Martin Luther King, Jr., and Political Philosophy

Martin Luther King, Jr., may be America’s most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King’s writings and political thought remains under-appreciated. In this excerpt from the Introduction of To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry consider what King still has to teach us about building a more just and peaceful world.

The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, will undoubtedly occasion many observances of his extraordinary life and enduring political legacy. This response is only be fitting of King’s profound sacrifices, as well as the sacrifices of those who traveled alongside him on what James Baldwin presciently and empathetically called his “dangerous road.” But even as we honor King’s memory, it is imperative that we consider what his thought still has to teach us about how to build a more just and peaceful world and, more generally, about political morality, judgment, and practice.

Any attempt to interpret and critically engage King’s political thought, however, confronts a paradox. On one hand, there is the inescapable fact that King may be the most globally celebrated political figure, as well as part of the most renowned social movement, to have emerged in the United States in the twentieth century. In 1983, after occasionally rancorous de­bate, but only fifteen years after the civil rights leader’s death, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a federal holiday commemorating King’s birthday. Twenty years later, at least 730 U.S. cities were home to a street bearing his name. Perhaps the greatest testament to America’s reverence for King is the monument to him that stands amid the presidential statues, war memorials, and national museums on Washington, DC’s National Mall. There, near where King delivered “I Have a Dream” — arguably the most famous speech in American history — a sculpture dedicated to King’s memory depicts him emerging from a massive “stone of hope” meant to evoke one of the most famous lines from that address: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

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To paraphrase Wittgenstein, one might say that when it comes to King, contemporary political theory, philosophy, and social criticism are held captive by a picture. It is difficult to get outside that picture because it lies deep within our cultural common sense. The very vocabularies, narratives, concepts, and paradigms we have developed, ostensibly to understand someone like King, inexorably repeat back to us an image that conceals the scope and subtlety of his thought. The part of King’s thinking that remains visible gets compressed into arguments or claims that, for most political philosophers, are already considered convictions. Thus, reading Martin Luther King seriously appears incapable of repaying the effort. As scholars of black political thought and African American philosophy, we find these interpretive obstacles, perhaps particularly acute in this case, to be familiar. We hope to demonstrate the wrongheadedness of this larger orientation while also presenting a valuable collection of original theoret­ical work on a historically significant but deeply under-appreciated thinker.

Though he held a doctorate in systematic theology and spent a number of years studying the history of Western political thought and philosophy, King was not an academic political philosopher. In addition to being an activist and a Christian minister, he was, however, a serious public philosopher, writing numerous books and essays and delivering countless speeches for a general audience. Given the professionalization of po­litical philosophy, there is a strong bias against treating public philoso­phers, even eminent world-­historical figures like King, as worthy of sus­tained study. Academic political philosophers write largely for each other and rely almost exclusively on a tiny canon of nonacademic po­litical thinkers — for example, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean­Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. There is a high bar to accep­tance into this elite company, and few black public philosophers (with the exception, perhaps, of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon) are widely regarded as having cleared it. Public philosophers are generally seen as, at best, popularizers of the original ideas of more significant thinkers. The study of King has suffered because of this academic insularity and prejudice against political thinkers who seek a nonspecialist readership. So here, through our collective effort to critically engage King’s writings, we aim to help correct this unjustified neglect — while also, we hope, ap­pealing to nonspecialist readers ourselves.

It is also important to acknowledge that King is often read through one of the most enduring and entrenched features of black political culture: the celebration of, and reverence for, virtuosic oratory performance and orac­ular wisdom. Rooted in African American religious and artistic practice, these performances fuse style and substance and embody them in a char­ismatic rhetorical persona, which seems, to many, to confer authority and standing. A masterful orator and inspiring leader, King had an uncanny ability to turn a memorable and lyrical phrase, to conjure a vivid meta­phor, to stir his listeners’ emotions, and to move people to action across a wide range of audiences. These talents understandably continue to play a significant role in securing and shaping King’s legacy.

Although poetic and prophetic performance can indeed impart vital philosophical insight, interpreting a public philosopher like King solely through this lens risks distortion and invites misuse. For instance, one can be tempted to invoke a phrase, abstracted from its context, to amplify an idea or advance a cause that King actually opposed. One might treat a quoted remark as if it were a standalone aphorism when in fact King used it as a premise in a wider argument. Or because a particular rhetorical pre­sentation of an idea resonates powerfully, one might feel viscerally that it is grasped without, however, appreciating its full implications or philo­sophical grounding. We contend that King is a systematic thinker and thus it is imperative to dig beneath his soaring oratory and quotable phrases to find the complex reasons he provides to support his practical conclusions.

This vision, more broadly, calls for analyses of black political thought that attend carefully to the details and nuances of arguments advanced by black thinkers and the often subtle philosophical differences between like­ minded figures. This work demands the charitable reconstruction of theo­retical claims to clarify and make explicit key insights and fruitful avenues for further research and reflection. To carry it out, we must avoid, or at least provisionally hold at bay, certain familiar tendencies in scholarly ac­ counts of black political thought: treating political ideas solely as ratio­nalizations for class and group interests or as effects of socio-historical factors; regarding these ideas as worthy of study only because of their per­ceived social function; thinking of them as mere social or psychological phenomena to be empirically explained; and — particularly pernicious in the case of King — reducing these ideas to mere tactical moves to advance some agenda in a changing context.

The approach to black political thought that we favor also rejects hagiography. Black thinkers are due far more respect and attention than they typically receive from political philosophers. They should not, however, be uncritically celebrated or treated as oracles of near­-divine wisdom. Criti­cism and disagreement are often appropriate, and necessary. Indeed, honest critical engagement (which eschews harsh polemics and ad hominem dis­ missals) is a way of showing genuine respect for black thinkers. This is a conception of political philosophy shared by our contributors and our subject. It embraces historical specificity and close reading, considers and defends substantive principles, values, and goals, and builds upon the very ideas and theories put forth by the thinkers we sharply criticize. In doing so, it contributes to the rediscovery of rich and often overlooked tradi­tions of political thought.