From King to Obama

In the future we must become intense political activists. We must be guided in this direction because we need political strength, more desperately than any other group in American society. Most of us are too poor to have adequate economic power, and many of us are too rejected by the culture to be part of any tradition of power. Necessity will draw us toward the power inherent in the creative uses of politics. (Martin Luther King, Jr. - Black Power Defined - New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1967)

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee as the United States headed towards a Presidential election against a backdrop of growing social tensions caused by a war in Vietnam, widening frustrations about the pace of social transformation at home, and the announcement by Lyndon B. Johnson that he would not seek another term as President.  King himself stood at the centre of these developments as he was involved in organizing the Poor People's Campaign and its plan for non-violent protests in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1968 in order to force the federal government to do more to address the persistence of social, racial, and economic inequities that continued to shape American life.

King's plan for 1968 followed upon his break with the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967 when he delivered his major critique of the war - A Time to Break Silence - to an audience at the Riverside Church in New York City. In that address, King explicitly linked the escalation in Vietnam to the crisis confronting the poor in America. According to King:

There is ... a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago, there was shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor- both black and white - through the poverty program. ... Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

King's 1967 speech marked a major turning point in his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson. King's moral clarity on the need for an end to the American war in Vietnam helped to crystallize the increasing domestic disaffection with the Johnson administration which had supported King' struggle with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King's critique in 1967 also helped to spur the political momentum against the war coming from within the Democratic party and the Congress that led to Johnson's decision to leave office in 1968.

Throughout his brief but brilliant career as the leader of the civil rights struggle, King, who had never held political office, displayed the extraordinary skills of a national leader invested with a moral authority that transcended political affiliation. His was the voice of both reason and faith that framed the issues confronting America at a time that American race relations constituted a stumbling block to American efforts to exercise leadership in the international system. King understood that social transformation within America was key to American leadership in the international system, and his challenges to both American domestic politics and the war in Vietnam was about creating a moral economy and political order based upon non-violence. In his tribute to Mohandas Gandhi - His Influence Speaks to World Conscience - on the tenth anniversary of the Indian leader's assassination, King observed:

I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of non-violence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem of America. ... When I was in theological school, I thought the only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed revolt. I felt that the Christian ethic of love was confined to individual relationships. I could not see how it could work in social conflict. Then I read Gandhi's ethic of love as revealed in Jesus but raised to a social strategy for social transformation. This lifts love from individual relationships to the place of social transformation. This Gandhi helped us to understand and for this we are grateful a decade after his death.

King also applied this recognition of Gandhi's insight into changing popular consciousness in order to stimulate social transformation as a way of framing the debate about war in a nuclear age. King argued that:
The Gandhian influence in some way still speaks to the conscience of the world as nations grapple with international problems. If we fail, on an international scale, to follow the Gandhian principle of non-violence, we may end up destroying ourselves through the misuse of our own instruments.

King's engagement with Gandhi's thought and praxis had led him to articulate an alternative vision for American domestic politics and his critique of America's war in Vietnam. His assassination in 1968 as he was planning the Poor People's Campaign, and while he was visiting Memphis to lend support to striking sanitation workers seeking union representation, brought an end to King's vision of social transformation and his efforts to promote a retreat from the culture of war represented by America's misadventure in Vietnam.

King's death may have stilled his voice and his championship of non-violence in both domestic politics and foreign policy. However, his legacy has continued to shape contemporary America, not only through the celebration of the national holiday that was established in his honor by the Reagan administration, but also by his articulation of the possibility of an America where people could be defined by the "content of their character" rather than "the color of their skin." It is a legacy that now poses the most direct challenge to American political culture since King's assassination.

The emergence of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate in, perhaps, the most significant presidential election year since 1968 when both King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, has returned the issues of 1968 to the American political agenda. Obama has become a candidate from the African American community who has demonstrated enormous appeal to significant numbers of white, black, and other Americans and his charismatic appeal has crossed racial, generational, and partisan boundaries. He has emerged as a symbol of a budding American political maturity and an advocate of a radical shift in contemporary political culture. In real terms, his rhetoric has increasingly made him (to use King's phrase) "a genuine leader [who] is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus." 

Obama's early appeal was based upon his willingness to emphasize that he had opposed the American invasion of Iraq as a matter of principle and he has used it effectively to distance himself from other candidates. However, key to his growth as a political figure has been his willingness to speak a language of consensus across the political divide and to use his family history - the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii - to illustrate his ability to live with and engage people across the mosaic of American society.  It has been often-forgotten that Hawaii represents a distinct cultural space in American society. Separated from the mainland of North America by thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii in 1959 was the only state to be admitted to the Union with a majority of its population composed of people of colour. It is also a culture in which indigenous and immigrant cultures have intermingled and created spaces for the sustenance of a cultural pluralism that contrasts sharply with the legacies of segregation that define much of the American mainland.

It is perhaps this comfort with cultural pluralism in Hawaii that shaped his formative years, together with his mother's willingness to engage cultures other than mainland America, which have been important formative influences upon his political style and rhetoric. Like Martin Luther King Jr. who was educated in both the South and the North of the United States, in both historically black and predominantly white colleges and universities, and who was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi and other challengers to oppression, Obama demonstrates the ability and willingness to transcend the cloistered boundaries of American political debates. His legal training and his teaching of constitutional law have also given him a firm grounding in American rhetoric and political theory that few of his counterparts can match. It is his ability to think outside the box and to move beyond mouthing reassuring platitudes that have defined Obama's campaign and his political strategy thus far.

It was this intellectual flexibility that allowed Obama to escape the lapse into "group-think" and hysteria that swept the majority of the American elected leadership into endorsing the ill-conceived military campaign against,  and the subsequent occupation of, Iraq. Like King in 1967, Obama's willingness to call for an end to an American war of choice that has tarnished the American image abroad, and provoked deep divisions at home, has been a source of discomfiture for an American political leadership blinded by imperial hubris. As a consequence, his presidential campaign offers the promise of relief from an unpopular war that has become a political and economic burden for the entire country. Like his fellow Texan and counterpart in 1967, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush is confronted by the fact that a major African American leader with a significant national following has sharpened the crisis of political legitimacy over a failed war.

The war in Iraq has had a major impact upon American economic well-being since it has coincided with large tax cuts for the wealthy, increasing crude oil prices, an explosion of trading and current account deficits for the federal government, and the decline in the value of the US dollar as a reserve and trading currency. These economic developments have been compounded by the strain on the American military resulting from the pursuit of a two-front "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq. In many ways, Iraq, like Vietnam, is going to force any new administration to confront the unforeseen costs and unintended consequences of the war for the American economy and its military establishment. These were the issues that allowed the Republican candidate Richard Nixon to capture the White House in 1968, and to initiate the resurgence of the American right that has dominated American politics over the last four decades. The Democratic party has an historic opportunity to use the 2008 election to move American politics towards the progressive agenda which stumbled in the 1960s with the assassination of King and the Kennedy brothers, and the collapse of the Johnson administration as a result of the war in Vietnam.

Key to the return of a progressive agenda in American politics will be a sustained effort to build a broad inter-racial coalition transcending class and regional boundaries, within the Democratic party. Given the increasing diversity of American society, and the plethora of evidence that the Republican party has been unable to break the deep-seated xenophobia and commitment to white supremacist politics that has shaped its politics since the late 1960s, the Democratic party has become the vehicle of choice for a ‘new politics' of race that could effectively reshape both the rhetoric and reality of American life. In many ways, the creative use of inter-racial politics could lead to the Democrats playing a leading role in the institutionalization of a multi-cultural democracy in America which can reinvigorate America's appeal as an open society within the wider international system. That is the challenge facing the Democratic Party in 2008 - giving substance to King's recognition that social transformation at home is key to the exercise of American influence abroad.

Unlike King who remained outside of the realm of electoral politics, and inspired by a religious calling to redeem America, Obama will have to rise to the challenge of developing a strategy based upon the "creative use of politics" as a way to reshape American politics for a new generation. He has stepped into uncharted waters by becoming a major contender for leadership of the Democratic party, and ultimately for the office of President. His rise has been as much a product of his political acumen as it has been a consequence of the catastrophic failures of the Bush administration - Iraq, Katrina, and the Mortgage meltdown that has overtaken large parts of the American financial services industry and some international investors. Overcoming these challenges would test the best of traditional candidates for the American Presidency, but Obama will be carrying the visible marker of being an "outsider" in the White House - should he win the Presidency. It will be both a challenge and an opportunity to write a new chapter in the saga of American history.

First published in the Trinidad and Tobago Review, March 3, 2008