott , and the two had four children: Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, when he was shot by James Earl Ray . An hour later, King died at St. Joseph’s hospital. His death sparked riots across the country. In the United States he is memorialized on the third Monday of January every year— Martin Luther King, Jr., Day , which was first observed as a federal holiday in 1986.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia , U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis , Tennessee) was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , which promoted nonviolent tactics , such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights . He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern Black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King’s father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta . The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “Black Wall Street,” home to some of the country’s largest and most prosperous Black businesses and Black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family .

This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the prejudices then common in the South . He never forgot the time when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents’ permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. “Negroes and whites go [to] the same church,” he noted in a letter to his parents. “I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This summer experience in the North only deepened King’s growing hatred of racial segregation .

At Morehouse, King favored studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged. King’s mentor at Morehouse was the college president , Benjamin Mays , a social gospel activist whose rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King’s father. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the African American community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the Black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage King. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948.

King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester , Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi ’s philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of Crozer’s student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, “The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation.” From Crozer, King went to Boston University , where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own theological and ethical inclinations, he studied man’s relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.”

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Martin Luther King Jr.

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 25, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington , which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act . King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day , a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

When Was Martin Luther King Born?

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia , the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher.

Along with his older sister Christine and younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams, he grew up in the city’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, then home to some of the most prominent and prosperous African Americans in the country.

Did you know? The final section of Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech is believed to have been largely improvised.

A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted to Morehouse College , the alma mater of both his father and maternal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.

Although he had not intended to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind under the mentorship of Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality. After graduating in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree, won a prestigious fellowship and was elected president of his predominantly white senior class.

King then enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, completing his coursework in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music . The couple wed in 1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church .

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King and Bernice Albertine King.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days. The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest’s leader and official spokesman.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King—heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin —had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.

King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January.

On September 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry walked into a Harlem department store where King was signing books and asked, “Are you Martin Luther King?” When he replied “yes,” she stabbed him in the chest with a knife. King survived, and the attempted assassination only reinforced his dedication to nonviolence: “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place.”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists—most of them fellow ministers—founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolent protest.

The SCLC motto was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” King would remain at the helm of this influential organization until his death.

In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

During a month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet family members and followers of Gandhi, the man he described in his autobiography as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” King also authored several books and articles during this time.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In 1960 King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church . This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s.

Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America’s most racially divided cities.

Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “ Letter from Birmingham Jail ,” an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

The 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike That Drew MLK to Memphis

With the slogan, "I am a man," workers in Memphis sought financial justice in a strike that fatefully became Martin Luther King Jr.'s final cause.

Behind Martin Luther King’s Searing ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’

King penned of the civil rights movement's seminal texts while in solitary confinement, initially on the margins of a newspaper.

How an Assassination Attempt Affirmed MLK’s Faith in Nonviolence

The civil rights leader was attacked in 1958 by Izola Ware Curry, a decade before his murder.

March on Washington

Later that year, Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices Black Americans continued to face across the country.

Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

"I Have a Dream" Speech

The March on Washington culminated in King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial —a monument to the president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States—he shared his vision of a future in which “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

The speech and march cemented King’s reputation at home and abroad; later that year he was named “Man of the Year” by TIME magazine and in 1964 became, at the time, the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .

In the spring of 1965, King’s elevated profile drew international attention to the violence that erupted between white segregationists and peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, where the SCLC and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had organized a voter registration campaign.

Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson , who sent in federal troops to keep the peace.

That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act , which guaranteed the right to vote—first awarded by the 15th Amendment—to all African Americans.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The events in Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the established political framework.

As more militant Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence, King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam War and poverty among Americans of all races. In 1967, King and the SCLC embarked on an ambitious program known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to include a massive march on the capital.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated . He was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where King had traveled to support a sanitation workers’ strike. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning.

James Earl Ray , an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998.

After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a U.S. federal holiday in honor of King.

Observed on the third Monday of January, Martin Luther King Day was first celebrated in 1986.

Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

While his “I Have a Dream” speech is the most well-known piece of his writing, Martin Luther King Jr. was the author of multiple books, include “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” “Why We Can’t Wait,” “Strength to Love,” “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” and the posthumously published “Trumpet of Conscience” with a foreword by Coretta Scott King. Here are some of the most famous Martin Luther King Jr. quotes:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.”

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?’”

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The Purpose of Education

Morehouse College, 1948

As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.

It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, “brethren!” Be careful, teachers!

Martin Luther King Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on martin luter king.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African-American leader in the U.S. He lost his life while performing a peaceful protest for the betterment of blacks in America. His real name was Michael King Jr. He completed his studies and attained a Ph.D. After that, he joined the American Civil Right Movement. He was among one of the great men who dedicated their life for the community.

Reason for Martin Luther King to be famous

There are two reasons for someone to be famous either he is a good man or a very bad person. Martin Luther King was among the good one who dedicated his life to the community. Martin Luther King was also known as MLK Jr. He gained popularity after he became the leader and spokesperson of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Martin Luther King was an American activist, minister, and humanitarian. Also, he had worked for several other causes and actively participated in many protests and boycotts. He was a peaceful man that has faith in Christian beliefs and non-violence. Also, his inspiration for them was the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. For his work in the field of civil rights, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was a great speaker that motivated the blacks to protest using non-violence. Also, he uses peaceful strategies like a boycott, protest march , and sit-ins, etc. for protests against the government.

Impact of King

King is one of the renowned leaders of the African-American who worked for the welfare of his community throughout his life. He was very famous among the community and is the strongest voice of the community. King and his fellow companies and peaceful protesters forced the government several times to bend their laws. Also, kings’ life made a seismic impact on life and thinking of the blacks. He was among one of the great leaders of the era.

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Humanitarian and civil rights work

As we know that King was a civic leader . Also, he has taken part in many civil right campaigns and boycotts like the Bus Boycott, Voting Rights and the most famous March on Washington. In this march along with more than 200,000 people, he marched towards Washington for human right. Also, it’s the largest human right campaign in U.S.A. history. During the protest, he gave a speech named “I Have a Dream” which is history’s one of the renowned speeches.

Death and memorial

During his life working as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement he makes many enemies. Also, the government and plans do everything to hurt his reputation. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Every year the US celebrates his anniversary as Martin Luther King Jr. day in the US. Also, they honored kings’ memory by naming school and building after him and a Memorial at Independence Mall.

Martin Luther King was a great man who dedicated his whole life for his community. Also, he was an active leader and a great spokesperson that not only served his people but also humanity. It was due to his contribution that the African-American got their civil rights.

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May 19, 1925 to February 21, 1965

As the nation’s most visible proponent of  Black Nationalism , Malcolm X’s challenge to the multiracial, nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King, Jr., helped set the tone for the ideological and tactical conflicts that took place within the black freedom struggle of the 1960s. Given Malcolm X’s abrasive criticism of King and his advocacy of racial separatism, it is not surprising that King rejected the occasional overtures from one of his fiercest critics. However, after Malcolm’s assassination in 1965, King wrote to his widow, Betty Shabazz: “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem” (King, 26 February 1965).

Malcolm Little was born to Louise and Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on 19 May 1925. His father died when he was six years old—the victim, he believed, of a white racist group. Following his father’s death, Malcolm recalled, “Some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle and began to eat away our pride” (Malcolm X,  Autobiography , 14). By the end of the 1930s Malcolm’s mother had been institutionalized, and he became a ward of the court to be raised by white guardians in various reform schools and foster homes.

Malcolm joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) while serving a prison term in Massachusetts on burglary charges. Shortly after his release in 1952, he moved to Chicago and became a minister under Elijah Muhammad, abandoning his “slave name,” and becoming Malcolm X (Malcolm X, “We Are Rising”). By the late 1950s, Malcolm had become the NOI’s leading spokesman.

Although Malcolm rejected King’s message of  nonviolence , he respected King as a “fellow-leader of our people,” sending King NOI articles as early as 1957 and inviting him to participate in mass meetings throughout the early 1960s ( Papers  5:491 ). Although Malcolm was particularly interested that King hear Elijah Muhammad’s message, he also sought to create an open forum for black leaders to explore solutions to the “race problem” (Malcolm X, 31 July 1963). King never accepted Malcolm’s invitations, however, leaving communication with him to his secretary, Maude  Ballou .

Despite his repeated overtures to King, Malcolm did not refrain from criticizing him publicly. “The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy,” Malcolm told an audience in 1963, “is the Negro revolution … That’s no revolution” (Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” 9).

In the spring of 1964, Malcolm broke away from the NOI and made a pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned he began following a course that paralleled King’s—combining religious leadership and political action. Although King told reporters that Malcolm’s separation from Elijah Muhammad “holds no particular significance to the present civil rights efforts,” he argued that if “tangible gains are not made soon all across the country, we must honestly face the prospect that some Negroes might be tempted to accept some oblique path [such] as that Malcolm X proposes” (King, 16 March 1964).

Ten days later, during the Senate debate on the  Civil Rights Act of 1964 , King and Malcolm met for the first and only time. After holding a press conference in the Capitol on the proceedings, King encountered Malcolm in the hallway. As King recalled in a 3 April letter, “At the end of the conference, he came and spoke to me, and I readily shook his hand.” King defended shaking the hand of an adversary by saying that “my position is that of kindness and reconciliation” (King, 3 April 1965).

Malcolm’s primary concern during the remainder of 1964 was to establish ties with the black activists he saw as more militant than King. He met with a number of workers from the  Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee  (SNCC), including SNCC chairman John  Lewis  and Mississippi organizer Fannie Lou  Hamer . Malcolm saw his newly created Organization of African American Unity (OAAU) as a potential source of ideological guidance for the more militant veterans of the southern civil rights movement. At the same time, he looked to the southern struggle for inspiration in his effort to revitalize the Black Nationalist movement.

In January 1965, he revealed in an interview that the OAAU would “support fully and without compromise any action by any group that is designed to get meaningful immediate results” (Malcolm X,  Two Speeches , 31). Malcolm urged civil rights groups to unite, telling a gathering at a symposium sponsored by the  Congress of Racial Equality : “We want freedom now, but we’re not going to get it saying ‘We Shall Overcome.’ We've got to fight to overcome” (Malcolm X,  Malcolm X Speaks , 38).

In early 1965, while King was jailed in Selma, Alabama, Malcolm traveled to Selma, where he had a private meeting with Coretta Scott  King . “I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult,” he assured Coretta. “I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King” (Scott King, 256).

On 21 February 1965, just a few weeks after his visit to Selma, Malcolm X was assassinated. King called his murder a “great tragedy” and expressed his regret that it “occurred at a time when Malcolm X was … moving toward a greater understanding of the nonviolent movement” (King, 24 February 1965). He asserted that Malcolm’s murder deprived “the world of a potentially great leader” (King, “The Nightmare of Violence”). Malcolm’s death signaled the beginning of bitter battles involving proponents of the ideological alternatives the two men represented.

Maude L. Ballou to Malcolm X, 1 February 1957, in  Papers  4:117 .

Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X , 1973.

King, “The Nightmare of Violence,”  New York Amsterdam News , 13 March 1965.

King, Press conference on Malcolm X’s assassination, 24 February 1965,  MLKJP-GAMK .

King, Statement on Malcolm X’s break with Elijah Muhammad, 16 March 1964,  MCMLK-RWWL .

King to Abram Eisenman, 3 April 1964,  MLKJP-GAMK .

King to Shabazz, 26 February 1965,  MCMLK-RWWL .

(Scott) King,  My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. , 1969.

Malcolm X, Interview by Harry Ring over Station WBAI-FM in New York, in  Two Speeches by Malcolm X , 1965.

Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,”  in Malcolm X Speaks , ed. George Breitman, 1965.

Malcolm X, “We Are Rising From the Dead Since We Heard Messenger Muhammad Speak,”  Pittsburgh Courier , 15 December 1956.

Malcolm X to King, 21 July 1960, in  Papers  5:491 .

Malcolm X to King, 31 July 1963, 

Malcolm X with Haley,  Autobiography of Malcolm X , 1965.

Historical Material

Maude L. Ballou to Malcolm X

From Malcolm X