Politico's Glenn Thrush has a shockingly thoughtful piece (shocking because it's in Politico) on the ideological intersections and divergences of Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr.'s careers. It gets at the enduring race-class divide in American political philosophy--as further separated by time, circumstances, political realities and personal temperament. Thrush's is a brilliant survey, which I recommend very much.
I do, however, somewhat differ with its suggestive conclusion, which is what makes stuff like Thrush's piece worth reading. Let's get right to it:
King dealt with issues of class and economic equality gingerly at the start of his career.
That was changing as he delivered his speech 50 years ago. “I Have a Dream” is a race speech--but King did allude to a broader movement to address economic inequality in the nation’s cities....
King didn’t embrace economic inequality as a central theme until the summer of 1967, when he began organizing a multiracial Poor People’s Campaign, an unsuccessful effort to prod the Johnson administration to pass a national economic bill of rights. He was murdered a year later supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
Yet even at the end of his life, King--unlike Obama--viewed his struggle as fundamentally racial, according to his biographer Taylor Branch.
It's the final passage's essence that I disagree with, although I readily confess that my disagreement comes in the form of a hard, yet unprovable, assumption.
It seems to me that when assessing King's career, one must look at the totality of its movement, its trajectory, its unfinishedness--and King's trajectory was clearly, I would argue, toward a synthesis that heavily favored a class-over-race analysis of economic inequality. (The commie-paranoid J. Edgar Hoover undoubtedly agreed.) Had King lived but another 10 years, that trajectory would have been confirmed, I think--blending, in the process, King's ideological approach more intimately with Obama's.
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