Martin Luther King Jr. and the Democratic Constitution
The time is always right to reflect on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, writes Luke Pickrell
Photo by David De Hart
The time is always right to reflect on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not with idolatry, but to apply the lessons and inspiration of history to our present struggles for democracy and freedom. Remembering the real Martin Luther King, Jr. isn’t easy. Mainstream celebrations of his life mostly ignore his democratic politics and socialist convictions. King would want nothing to do with those leveraging hatred and fear in the service of war and the accumulation of wealth. He died in the service of striking sanitation workers and amidst calls for an end to the Vietnam War and a guaranteed basic income for all Americans. He died condemning capitalism and militarism and looking beyond the political confines of the Constitution.
King fought for a fundamental change in the laws governing Americans and a vast reconfiguration of society. “America, you must be born again!” he exclaimed in 1967: “Your whole structure must be changed.”2 King was a political figure who pushed the status quo and was a citizen of the United States. For these reasons, his life took place within the Constitution's framework—the land's supreme law. King was aware of the Constitution. How could he not have been? To be a social actor in the United States desirous of fundamental change, let alone one of King’s immense stature, is to maneuver — consciously or unconsciously — within the political parameters established by the Framers in 1787. The “basic rhythm of American constitutional life…the two-, four-, six-year electoral cycles, the distinctive interchanges between Congress and President, President and Court, Court and Congress, nation and state, politics and law”3 shapes the world around us. Confrontation was inevitable.
The Constitution was a part of King’s struggle from the beginning. During a 1965 interview with Playboy Magazine, he described his first experience with racism while traveling from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia, in 1944. “I had participated there in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks. It turned out to be a memorable day, for I had succeeded in winning the contest. The subject, I recall, ironically enough, was ‘The Negro and the Constitution.’”4 But the day was memorable for another reason. The bus driver made King and his teacher stand in the aisle during the long trip back to Atlanta to accommodate white passengers. King described the event as “the angriest I had ever been in my life.”5
In the Playboy interview, King didn’t explain why it was “ironic” to have his first experience with racism happen in the context of a speech about African Americans and the Constitution. But there are clues. During the ride home, the teenage King, seething with anger, surely thought about his speech. “Slavery has been a strange paradox in a nation founded on the principles that all men are created free and equal,” he’d told the judges: “Finally, after tumult and war, the nation in 1865 took a new stand — freedom for all people. The new order was backed by amendments to the national constitution making it the fundamental law that thenceforth there should be no discrimination anywhere in the ‘land of the free’ on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”6 King probably didn’t feel very “free” standing in the aisle on the trip back to Atlanta. “Black America still wears chains. The finest Negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man,”7 he’d explained to the assembled adults. The bus driver was a mean white man.
In one of his first major speeches, a now twenty-six-year-old King linked the burgeoning Civil Rights movement to the supreme law of the land, exclaiming, “[We] are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”8 During a 1962 speech to the National Press Club, King described the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as “great wells of democracy,”7 and later, as “promissory [notes] to which every American was to fall heir…the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”9 It was ironic (though not entirely unexpected) that King had been made to stand hours after talking about universal and equal rights.
King and the Civil Rights Movement often appealed to the Constitution’s authority to win the same rights held by whites, including, first and foremost, the right to vote. It took a decade, but by the mid-sixties, the three branches of government seemed to be responding to mass protests. The Supreme Court handed down favorable rulings in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and Bailey v. Patterson (1962). Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act (1964). In June 1963, John F. Kennedy used the National Guard to enforce school integration and declared on national television that racism had no place in American society.
King never expressed blind devotion to the Constitution. Freedom and justice were his guiding lights. If the Constitution facilitated that pursuit, it was good. When the Constitution blocked those goals, it was not. When, in 1955, King told his congregation, “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong,” he was probably referring to the Reconstruction Amendments and recent decision in Brown v. Board.
In Letter From Birmingham Jail, King quoted Saint Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all,”11 and, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”12 Saint Augustine also said, “Without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?”13 The Constitution’s continued denial of universal and equal suffrage — of one person, one equal vote — is unjust. Without democracy, what is the state except an army of thieves?
After taking part in his first anti-war march on March 25, 1967, King told his Southern Christian Leadership Council colleagues that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism.”14 But as King turned his attention toward Vietnam and the struggle for economic justice, his relationship with the state and other leaders in the Civil Rights Movement became increasingly antagonistic. Not everyone was keen to hear him say that in a country as wealthy as the United States, “[It] is morally right to insist that every person has a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.”15
By 1967, the way forward for the Civil Rights Movement was uncertain. “So far,” explained King in Where Do We Go From Here?, “we have had constitutional backing for most of our demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we could be sure of legal support from the federal courts. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear.”16 The movement had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights.”17 Admitting his uncertainty was, perhaps, the most revealing thing King said about the limits of Constitutional freedoms.
“When a people are mired in oppression,” wrote King, “they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change.”18 The Civil Rights Movement comprised millions of oppressed people demanding maximum participation in the political system shaping their lives. “The concept of democracy,” King explained, was being “pushed to deeper levels of meaning — from the formal exercise of voting, still an issue in much of the United States for many Negroes, to effective participation in major decisions.”19 Perhaps King was beginning to realize that the ability to vote is an impoverished definition of democracy. During the 1960s, the U.S. changed from non-universal and unequal suffrage to universal and unequal suffrage.
Conversations about who has power and why the lawmaking process excludes so many people occurred nationwide. Ten years before King spoke about democracy’s “deeper levels of meaning” in the context of the Vietnam War, C. Wright Mills discussed “the domination of the military event.” Many people in the United States, Mills explained, black and white, “hear that the Congress has again abdicated to a handful of men decisions clearly related to the issue of war or peace. They know that the bomb was dropped over Japan in the name of the United States of America, although they were at no time consulted about the matter. They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know that they are not making any.”20 More or less concurrent with King, Students for a Democratic Society, whose original leaders were greatly influenced by Mills, united around the (often ambiguous) project of building “participatory democracy” and restructuring the decision making apparatuses of American politics.
King understood that a minority of the population disproportionately affected U.S. politics. However, he never explicitly connected this “tyranny of the minority” to the rules established by the Constitution — the Senate being the most egregious. This minority, he explained, kept America “far behind European nations in all forms of social legislation. England, France, Germany, and Sweden, all distinctly less wealthy than us, provide more security relatively for their people.”21 Well-funded education, accessible healthcare, adequate wages, and gun reform — then and now, people want to change the laws to make the entire country and the entire world a better place. The struggle for universal freedom pervaded all of King’s being. By attacking Southern racism and the minoritarian stranglehold of the South over the country’s politics, the Negro, he explained, had “already benefited not only himself but the nation as a whole.”22
Ten months after writing that the Civil Rights Movement had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights,” James Earl Ray killed King in Memphis. Today, what was unclear to King is clear to us. The undemocratic Constitution “weighs like a nightmare” on us all. Dissolve the Senate — an “obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth”23 — and vest supreme power in an enlarged House of Representatives. The House’s enactments, in the words of Victor Berger, “shall be the supreme law, and the President shall have no power to veto them, nor shall any court have the power to invalidate them.”24
In describing the Senate as a “menace” to liberty and an obstacle to social growth, Berger, both in substance and style, sounded a lot like King. Rhetoric was one of the Reverend's many talents. He knew how to make things hurt and make something distant feel close to home. Life under Jim Crow was a story of constant oppression — one which King painted in vivid colors. A child “brought up to physical maturity in Birmingham,” he told an audience, “would be born in a Jim Crow hospital to parents who probably lived in a ghetto. You would attend a Jim Crow school…spend your childhood playing mainly in the streets because the ‘colored’ parks were abysmally inadequate… [and] go to a Negro church.”25 The oppression continued into adulthood, where one would be unable to join a local branch of the NAACP, find a decent job, or vote. In Birmingham, “you would be living in a community where the white man’s long-lived tyranny had cowed your people, led them to abandon hope, and developed in them a false sense of inferiority.”26
As in King’s time, all movements demanding change beyond a certain threshold must confront the Constitution. Take the modern Poor People’s Campaign. Grounded in King’s call in 1968 for a “revolution of values” in America, the Campaign seeks to create “a movement that will shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections at every level of government, and build lasting power for poor and impacted people.”28 Part of that movement is the call for a Third Reconstruction based around a program to “Fully address poverty and low wages from the bottom up.” The program calls on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, guarantee the right to form a union, expand healthcare and access to housing, increase taxes on the wealthy, and expand the (now defunct) Child Tax Credit. Other demands include reforming the Supreme Court, restoring the 1965 Voting Rights Act, establishing statehood for Washington D.C., abolishing the filibuster, relieving student debt relief, demilitarizing the Southern Border, and ending fossil fuel subsidies.29 All of these demands will slam against the minoritarian checks of the Constitution, including the “obstructive and useless” Senate described by Berger. Democracy is the solution to the present lack of reforms. It will also lead to democratic control and management of the economy.
During the Children’s Crusade in Alabama, high schoolers danced as they were doused by fire hoses and skipped into the waiting police wagons. During the wars of Reconstruction, enslaved people turned Union soldiers turned veterans donned their old uniforms, picked up guns, and marched in formation to defend their hard-won rights. Something of this spirit — the ability to endure abuse, go to jail, and even die for their convictions — will necessarily return en masse when a new movement for democracy takes off in the United States.
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross. New York: Quill, 1986, p. 625.
Washington, James M. (ed.). Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. p. 251.
Ackerman, Bruce. We the People, Volume 1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. p. 4.
Washington, James M. (ed.). p. 342.
Ibid. p. 343.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Negro and the Constitution.” Stanford University. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/negro-and-constitution
Ibid.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1955-martin-luther-king-jr-montgomery-bus-boycott/
Washington, James M. (ed.). p. 165.
SDS’s Port Huron Statement reflects a similar belief: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potential for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with the image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.”
Washington, James M. (ed.). p. 217.
Ibid. p. 293.
“Extracts from St Augustine: The City of God.” http://imagining-other.net/pp4augustineextracts.htm#:~:text=Without%20justice%20what%20are%20kingdoms,them%20by%20an%20agreed%20rule.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Three Evils of Society.” Northwest Educational Service District. https://www.nwesd.org/ed-talks/equity/the-three-evils-of-society-address-martin-luther-king-jr/
Washington, James M. (ed.). p. 58.
Ibid. p. 59.
Ibid. p. 58.
Ibid. p. 303.
Ibid.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. England: Oxford Press, 1956. p. 9.
Washington, James M. (ed.). p. 582
Ibid. p. 564.
Glass, Andrew. “House member seeks to abolish the Senate, April 27, 1911.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/house-member-seeks-to-abolish-the-senate-april-27-1911-222359
Ibid.
Washington, James M. (ed.). p. 526.
Ibid. p. 528.
Levitsky, Steven; Ziblatt, Daniel. Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. New York: Crown, 2023, p. 182.
“About.” Poor People’s Campaign. https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/
Poor People’s Campaign. “Third Reconstruction Agenda.” https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Third-Reconstruction_long_9-15.pdf