The Selling of MLK
By Dr. Earl Ofari Hutchinson
This month's national holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. should have been a time for renewed reflection and discussion on poverty and racism in America. Instead the talk this year again was about alleged conspiracies and plots to kill King. The talk was triggered by recent media reports that King's convicted assassin James Earl Ray is near death in a prison hospital. Ray's attorney, William Pepper, has seized on the attention to push his claim that Ray is a Lee Harvey Oswald-type patsy and that King's killing was orchestrated by the government.
Almost certainly there'll be more books, and there's even talk of a movie written and directed by, who else, Oliver Stone, on the King assassination. While the search for the truth is noble, the grab for money and publicity isn't. My suspicion is that the conspiracy theorists are less concerned with protecting the King legacy than profiting off of it. If King were alive he would be appalled.
The moral contradictions and inconsistencies between King's public image and private life style have piled up since his assassination in 1968. King has been accused of plagiarism, purveying smut, and engaging in sexual hijinks. But, whatever his flaws, King was consistent on one thing. He abhorred personal wealth and the ownership of private property. For years, the King family lived in what charitably could be described as a ramshackle house. As his family grew in size, friends and family members begged him to move to a larger house. King resisted. An exasperated, Coretta Scott King explained that he "felt that it was inconsistent with his philosophy" to own property. In 1965 King gave in and paid the grand sum of $10,000 for a bigger home. But he continued to complain that the house was "to big" and "elegant."
He railed against the penchant for lavish personal spending, luxury apartments and fancy homes by some staffers in his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King increasingly incorporated anti-capitalist rhetoric in his speeches, and denounced American society as greedy and materialistic.
On several occasions he told friends and SCLC staffers that he believed in "democratic socialism" for America. King often expressed admiration for the writings of Karl Marx. By 1968, he had strayed far from the goals of civil rights and moderate political change. He called America "corrupt" and demanded "a fundamental redistribution of the wealth." He accused the United States government of waging an "imperialist war" of domination against the Vietnamese peasants.
The red-baiters and professional King haters branded him a Communist. The Lyndon Johnson White House turned hostile. Corporate and foundation supporters slowly turned off the money spigot. This left SCLC in deep financial trouble. During his last days, King spent much of his time fund raising and defending his policies against the critics within and without his organization. But he refused to back down. He launched even more frenetic attacks on what he called America's "property centered and profit centered" lust.
Today, King would be revolted by the self-indulgent grab for expensive cars, clothes, and dollars by the MTV generation. He would be horrified by the get rich quick "gangsta" lifestyle of many young Blacks.
The irony is that King did much to make that indulgent lifestyle possible. When the civil rights movement broke the back of legal segregation, the doors of corporations, colleges, and government agencies swung open to Blacks. Since the 1970s there has been a 52 percent increase in the number of Black managers, professionals, technicians and government officials. Nearly one-third of Blacks have incomes in excess of $35,000. In 1995, the top 100 Black businesses had gross sales of $11 billion. Nearly one out of four Blacks have the cash to flee the "hood" and live in the suburbs. In 1995, 75 percent of Blacks graduated from high school. Thirty two percent attended college.
This generation has gotten a bite of the American economic pie and wants more. To them ideology has not only come to an end, as sociologist Daniel Bell warned, it has become a dirty word. In the era of conservative revolt by angry white males, King's relentless demand for massive government funded programs for the poor sounds like a bad joke. The sad truth is that King was a man for his times, but not for these times. If psychologist Eric Fromm is right, that in a capitalist society "things are expressed as commodities," then it was inevitable that the King legacy would be turned into a commodity, packaged and sold to the public. It may be the American way, but, lest we forget, it wasn't King's way.
Responses may be sent e-mail to Earl Ofari Hutchinson: ehutchi344 @aol.com
Dr. Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of The Assassination of the Black Male Image and Beyond O.J.: Race, Sex, and Lessons for America.