Freedom Economics

Though nearly all Americans think they know about him, Martin Luther King Jr. can still surprise us. While much of U.S. culture has marched off in a distinctly conservative direction, the questioning, communitarian energy of activists like King appears strangely alien today.¹ Since his untimely death in 1968, people across the political spectrum have domesticated King as a symbol of their own political agenda and reduced King's vision to remarkably few specific components: let us get along and judge our children on character, not skin color. In a development that might well stun King, even corporate chiefs and political conservatives line up to support King-the-symbol. There are King boulevards, bridges, and schools. It turns out that the most effective way to ignore King has been to put his tamed image everywhere. Lost here is King's analysis of the "malignant kinship" of economic and racial oppression that informed his entire life.

Thomas Jackson has launched a frontal assault on the dominant culture's cooptation of King. Pressed into what Jackson calls a "narrow civil rights frame," King's ongoing struggle against greed, militarism, and poverty is rendered invisible (p. 363). Indeed, how the culture violated King says more about the culture than King. Jackson reminds us of the King who asserted that ending racism couldn't be effectively addressed without tackling economic justice. And one can't think about economic justice without focusing on capitalism's organic problem: the centrality of profit. In a country where the clear majority of people are Christian, then and now, King preached about a Jesus fundamentally opposed to the profit-motive. This King is a threat. He challenges power. In fact, his ideas fundamentally question how most pursue their daily lives.

Jackson's message thus shoots us between the eyes. He rehabilitates King's clearest economic vision: America "had socialism for the rich, and rugged free-enterprise capitalism for the poor" (p. 346). As King would have understood, and as Jackson explains, a shared cultural context no longer exists to fully grasp the urgent lucidity of King's message. Within the confines of corporate-financed politics and media, today King's central ideas would be dismissed as out of touch or discredited as dangerously foolish.

Jackson's work shows not only that King's economic analysis and goals are as pertinent today as ever, but also that they made up the very foundation of King's thinking. With great clarity, Jackson exemplifies the best offerings of intellectual history. For example, in one paragraph, Jackson uses King's revisions of the Good Samaritan parable to detail twelve years' worth of evolution in King's thought. First used in a 1953 sermon to promote "dangerous altruism" among parishioners, MLK expanded the concept five years later to nations, urging they move beyond the narrow concerns of their own citizens. In 1960, King warned members of his own movement: "Perhaps the priest and Levite hurried by [the Jericho Road robbery victim] in haste to reach a meeting of the 'Jericho Road Improvement Association,'" an ironic nod to the increasing social value of movement membership. In 1965, he demanded change in the "conditions that make robbery possible." And in the last years of his life, King demanded the movement generate "massive action . . . to get rid of the Jericho Road which brought the victims into being" (p. 48). Has any King scholar ever covered so much ground so gracefully?

In the 1960s, white "moderates," North and South, often repeated some version of what they considered conventional wisdom: black people had to earn the right to vote, for they presumably had "made no contribution to civilization," and until they did, should not expect the full privileges of white society. In the most elemental way possible, the civil rights movement proved them wrong: southern blacks taught America what democratic society could, and should, look like. Jackson is one of a recent spate of scholars who...