THE RADICAL KING

A reframing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy to celebrate his political radicalism.

As the civil rights movement was shifting more toward Black Power militancy, King was occasionally criticized as a moderate whose nonviolent philosophy needed to give way to a more confrontational style, one that seemed more in tune with the tenor of the times and the temper of younger activists. As editor and annotator, the provocative scholar West (Black Prophetic Fire, 2014, etc.) maintains that King and Malcolm X, for example, were becoming allies rather than remaining polarities as black leaders and that King’s leadership was not only more radical than frequently recognized, but also more pragmatic and visionary.  From sermons and speeches to the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” much of this material is oft-anthologized, with the chronological context showing the intellectual and philosophical progression of a leader who was more radical than many suspected from the start. Tributes to W.E.B. Du Bois and Norman Thomas reinforce King’s radical sympathies, as do his reflections on reading Marx (he was ambivalent about both communism and capitalism). “King and [Nelson] Mandela are the two towering figures in the past fifty years in the world,” writes West. “Both have been Santa Clausified—tamed, domesticated, sanitized, and sterilized—into nonthreatening and smiling old men….Yet both were radical and revolutionary.” Permeating the collection is the theme of “radical love,” distinguishing King from those who preached hate toward the white oppressor or saw no place for whites in the fight for equality. “The aftermath of violence is always bitterness,” he preached in a sermon on Gandhi. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of…a new love and a new understanding and a new relationship…between the oppressed and the oppressor.”

Though many of the entries are familiar, this useful collection takes King from the front lines of Southern segregation to a national movement for economic equality to an international condemnation of imperialism and armed intervention.