All-American Rebels by Robert C. Cottrell

Author:Robert C. Cottrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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While terribly distressed by the war, King had continued his Poor People’s Campaign to demand Congress initiate an extensive jobs program or provide guaranteed income for the American people. During the last months of his life, King openly advocated the democratic socialism he had long favored. Amid his courting of Coretta Scott, the then twenty-three-year-old King had revealed in 1952, “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” Assailing capitalism, King charged that it took “necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” Talking to the Negro American Labor Council in 1961, King declared, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in late 1964, he acknowledged that Scandinavian democratic socialism had much to offer. Capitalism he saw as linking racism, militarism, and materialism. Talking at a SCLC retreat in the spring of 1967, King indicated, “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.” He also stated, “We see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

Speaking with the journalist David Halberstam in mid-1967, King conceded, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” Emphasizing the need for improved distribution of wealth, King suggested to his staff, “Maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, published during the summer of 1967, King wrote, “The time has come for us,” he asserted, “to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

Discussing the Poor People’s Campaign at a SCLC gathering in early December, King indicated his organization would “lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to” the nation’s capital the following spring to demand “jobs or income for all.” The demonstrators would insist on being heard and remain in Washington, D.C., “until American responds.” They would confront, even embrace “scorn or ridicule,” if necessary, for that was what the poor faced. They would willingly accept jail, for that too was something the indigent experienced. However, SCLC hoped that the Washington action and subsequent militant nonviolent protests across the country would be sympathetically received. Staff members would farm out to key cities and rural communities to elicit volunteers for the Poor People’s Campaign. “Our nation is at a crossroads of history,” King warned. He genuinely feared this amounted to a “last chance” to head in the direction of “constructive democratic change.”

As King planned his Poor People’s Campaign, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover added SCLC as a target under COINTELPRO. Orders went out to FBI offices “to expose, disrupt,

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