What Democrats can learn from King’s failure

World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico, 1964

Next Stop: the North

A few months after the 1965 Watts riots, Martin Luther King, Jr. published an essay in the Saturday Review, “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots: Next Stop: the North.” It was a clear-eyed assessment of his decade of movement work that had produced major wins, from the victorious Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Still, King and his colleagues knew that it was time to expand the terrain of their struggle. 

Importantly, what motivated King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to expand their movement northward was their appreciation of the retrograde material and political conditions that black people on the coasts and in the north lived in, especially in contrast to black southern advancements. The South had seen the “birth of human dignity,” as King put in, a decade prior. The North had not enjoyed that nascent progress; in fact, it was quite the opposite: 

the Negro’s repellent slum life was altered not for the better but for the worse. Oppression in the ghettos intensified. To the homes of ten years ago, squalid then, were added ten years of decay. School segregation did not abate but increased. Above all, unemployment for Negroes swelled and remained unaffected by the general economic expansion. As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied.

The riots were the manifest rejection of the dehumanization of the ghetto and the racist policies that produced it. Dignified people will always rattle their cages; organized people can destroy them.

Central to this analysis was a critique of himself and his colleagues: the Civil Rights Movement as it had been executed was a regional movement, not a national one. Had the movement actually been national, as its federal legislative victories seemed to suggest, there would have been progress on all the issues he lamented. The Watts riots igniting just five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act was symptomatic of the fact that for too many of the nation’s black people, these advances were largely symbolic.

They, as political leaders, King continues, had miscalculated the scope of their efficacy. They were to blame for their naivete: “We forgot what we knew daily in the South–freedom is not given, it is won by struggle.” And so, at the invitation of local organizers, King and other SCLC leaders and their families moved to Chicago for what became known as the Chicago Freedom Movement or the Chicago Campaign. As always, they set their eyes on targets that impact the day-to-day economic and spiritual lives of black Chicagoans: dignified housing, employment opportunities, and the racial segregation that defined both markets. 

Ultimately, the Chicago Campaign failed. King’s coalition managed to get a number of important concessions from local business and political leaders; however, they did not have the power to ensure that promises were kept. In the wake of his experience of Chicago’s ghettos, national housing policy became a focal point for King’s organizing until his death. Indeed, it was just a week after King’s assassination with cities across the nation in flames that President Johnson was able to get the Fair Housing Act across the finish line in Congress.

Political Leadership & Thought

I’ve thought about this frequently in the months since the presidential election. More than anything, I cannot stop thinking about the contrasting philosophies of leadership of the SCLC compared to the one that prevails today. The subjects of King’s reflections had been clear: their own shortcomings as leaders, the tactics of the opposition, and how black people were actually living. Their critical self-reflection used the quality and duration of black people's lives as the most important measure for success. 

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference of 1965 would be an outlier in contemporary national politics and punditry. In the months since the presidential election, hundreds of articles have been written about how people who should have voted for Vice President Kamala Harris failed to do so. What a remarkable reversal of political responsibility from leaders onto the electorate they claim to lead. Not surprisingly, this is always a deeply paternalistic posture, steeped in classist and racist assumptions about the segment of the electorate in question. 

This stems, at least in part, from moralizing about political decisions presented to working class people. After every disappointing election, commentators and politicians look down at marginalized people to see who they can blame. Those of us who engage in public life need a different analysis: Like King and his SCLC comrades, we need the moral courage to scrutinize our shortcomings as intellectuals and organizers. More importantly, we need to ask why Democratic Party leadership repeatedly fails to make a convincing offer to the people that shows a vote for them is materially beneficial. 

In the runup to the 2020 presidential election, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos conducted a poll to uncover the barriers to voting. Over 30 percent of unlikely voters said they do not vote because “no matter who wins, nothing will change for people like me.” It is the job of political leaders to make a compelling, realistic case as to why those nonvoters and other skeptics are wrong. The electorate did not fail Kamala Harris. Time ran out for Democratic Party leadership’s decades-old strategy of treating its nonwhite, working class base as hostages with nowhere else to go. 

In solidarity,

Dwayne