by Tom H. Hastings
During the fight over the new House Speaker election, Congress member Chip Roy (R-Texas), who voted against the anti-lynching act last March, had the immoral temerity to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He did so as he explained how he was positioning himself to the hardliner right of rightwing Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
“We do not seek to judge people by the color of their skin but rather the content of their character,” said Roy.
How fitting, then, or misfitting, that Roy should oppose McCarthy, who himself has a long history of misapplying MLK quotes.
But Dr. King is the only American for whom we celebrate a national holiday, so his commitments, his actual moral authority and the meaning of what he said and wrote should be honored with accuracy and without the cynical misapplication of his words to claim he would advocate for the opposite of what he actually believed, what he lived for and ultimately what he died for.
The misattribution of Dr. King’s meaning is mostly, but not entirely, committed by rightwing politicians who vote against supporting health equity, against funding help for houseless people or against basic civil rights and even human rights.
Leftwing spokespeople also quote MLK to justify violence in the streets, riots, even looting. MLK was quite clear that he felt that, while all that is understandable when people are oppressed and kept in poverty and prison and killed by police, he also felt it was a very ineffective way to seek change.
King began publicly speaking about riots in 1966, always coming to this conclusion: Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
But his message of nonviolence was less accepted by black people in northern and western cities who didn’t care much about desegregation and who already had relatively decent voting rights — but knew they lacked other rights. King knew that the next phase of the struggle had to address the structural economic conditions that kept so many African Americans in dire poverty with poor educational, housing, health care, and career opportunities.
Grinding poverty along with a police force that felt more like an occupying army in many larger cities tended to produce a complete failure of patience and a simmering rage that could be triggered into riots by just one more outrage.
Again and again, King acknowledged the heart and commitment of those who resorted to violent insurgency, in the U.S. and abroad, when that insurgency was fighting injustice, yet he always qualified that admiration for those taking risks using violence with his belief that nonviolence is a far more effective and just path toward liberation.
Of course MLK offered his analysis based on experience, not empirical research. But his conclusion was borne out by the research done by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Their findings, and those of subsequent researchers include:
- Nonviolent insurgencies succeed about twice as often as do violent insurgencies. Riots are understandable yet much less likely to produce positive results than mass disciplined nonviolent struggle.
- Nonviolent revolutions are, on average, much faster than violent revolutions.
- Violent campaigns result in far more mortalities than do unarmed campaigns.
- Nonviolence has ousted very brutal dictators; violence has failed against relatively less autocratic regimes.
- Both nonviolence and violence can succeed and both can fail, but nonviolence succeeds more often with fewer costs.
To read what King wrote in the 1950s and then 60s — his books and his speeches — reveals a prophetic voice, one taken from us far too early, taken by violence, taken by racism.
So many have said we live in a post-truth world. Can we turn that around and show respect for the facts? King’s truth should live, unencumbered by willful twisting into lies about what he said, what he did, and what he believed.
May we have a happy MLK Day. May it be one of reflection on some deep truths.
