Green Social Thought 66: A Magazine of Synthesis and Regeneration, Winter 2015 35

Thinking Politically Trumpet of Conscience

Remembering the Officially Deleted Dr. King by Paul Street

In Summer 2013 I happened upon a neat find in a used book store. I found an original edition of Martin Luther King’s posthumously published book The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) a compilation of five lectures King gave over the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) during November and December of 1967, just five months before his assassination (or execution) in Memphis. The CBC had invited King to talk about anything he considered relevant not only in the US but around the world.

The Trumpet of Conscience does not jibe well with the conventional domesticated and white-

washed image of King that is purveyed across the nation ever year during and around the national holi-day the bears his name. That image portrays King as a moderate reformer who wanted little more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a mostly be-nevolent American System — a loyal supplicant who was tearfully grateful to the nation’s leaders for finally making those adjustments.

The official commemoration says nothing about the Dr. King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age[1] and who said in his last years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.” [2] It deletes the King who wrote that the “real issue to be faced” beyond superficial matter was “the radical reconstruction society of society itself.”

In his first talk (“Impasse in race relations”), King re-flected on how little the black freedom struggle had actually attained beyond some frac-tional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of the limited forward progress” blacks and their allies had attained “by [a] white re-sistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] deeply rooted in US society.”

“As elation and expectations died,” King ex-plained,

… Negroes became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of depriva-tion. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern ghettoes. Al the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions—and even these were only partially improved. (p. 6)

Worse than merely limited, the gains won by black Americans during what King considered the

“first phase” of their freedom struggle (1955–1965) were dangerous in that they “brought whites a sense of completion”— a preposterous impression that the so-called “Negro problem” had been solved and that there was therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism. “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the sec-

ond rung of the ladder,” King noted, “a firm resis-tance from the white community developed….In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters un-mistakably it was outright resistance” (p. 6).

“The white man does not abide by law.” Explaining the remarkable wave of race riots

that washed across US cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no apologies for black vio-lence. He blamed “the white power structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequal-ity intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept

radical structural change,” which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling blacks (whose expectations for substantive change had been aroused) “that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor” (9–10, emphasis added).

King also blamed the riots in part on Washing-ton’s imperialist and mass-murderous “war in [here he might have better said “on”] Vietnam.” The mili-tary aggression against Southeast Asia stole re-sources from Johnson’s briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” It sent poor blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable

“…to achieve real equality, the US will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”

“…the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that

has been unable to seat them together in the same school.”

36 Green Social Thought 66: A Magazine of Synthesis and Regeneration, Winter 2015

response and even a solution to social and political problems.

Black Americans and others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white

boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit,” King said in his second CBC lecture, adding that he “could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipu-lation of the poor” (p. 23).

Racial hypocrisy aside, King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better have said “military empire”] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom” (p. 33).

Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their lib-eral and conservative critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’ transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,” who “created discrimination…created slums. [and] per-petuate unemployment, ignorance, and pov-erty….[T]he white man,” King elaborated,

… does not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly vio-lates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vi-cious system of the white society.” (p. 8)

Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King

said in his fourth lecture, but noted that their aggres-sion was “to a startling degree…focused against property rather than against people.” He observed that “property represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [understandably] attacking and trying to destroy” (pp. 56–57). Against those who held property “sacred,” King argued that “Prop-erty is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being.”

“The roots are in the system.” What to do? King advanced significant policy

changes that went against the grain of the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New Left Radicals that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations” (p.40). King advocated an emergency national program providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guar-anteed national income “at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called tor “demoli-tion of slums and rebuilding by the population that lives in them” (p. 14).

His proposals, he said, aimed for more than ra-cial justice alone. Seeking to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the Negro revolt”

had come to challenge what he called “the interre-lated triple evils” of racism, economic injus-tice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism). It had “evolve[ed] into more than a quest for desegregation and equality” by becoming

“a challenge to a system that has cre-ated miracles of production and tech-nology to create justice.”

“If humanism is locked outside the system,” King said in his opening lecture, “Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far grater struggle for liberation will un-fold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war….” (pp. 16–17, emphasis added).

There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he re-ferred to “the system” and its “inner core of despotism.” [3]

“They must organize a revolution against the privileged minority of the earth”

No careful listener to King’s CBC

“[T]he white man,” King elaborated, “does not abide by law in the ghetto.”

“Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights

and respect, it has no personal being.”

Green Social Thought 66: A Magazine of Synthesis and Regeneration, Winter 2015 37

talks could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both White and Negro— live in a cruelly un-just society,” King said in his fourth lecture. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added (p. 59).

Such a revolution would require “more then a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] function-ing at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.”

“The storm is rising against the privileged mi-nority of the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not abate until [there is a] just dis-tribution of the fruits of the earth…” (p. 17). As this reference to the entire earth suggested, the “massive, active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the mod-ern system” (p. 48) that King advocated was “inter-national in scope,” reflecting the fact that “the poor countries are poor primarily because [rich Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic im-perialism” (p. 62).

Regression, betrayal, and “the mendacity of hope”

The threat posed to that official memory by King’s CBC lectures—and by much more that King did and said and write in the last three years of his life—is not just that they show an officially iconic gradualist reformer to have been a radical opponent of the profits system and its empire. It is also about how clearly King analyzed the incomplete and unfin-ished nature of the nation’s progress against racial and class injustice, around which all forward devel-opments pretty much ceased in the 1970s, thanks to a white backlash that was already well underway in the early and mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers) and to a top-down corporate war on working class Americans that started under Jimmy Carter and went ballistic under Ronald Reagan.

The “spiritual doom” imposed by militarism has lived on, with Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of Iraqis, Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and Asians in many different ways over the years since Vietnam.[4] Accounting for half the world’s obscene military expenditure, the US main-tains Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global killing ma-chine (which operates from more than 1000 bases located in more than 100 “sovereign” nations) even as the current record-setting number of officially poor Americans remains stuck at 46 million, a very

disproportionate number of whom are black and La-tino/a.

It is ironic that Barack Obama keeps a bust of King in the White House’s oval office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred peace and justice leader’s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed Jr.’s early (1996) dead-on description of the future President as “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impec-cable credentials and vacuous to repressive neolib-eral politics”[5], President Obama has consistently backed top corporate and financial interests (whose representatives have filled and dominated his ad-ministrations, campaigns, and campaign coffers) over and against those who would undertake serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth (the savage re-concentration of which since Dr. King’s time has produced a New Gilded Age in the US), constrain capital, and save livable ecology as it ap-proaches a number of critical tipping points on the accelerating path to irreversible catastrophe.

Thus is that one of Obama’s supporters was moved in late 2012 to complain that a president “whose platform consists of Romney’s health care bill, Newt Gingrich’s environmental policies, John McCain’s deficit-financed payroll tax cuts, George W. Bush’s bailouts of filing banks and corporations, and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate” was still being denounced as a leftist enemy of business by the Republicans. [6]

“A calling beyond national allegiances” Explaining why he had turned against the Viet-

nam War, King noted that “a burden of responsibil-ity was placed upon me in 1964: I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder that I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’ This is a calling

which takes me be-yond national alle-giances …to the mak-ing of peace” (p. 25).

In answering that call, King stood to the portside of

leading US 1960s social democrats like Bayard Rustin, A Phillip Randolph, and Michael Harrington. These and other left leaders (e.g. Max Shachtman and Tom Kahn) were unwilling to forthrightly op-pose the US-imperial assault on Indochina because of their misplaced faith in pursuing the fight against poverty in alliance with the pro-war Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO. [7] Besides opposing the war on moral grounds, King understood very well that expenses of crushing Vietnam were precluding and cancelling out anti-poverty spending.

A testament of radical hope Perhaps the Obama experience is at least a les-

son on how progressive change is about something much bigger than a change in the party or color of the people in nominal power. That is certainly some-thing King (who would be 85 today) would have thought has been able to witness the endless men-

It is ironic that Barack Obama keeps a bust of King in the White House’s oval office…

38 Green Social Thought 66: A Magazine of Synthesis and Regeneration, Winter 2015

dacity of the the nation’s first half-white president first-hand. “The black revolution,” King wrote in a posthumously published 1969 essay titled “A testa-ment of hope” – embracing a very different sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008—

… is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interre-lated flaws — racism, poverty, militarism, and ma-terialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of out society. It reveals sys-temic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”[8]

Those words – words you will not hear via “mainstream” media during the national King Day celebrations — ring as true and urgent as ever today, as it becomes undeniable that the profits system’s inner core of despotism is driving humanity over an environmental cliff and that it has become eco-“socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky.” Paul Street (paul.street99@gmail.com) is the author of many books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Segregated Schools (Routledge, 2005) and They Rule: The 1% v. De-mocracy (Paradigm, 2014). Endnotes 1. Frady, M. Martin Luther King, Jr, A life. (New York:

Penguin, 2002), 25

2. Garrow, D. J..Bearing the cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (HarperCollins, 1986), 41–43.

3. Garrow, Bearing the cross, 382, 591–92; M. E. Dyson, I may not get there with you: The true Martin Luther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000), 87–88.

4. A useful review is W. Blum, Rogue state: A guide to the world’s only superpower (Common courage Press, 2005). See also N. Chomsky, Year 501: The conquest continues (South End Press, 1993) and W. Churchill, On the justice of roosting chickens: Reflections on the consequences of US imperial arrogance and criminal-ity (AK Press, 2003),

5. And with my description of Obama’s commitment and career in my book Barack Obama and the future of American politics (Paradigm 2008, written in 2007). See A. Reed, Jr., The curse of community, Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class notes: Posing as politics and other thoughts on the American scene (New York, 2000), 10–13.

6. E. Klein, Block Obama! New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012, quoted in P. Anderson, Home-land, New Left Review 81 (May–June 2013).

7 For a detailed and remarkable account, see P. Le Blanc and M. D. Yates, A freedom budget for all americans: Recapturing the promise of the civil rights movement in the struggle for economic justice today (New York: Monthly Review, 2013).

8. Martin Luther King, Jr., A testament of hope” (1969) in J. Washington, ed., A testament of hope: The essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King. Jr (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 315.

AFRICOM Goes to War on the Sly by Nick Turse

What the military will say to a reporter and what is said behind closed doors are two very different things—especially when it comes to the US military in Africa. For years, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) has maintained a veil of secrecy about much of the command’s activities and mission loca-tions, consistently downplaying the size, scale, and scope of its efforts. At a recent Pentagon press con-ference, AFRICOM Commander General David Rodriguez adhered to the typical mantra, assuring the assembled reporters that the United States “has little forward presence” on that continent. Just days ear-lier, however, the men building the Pentagon’s presence there were telling a very different story—but they weren’t speaking with the media. They were speaking to representatives of some of the biggest military engineering firms on the planet. They were planning for the future and the talk was of war.

I recently experienced this phenomenon myself during a media roundtable with Lieutenant General Thomas Bostick, commander of the US Army Corps of Engineers. When I asked the general to tell me just what his people were building for US forces in Africa, he paused and said in a low voice to the man next to him, “Can you help me out with that?” Lloyd Caldwell, the Corps’s director of military programs, whispered back, “Some of that would be close hold”—in other words, information too sensi-tive to reveal.

The only thing Bostick seemed eager to tell me about were vague plans to someday test a prototype “structural insulated panel-hut,” a new energy-efficient type of barracks being developed by cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. He also

assured me that his people would get back to me with answers. What I got instead was an “inter-view” with a spokesman for the Corps who of-fered little of substance when it came to con-struction on the African continent. Not much information was available, he said; the projects were tiny, only small amounts of money had

been spent so far this year, much of it funneled into humanitarian projects. In short, it seemed as if Af-rica was a construction backwater, a sleepy place, a

They were planning for the future and the talk was of war.