I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.
What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
He was literally a professional theologian and his beliefs were instrumental to his activist work. And when was this quote from? He became more and more fervently anti-capitalist as time went on and he realized that the United States was a “burning house” due to its broken economic system.
He spoke a few times saying that Communist states hadn’t aligned themselves to the same freedoms as America is supposed to, etc. etc. It’s pretty bread and butter appealing to red scare America rhetoric, and it’s much less anti Communist than almost anything else that was remotely mainstream from the time. So I say he gets a pass.
Where Do We Go From Here? August 1967, 8 months before being assassinated
pointing out a bad take doesn’t diminish his accomplishments, being a demsoc is still good, he knew the feds were after him and what his audience needed to hear and definitely gets a pass
The fact that they had to water him down, and couldn’t just disappear him from mainstream historiography like they did with Huey Newton, is a big part of what makes him a legend.
This is a great quote, it has been some time since I read up on MLK so I forgot who had said it. I agree with it completely.
MLK was a fucking legend
mostly, he also had some bad takes
I can’t say it’s a bad take as I haven’t read Feuerbach
He was literally a professional theologian and his beliefs were instrumental to his activist work. And when was this quote from? He became more and more fervently anti-capitalist as time went on and he realized that the United States was a “burning house” due to its broken economic system.
He spoke a few times saying that Communist states hadn’t aligned themselves to the same freedoms as America is supposed to, etc. etc. It’s pretty bread and butter appealing to red scare America rhetoric, and it’s much less anti Communist than almost anything else that was remotely mainstream from the time. So I say he gets a pass.
Where Do We Go From Here? August 1967, 8 months before being assassinated
pointing out a bad take doesn’t diminish his accomplishments, being a demsoc is still good, he knew the feds were after him and what his audience needed to hear and definitely gets a pass
Hard agree. Too bad seeing that in '67 though.
Yeah, sad that schools teach such a watered down version of him.
The fact that they had to water him down, and couldn’t just disappear him from mainstream historiography like they did with Huey Newton, is a big part of what makes him a legend.
It’s almost funny to see liberals quoting this at ‘centrist’ liberals as though they aren’t basically identical.
Almost.