Part II
WE MUST BE THE CHANGE
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Feb. 2, Feb. 8, 2003
Part II
The eruption of the Black Power movement and the urban rebellions had a
similar impact on King, although few speakers talk about this because it
is much easier to honor King as a civil rights advocate than as an advocate
of radical revolution. In 1964 King won the Nobel Peace Prize for his
leadership of the civil rights movement. In the 1950s tens of thousands
of African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, inspired by his vision of the
beloved community, had carried on a year-long, non-violent, disciplined and
ultimately successful boycott, struggling against their dehumanization not
as angry victims or rebels but as new men and women, representative of a new
more human society. Using methods that transformed themselves, they
triggered the human identity and ecological movements which over the last
forty years have been creating a new civil society in the United States.
What is still largely unexplored is the tremendous leap in King's
thinking after his encounters in 1966 with black inner city youth in
Chicago. As a result of these meetings and the subsequent eruption of the
Black Power movement, King recognized that neither integration and the
career opportunities opened up by the civil rights movement or Black Power
met the needs of a whole new generation of black youth. "One
unfortunate thing about Black Power," he said, "is that it gives race a
priority precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces
have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike."
As a result, in his major writings and speeches in 1967 [Where Do We Go
From Here: Community or Chaos? and Time to Break Silence] King began to
project a new kind of radical revolution, a revolution that would be
non-violent but would rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented¹
society to a Operson-oriented¹ society." "When machines and computers,
profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than
people," he said, Othe giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Warning that material growth had been made an end in itself and that our
scientific power had outrun our spiritual power, King rejected the
dictatorship of High Tech, which he said diminishes people because it
eliminates the sense of participation. "Enlarged material powers," he warned
repeatedly, "spell enlarged peril if there is no proportionate growth of
the soul." We have "guided missiles and misguided men."
King also worried that the integration won through the civil rights
struggle was giving birth to a black middle class who would be preoccupied
with individual upward mobility. He deplored the way that educators were
trying to instill middle-class values in black youth, noting that "it was
precisely when young Negroes (sic) threw off their middle-class values and
put careers and wealth in a secondary role" that they made an historic
social contribution. He called for new programs that would involve young
people in "self-transforming and structure-transforming" direct actions "in
our dying cities." and for "new forms of work for those for whom
traditional jobs are not available."
"The work which improves the conditions of mankind," he wrote. "the work
which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and
elevates thought is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of
slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal
necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake and not
that they may get more to eat or drink or wear or display. In a state of
society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously
increased."
He also began projecting a new concept of global citizenship. "Every
nation," he said, "must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a
whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."
King was a Movement activist for only thirteen years, from his
participation in the Montgomery Bus Boycott to his assassination in April
1968. But the dialectical development of his thinking during those
turbulent years is unmistakable. During the civil rights struggle he
struggled to break down racist barriers to black access to institutions.
But after having been confronted in 1966 with the anger and despair of
black youth, he began calling for a radical revolution and a new social
system that goes beyond both Capitalism which he said is "too I-centered,
too individualistic" and Communism which is "too collective, too static."
In making this leap, King exemplified one of the most important
qualities of Movement leadership, openness to the new contradictions and
challenges that emerge from both your successes and your setbacks. This
was also one of Malcolm's great strengths - and Gandhi's.
To be continued.
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