Week Nine
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
Modernity has fostered public condemnation of slavery, if not its actual abolition. Without Lincoln’s vindication of the American proposition that all humans are created equal, it’s not clear the United States would have taken over as the driver of modernity. However, the failure of Reconstruction to give emancipation political force and social reality has continued to be a bleeding wound. The “Black Lives Matter” protests prove that the bleeding continues and that systemic social problems must still be addressed—such as the role of police in the modern nation-state. Here we consider two of the greatest American black leaders, and ask, is emancipation to be attained through reform or revolution?
Malcolm Little was born in 1925. He spent six years imprisoned in Massachusetts for larceny and breaking and entering. There he joined the Nation of Islam, one of our hothouse American cults, which taught black self-reliance, separatism, and supremacy and that white people are a race of devils. He changed his name to Malcolm X to signify rejection of a slavemaster family name. He fought against the civil rights movement and its pursuit of integration and enfranchisement because of the Nation’s separatist views and rejection of participation in the political process. Though remaining Muslim, Malcolm X broke from the Nation in 1964, and soon after gave “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in Cleveland. The next year, he was assassinated by members of the Nation in Manhattan. : Malcolm X stood for an identity politics of black empowerment, which resonated with a people whose dignity has been lacerated for so long.
“And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we’ve seen is hypocrisy.”
“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in 1929 in Atlanta. His grandfather and father were Baptist ministers. The latter, originally named Michael, had visited sites associated with the reformer Martin Luther during a trip to Germany soon after Hitler had ascended to power, and took the name as a witness. Though tending towards liberal Protestant rationalism, receiving a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University, MLK in turn became a Baptist minister. The civil rights movement drew its power from the black churches, and MLK led the movement as a disciple of Christian love. His synthesis of nonviolence (from Gandhi) and civil disobedience (from Thoreau) dismantled Jim Crow. Towards the end of his life, MLK came to recognize the importance of class to racial justice, linking the Vietnam War to economic injustice. He supported democratic socialism and a guaranteed basic income. While organizing the Poor People’s March on Washington to demand an Economic Bill of Rights for every poor American, regardless of race, he was assassinated in 1968. Echoing Malcolm X, King was signaling a shift from “reform” to “revolution”: “We have moved from the era of civil rights to an era of human rights.”
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.