From Black Power to a Revolution of Values: Grace Lee Boggs and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Abstract

Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s essay on “the long civil rights movement” and the politics of collective memory opens with this trenchant quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. For Dowd Hall, the bowdlerization of King (“frozen in 1963, proclaiming ‘I have a dream’”) lies at the core of the sanitized narrative of the “short” civil rights movement. Dowd Hall wants us to remember King as “the democratic socialist who advocated unionization, planned the Poor People’s Campaign, and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike.”¹

The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society … and suggests that radical reconstruction of society is the real issue to be faced.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

I would like to thank Nico Slate, Joe Trotter, and the participants in the Black Power beyond Borders Conference for their comments and feedback. I also like to acknowledge my Michigan colleague Stephen Ward and the participants—especially coordinators Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Kenneth Mack—in the 2008–2009 workshop on “Race-Making and Law Making in the Long Civil Rights Movement” at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, where I presented an earlier version of this chapter. Note on references: My general understanding of basic aspects of King’s biography and his role in the civil rights movement, on which the major books on his life read generally consistent, is especially indebted to David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross, Thomas Jackson’s From Civil Rights to Human Rights, the Taylor Branch trilogy, and the editor’s introductions to the King Papers in ways that extend deeper than what is formally cited herewith.