By the end of his life, Martin Luther King realized the validity of violence
The riots of 1967 changed how the great man saw the struggle
In the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. was less than a year away from his death. It’s impossible to say if he knew this, but he must have felt something on the horizon. To be so black and so visible and so dangerous to the status quo for so long meant that the bullet was already on its way toward him. By then he had somewhat resigned himself to the idea of the riot as a necessary form of action.
Just a year earlier, in a tense 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace, he insisted that the vast majority of black people in America still honored nonviolent resistance as the best way forward, but acknowledged that a rising group in the black community was now advocating for violent resistance. This interview is where his famous “a riot is the language of the unheard” quote originated, citing the newfound urgency facing black people. Just a few sentences later, often left out of our retelling of the quote, King warned of violence in the coming summers while also holding fast to his hope for nonviolence. “I would say that every summer we’re going to have this kind of vigorous protest,” he told Wallace. “My hope is that it will be nonviolent. I would hope that we can avoid riots because riots are self-defeating and socially destructive. I would hope that we can avoid riots, but that we would be as militant and as determined next summer and through the winter as we have been this summer.”
The summer in question turned out to be the Long Hot Summer, and Martin Luther King found himself in an increasingly difficult position. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 felt to some like distant memories. Progress, especially when it is passed down by those in power to those who are not, can be blinding. The work of King’s civil rights movement was vital, but its successes may have obscured the fact that the root of the problem was impossible to pull up and dismantle: that the country was founded on the subjugation of the poor, the marginalized, the black.
King’s efforts towards moderation and a stern but willing hand to reach across the aisle to whites were increasingly at odds with the direction of the new resistance. He was right in 1966 about members of the black community turning to militant violence as a means of leveling the playing field, but he seemed then unwilling or unable to recognize their growing numbers and influence. Younger militants, buoyed by the earlier teachings of Malcolm X, assassinated just two years earlier, were moving themselves to the forefront of the national conversation around race and resistance.
There is something heartbreaking about watching one era bend itself as it begins to bow to another. King’s work was nowhere near finished in 1967, but the work he took on looked different. His eye was more globally tuned than it was before — vehemently speaking against the Vietnam War. He was focused on economic justice as well, laying the groundwork for what would become the Poor People’s Campaign. But in the urban areas that were being betrayed by the institutions that were supposed to uplift and protect them, urgency was high, and noise had to be made.
By the summer of that year, the country was on fire. Not all of it, of course — very specific pockets of it. Riots erupted in major cities: Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Newark. It was the boiling over of a pot that had been simmering for the majority of the Sixties, first in the South and then rising upward and outward: a pushback against rampant police abuse and lack of affordable housing, a swelling resistance against urban renewal projects and economic inequality, and, most importantly, the rise of black militancy.
In September of 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech at the American Psychology Association’s annual convention in Washington, DC. Approaching his fortieth year, more than a decade removed from his most prominent battles and victories, this was King with the sun setting at his back. In the eyes of many he was the nominal leader of a movement that no longer followed him. And he was faced with the choice of whether to resist or submit to the growing momentum of a younger, more turbulent generation. It was his first speech since the bloody summer had come to a close, and he appeared to have evolved on the issue of rioting and looting. He now spoke of it as a necessary act, a stance which stood in contrast to his discussion of riots just a year earlier. He had been resigned to them as an inevitability, but now he was understanding them as a small measure of freedom.
“Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena,” he told the assembled crowd of mostly white doctors and academics. “They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking.”
One of the foundational notions of nonviolence is that in order to be respected, one must behave well and abide by the social contract: work hard, follow the rules, and prosper. The problem is that since the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade, black people had worked harder and followed more rules, more strictly than anyone in America. And still they found themselves in an impossible and impoverished situation. King might not have been as militant as the militants would have liked, and he may have become an even greater citizen of the world while cities were on fire, but by the time he spoke in the fall of 1967, he recognized that it would no longer be effective to tell black folks to only protest peacefully, kindly, and respectfully. They could not prosper in a game where they were the only ones expected to play by the rules. King closed that speech with a stark truth:
“Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”
If it is violent to take that which does not belong to you for the thrill of, even briefly, imagining yourself on even ground with your oppressor, then King was concluding there was to be no hope for nonviolence. Perhaps not then, perhaps not ever. Martin Luther King, at the end of his life, was coming to understand the restrictions of nonviolence as a weapon against a violent oppressor who shows no moral compass. There are limits to how long one can attempt to quiet a fire. King’s transition from the summer of 1966 to the summer of 1967, was from hoping against violence to accepting it as a function of the society it operated in, as an inevitability for a people he had led to a promised land that did not deliver on its promise.
Beyond the misattributed quotes and bad memes and poor logic made in his name, the real tragedy of King’s legacy is that the white people who so frequently invoke it in the name of peace do so with a fundamental perversion of his message. Nonviolence — as it is discussed and fetishized in proximity to the poor and/or marginalized — is so often only dragged out in response to any uprising of those people. The riot is a language, yes, but the response to a riot is also its own language; a language of doublespeak. The call is for peace and love, but the true demand is for complete silence altogether. An NFL player takes a knee without speaking, and is threatened and hated, called a violent thug and a racist. For those of certain skin colors, no protest can be peaceful enough.
And it’s funny how that works. The people who have the most justifiable anger, the most rightful case for rebellion are the ones most frequently told to settle down, to embrace nonviolence. They are the ones told to follow the example of a man who met his end with a bullet, fired from a racist’s gun.
