The Triple Evils of Society
Why MLK was killed.
“I’ve come upon something that disturbs me deeply. We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know we will win, but I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid that America has lost the moral vision she may have had, and I’m afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears the soul of this nation.”
These words were spoken by one of the great leaders of the 20th century and perhaps the greatest American of them all, Dr. Martin Luther King. A black bodhisattva. A man whose teachings echo through the ages.
Soon after he spoke them, King would be dead — slain by an assassin's bullet. James Earl Ray — a petty criminal and white supremacist — was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the murder. He later recanted his confession, which he said he had given on the advice of his attorney to avoid the sentence of death by electrocution.
Throughout his life as an activist, King was subjected to surveillance by the FBI. The agency had started monitoring King in 1955 during his involvement with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Surveillance stepped up throughout the 1960s and very significantly after King’s seminal anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered on April 4, 1967.
J. Edgar Hoover, the notoriously nefarious director of the FBI, considered King a “liar,” a “communist” and a potential “messiah” for the black revolutionary struggle — a movement that Hoover considered dangerous, unpredictable, and a threat to national security. Hoover, who has been described as “The 20th century’s single most effective foe of the American left,” regularly leaked stories to the press denouncing King as a serial womanizer in an attempt to overthrow his moral authority.
As part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation against King, a letter was sent to him in 1964, purportedly from a former black supporter, denouncing him as “a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.” The letter went on to accuse King of adulterous acts and called him a “filthy, abnormal animal” before ending by suggesting King kill himself “before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” King correctly identified the letter as a threat from the FBI.
King was a lifelong advocate of non-violence and a preacher at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. He characterized non-violence as “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.” During the Bus Boycott, King got his first experience of non-violence as a force for social change. He refused to march with armed bodyguards despite threats made against his life and reacted with compassion to violent attacks, such as the bombing of his home. King called non-violent resistance “the guiding light of our movement” and added, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”
So why was King, an avowed Gandhian non-violent pacifist, considered a unique threat by the American state? It wasn’t because of his campaigns for racial equality; those were codified into law with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was because he had started speaking out against militarism overseas and poverty at home and calling for a radical reorganization of American society. He said in 1967:
“It was easier to integrate public facilities, it was easier to gain the right to vote because it didn’t cost the nation anything. And the fact is that we’re dealing with issues now that will call for something of a restructuring of the architecture of American society. It’s going to cost the nation something.”
King made the connection between what he called “The Triple Evils of Society,” namely racism, militarism, and poverty. He vowed to tackle the entanglement of capitalism and systemic poverty. In a speech delivered at Stanford University on April 14, 1967, entitled “The Other America,” King contrasted the popular vision of America as a bastion of freedom and prosperity with what he had seen in working-class slums:
“…tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America, millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America, millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America, people are poor by the millions. And they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
This speech came ten days after King had denounced the war in Vietnam and contrasted America’s attempts to devastate a poor Asian nation with its lack of effort in alleviating domestic poverty:
“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle (for economic justice). It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
King’s compassion for the poor meant he transcended the “us vs them” narrative that still dominates discussions on race today. On a march in Chicago in 1966, one white lady approached Dr. King full of vitriol and abuse and spat in his face. King retorted:
“You know, you’re much too beautiful to be mean.”
Later, the lady returned and apologized:
“I’m sorry, I never should have been so rude.”
King saw racism in whites as cancer, a disease they suffered from, an anger that ate away at their souls. He didn’t get mad with sick people; he tried to help them. He pitied poor whites who had nowhere to turn but racism; he knew that their poisoned minds resulted from the rotten core at the center of American society.
His beliefs echoed the lyrics of a popular song of the Civil Rights Era, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” by Bob Dylan:
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
King’s Poor People’s Campaign, launched in 1968, called for economic justice for poor people in the United States. Specific demands included $30 billion for anti-poverty initiatives — roughly the annual expenditure on Vietnam at the time, full employment, guaranteed income, and the annual construction of 500,000 residences:
“When it comes to poor people we call it welfare, handouts, doles. But when it comes to rich people we call it subsidies and it’s the same thing, it’s all welfare.”
In a speech to a multi-racial group of supporters, King said:
“It’s been one of my dreams that we would come together and realize our common problems. Black people, Mexican Americans, American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian Whites all working together to solve the problem of poverty.”
King’s appeal for people to unite across the racial divide went far beyond the narrow identity politics of today. Whilst modern movements attempt to integrate increasingly fringe minority groups into the fabric of a militarist state, King called instead for the radical construction of a more compassionate state.
King’s eagerness to build a multi-ethnic coalition was evident in his disparagement of figures like Stokely Carmichael, who advocated “black power.” Carmichael called for the eviction of white people from the freedom struggle and said that they should focus on developing their own communities. Marian Wright Edelman, an organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign, recalled:
“I will never forget Dr. King’s face when “black power” started to emerge, he looked like the most stricken man.”
In a 1968 tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois, author of several seminal works, including “The Souls of Black Folk,” King intoned that generations of white Americans had been “assiduously taught falsehoods” and that:
“the collective mind of America was poisoned with racism and stunted with myths.”
King said that the state had to propagate lies about the intelligence of black folk:
“because to tell the truth would have acknowledged the Negroes’ capacity to govern and fitness to build a finer nation in a creative relationship with poor whites.”
It was King’s belief that all of humanity was:
“caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Whilst King was calling for America to “be born again and undergo a radical revolution of values,” the state apparatus was busy in its attempts to bring him down. In Beyond Vietnam, King had called the American government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The government’s faithful organs in the media quickly responded.
The criticism of the speech was swift and sharp. Newspaper headlines read:
“A Tragedy,” “Dr. King’s Error,” “Martin Luther King Crosses the Line,” “King Loses Position in Rights Movement,” “Dr. King’s Disservice to His Cause,” “Martin Luther King’s Tragic Decision.”
The New York Times contested that by fusing the civil rights with the peace movement King was inviting failure by uniting two causes which were “distinct” and “separate.”
As the Poor People’s Campaign began to take shape in early 1968, the FBI stated erroneously that King clung to “the possibility of violence… as a lever to pressure Congress into action.” It then faulted King for not stopping rioters and looters.
President Lyndon Johnson asked his press secretary to distribute the FBI’s information about King’s ties to alleged Communist Stanley Levison to reliable reporters. The Democratic Party turned against him en masse. For speaking out against violence, King had become persona non grata in warmonger America.
The night before his assassination, King told a multi-racial group of striking garbage sanitation workers that he believed that their struggle in Memphis exposed the need for economic equality and social justice. He hoped that the Poor People’s Campaign would highlight that need on a national scale. The striking workers braved a snowstorm to witness King preach about his own mortality:
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Prexy Nesbitt, an activist who worked with King, said of meeting him in 1968:
“What I saw was a person who was more aware of the world situation, most of all Vietnam, and the forces of mal-intent that were mobilized and mobilizing against him.”
Nesbitt said that King’s anti-war stance had been the final straw for people who were determined to kill him. Clayborne Carson, a professor of History at Stanford University, commented:
“There were a lot people who preferred that (King) be dead. If they wouldn’t bring it about, they certainly weren’t disturbed by it. My feeling is that King would not have survived the ’60s in any case.”
After King was shot dead on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, a wave of riots swept the nation. President Johnson wasn’t surprised:
“What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”
King’s family attempted to continue his non-violent legacy. In an interview on April 6, his wife, Coretta Scott King, said:
“My husband often told the children that if a man had nothing that was worth dying for, then he was not fit to live. He said also that it’s not how long you live, but how well you live…. He gave his life for the poor of the world — the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam. Nothing hurt him more than that man could attempt no way to solve problems except through violence. He gave his life in search of a more excellent way, a more effective way, a creative rather than a destructive way.”
King’s brother, Alfred, long active in the civil rights movement and the Poor People’s Campaign, took over his role at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. On July 21, 1969, he was found dead in the swimming pool at his home. The cause of his death was listed as accidental drowning. Martin Luther King Sr., grieving father to two dead sons, said:
“He was a good swimmer. Why did he drown? I don’t know — I don’t know that we will ever know what happened.”
Alfred’s wife was more categorical:
“There is no doubt in my mind that the system killed my husband.”
J. Edgar Hoover died on the night of May 1, 1972. A “D-List” order was immediately issued, and the destruction of Hoover’s private files began. Helen Gandy, Hoover’s long-time secretary, spent weeks destroying his Personal File, thought to be where he had kept the most incriminating material used to control the most powerful figures in Washington. Any evidence the Personal File contained that the FBI was involved in a government conspiracy to assassinate Martin Luther King was destroyed.
In 1999, a jury in a civil case in Memphis unanimously concluded that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate King that “included governmental agencies.” A year later, the Federal Government investigated itself and found no evidence of a conspiracy.
