Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Individual

This week we honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., but it is a contested legacy. Was he some form of Marxist or democratic socialist, in tune with those who call for “socialism” and “collectivism” in America? Or should we understand him as supporting a traditional view of the American individual?

Born in 1929, King was accepted to Morehouse University at the age of 15. That summer, he worked on a farm in Connecticut and marveled at an integrated society, where white and black men worked side by side, attended integrated churches, and could eat at the same restaurants.

Within a decade, King had finished his undergraduate and graduate degrees, earning his Ph.D. and beginning service at a church in Montgomery, Ala. His graduate study at Boston University is often overlooked: he focused on personalism under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf, coming to a rich understanding of the Christian God as knowable, with important ramifications for the inherent worth of individual human persons, men and women, who are created in the image of God.

While in graduate school, King regularly preached at churches in the Boston area and elsewhere. One sermon called communism the “negation … of the Christian view of man.” In King’s words, communism is “incompatible” with Christianity and American society because of its brutality, statism, and “atheistic, secularistic, and materialistic” philosophy.

Whether we call it Marxism, socialism, communism, or collectivism, the individual would be a “servant, dutiful and submissive” to government. King preached,

…the state is the end while it lasts. Man becomes only a means to that end. And if any man’s so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of press or pulpit expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books and even his friendships are all restricted. Man has to be a servant, dutiful and submissive, of the State, and the state is omnipotent and supreme.

It is true that elsewhere King critiqued both collectivism and capitalism. Both drew his criticism as being unjust. But the differences in critique are important. King’s description of unfair, crony “capitalism” was appropriate because the black Americans of his day did not have access to an open, competitive, democratic free market system. Black Americans—especially in the American South, but in other places as well—encountered a perverted market and political system. A true free market system is rooted in a wider context of ordered liberty, individual rights, the rule of law, and political equality. Thus, King called for reforming American society, not overthrowing it.

In contrast, King understood all forms of collectivism as evil: “Man collectivized in the group [class], the tribe, the race, and the nation often sinks to levels of barbarity unthinkable even among lower animals.” That is because the ends-justify-the-means ethic of collectivism empowers elites, such as Stalin, Hitler (a national socialist), Mao, and Castro, to appropriate property, vilify groups within society (e.g., Jews, property owners), shut down churches and newspapers, imprison, and murder all under the guise of the “collective good.”

Perhaps we see King’s best defense of the individual in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. King argued that law should “uplift” the human person: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” King did not view America’s black citizens as the faceless proletariat of class theory; he called them the “disinherited children of God.”

King’s vision is consonant with that of America’s founders, de Tocqueville, Lincoln, and many others. According to King’s view of “human personality,” individuals are connected via the family, church, local community, and society. The American individual should not be understood as alienated, atomized, or consumed by greed. America’s individuals are rooted and connected.

Perhaps the best expression of King’s personalism can be found in the assumptions of his “I Have a Dream Speech.” King does not forecast a day when we have all been subsumed into the collective, nor does he call for a glorious revolution of the proletariat. He talks about “all of God’s children” as well as his own four children as distinct persons. “We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity.” Furthermore, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This is authentic American individualism. King summed it up, as a father, pastor, and citizen, that “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” will be able to seek their destinies, make contributions to their communities, take responsibility for themselves and for their families, and live with equality of opportunity within the framework of ordered liberty.

This article, written by VOC President and CEO Dr. Eric Patterson, was originally published in WORLD. The views and opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.