Nicholas Brown is a founding member of Harvard Students for Bernie: A College Democrats Subgroup.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is over. But as we count down the days until the first presidential caucuses and primaries, it is time to take King’s vision seriously.
On MLK Day, Americans gathered across the country for meals, service, and song, and newspapers republished “I Have a Dream.” On national television, the major Democratic presidential candidates walked arm in arm at the parade in Columbia, S.C.
I felt great joy seeing the most progressive field of presidential candidates in decades walk in solidarity together, commemorating King’s legacy. At the same time, I could not help but feel like I was watching a perfunctory show of support for a limited version of King’s vision — a vision which is still too bold for all but one of the candidates who joined the parade.
King believed in something he called democracy. For him, democracy and democratic socialism were synonymous. In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King clarified his position: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” King identified “three evils of society” as threats to democracy: racism, poverty, and war.
King’s work towards racial justice led him to fight for what he believed to be its extensions: universal enfranchisement, economic justice, and peace. With respect to universal enfranchisement, he declared, “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind — it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact — I can only submit to the edict of others.” As for economic justice, he organized the Poor People’s Campaign, which demanded full employment, a fair minimum wage, unemployment insurance, more low-income housing, and better education for the poor. Further, he proclaimed healthcare to be a right: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.” Destroying his reputation during the Vietnam War, he decried the United States’ sending young black men “away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
To truly understand who King was, you must recognize that his vision was much more radical than the watered-down version in our collective consciousness — a version which has been made palatable to nearly everyone. King’s complete vision of civil rights for all included defending universal enfranchisement, fighting the three evils, and championing every American’s right to healthcare.
Of all the 2020 presidential candidates, only Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) platform reflects King’s complete vision. In fact, the activist and rapper Killer Mike has gone so far as to declare that King “was killed for many of the same reasons [Sanders] is campaigning for.”
Today, King would likely be horrified to learn that mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement have raised the number of disenfranchised Americans — disproportionately people of color — from nearly 1.2 million in 1976 to over six million. According to King, that means six million of our fellow Americans do not possess themselves. While others debate granting voting rights to various groups, Sanders remains the only presidential candidate willing to defend the enfranchisement of every American. His push for universal suffrage, the basis of true democracy, demonstrates his commitment to civil equality, which permeates his platform.
Many of Sanders’ other goals also echo King’s vision:
- While his opponents argue about how to make housing more affordable for some, only Sanders has declared housing a fundamental human right and proposed a concrete plan to end homelessness in America.
- While other presidential candidates serving in the House and Senate vacillate between voting for and against Trump’s military budget increases, only Sanders publicly opposes all of them.
- While former Vice President Joe Biden led the effort to go to war with Iraq, only Sanders took the political risk of leading the then unpopular effort against invasion.
- While other candidates refuse to support universal healthcare — or no longer mention it on the campaign trail, let alone fight for it, after facing criticism — only Sanders makes that pillar of King’s civil rights a centerpiece of his agenda.
- While his opponents want to create more jobs, only Sanders, invoking the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign, aims to guarantee jobs for all.
- While others want to lessen the burden of paying for college or make it free for some, only Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) call for extending public education to include K-16.
- While Biden bragged about numerous attempts to freeze spending, which would allow inflation to undercut Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, and Social Security, only Sanders has spent decades consistently fighting to boost these programs in the name of economic justice.
As we know, King paid a heavy price for his vision: his life. It is less well-remembered that when he included economic justice, universal enfranchisement, and ending the Vietnam War in his civil rights agenda, his popularity plummeted. When King was assassinated at age 39, his public disapproval rating was nearly 75 percent. The FBI once named him the “most dangerous Negro in America,” surveilled him for twelve years, and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide. Few Americans know this ugly side of our history when King was disfavored by the people and treated as an enemy of the state.
We have come a long way since that time: Americans now rightly eulogize King, with even the FBI honoring his memory on Twitter. However, to honor King’s complete legacy, we must recognize the boldness of his vision, which not only threatened the status quo in the 1950s and 1960s but remains too radical today for every presidential candidate except Sanders.
But is King’s vision still too radical for America?
Today, Sanders leads the Democratic primary race in a recent CNN poll, comes in first among white people, nonwhite people, and voters under fifty in numerous polls, boasts the largest lead against Trump in hypothetical matchups of 2020 candidates, has the highest favorability of all candidates, would satisfy the most Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents if he were the nominee, is America’s most popular senator, and decisively won the popular vote in Iowa by six percent — a greater difference than the national popular vote margin of the 2016 presidential election. It is safe to say that a groundswell of Americans are ready for King’s vision, democratic socialism and all.
Image Credit: Flickr / cornstalker