One of the more bizarre things you will find on Twitter (and the rest of the Internet) is the assertion that Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would be sporting a MAGA hat and supporting Donald Trump. (He would also have celebrated his 93rd birthday last Saturday.)
This is one of the more strange "observations" of the radical right. Anyone with more working brain cells than Trump himself should know that King was the exact opposite from Trump in every way. Kind, generous, empathetic, intelligent. Vehemently opposed to militarism, racism, and capitalism. King believed socialism was the answer for many of the United States' most intractable problems.
As far back as 1952, when he was 23 years old, King said his economic outlook was "much more socialistic . . . than capitalistic". Indeed, "capitalism has outlived its usefulness". In a letter to Coretta Scott, the woman who would become his wife in June 1953, King wrote that capitalism "has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes".
In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King wrote: "Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few."
In his famous Riverside Church speech, also in 1967, King stated: "When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
And: "The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism."
King knew he was "engaged in the class struggle" and "there must be a better distribution of wealth" in the United States.
He advocated democratic socialist policies: a guaranteed annual income, constitutional amendments to secure social and economic equality, and greatly expanded public housing. He supported the ideas of socialist activist A. Philip Randolph: a jobs guarantee, a living wage and universal healthcare. He called for the "total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty".
In summation:
America must move toward a democratic socialism.
The FBI began "monitoring" King in 1955 and those surveillance efforts increased in 1964 after King bluntly stated the FBI was "completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South". King was viewed as a "communist threat" and an "enemy" of America. In 1964, the head of the FBI called King the "most notorious liar in the country".
Most of America agreed. For all of King's life as a public figure – he was a threat to the "American Way Of Life", Public Enemy Number 1. As late as 1968, only a few months before King was murdered, a poll showed that 75% of Americans disapproved of King.
The whitewashing of King's radicalism took decades, but most of his life's work was eventually erased and softened enough for him to become a beloved American hero. As Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for the New York Times, tweeted today: "as far as i can tell republicans believe that King emerged out of the ether to say this one line in august 1963 and then disappeared thereafter, never to speak again"
Here is a prime example of how right-wingers, currently working overtime to deny the right to vote to as many Americans as possible, especially non-white Americans, twist King's words to suit their racist ideology:
Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it "subsidized" when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it "welfare". The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all to often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That's the problem.
Here is what King actually said, in a sermon entitled "The Minister to the Valley", February 23, 1968:
Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it "subsidized" when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it "welfare". The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all to often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That's the problem.
Then, on March 18, 1968, he gave a speech in support of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike:
If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.
Seventeen days later, he was dead.
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