Martin Luther King, Jr., may be America’s most revered political
figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names
around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King’s
assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public
consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of
King’s writings and political thought remains underappreciated.
In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write that
the marginalization of King’s ideas reflects a romantic,
consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently
conservative—an effort not at radical reform but at “living up
to” enduring ideals laid down by the nation’s founders. On this
view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of
universal (white) heroes, but produced little original thought.
This failure to engage deeply and honestly with King’s writings
allows him to be conscripted into political projects he would not
endorse, including the pernicious form of “color blindness”
that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has
been overcome. Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert
Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in
careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings on
labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil
disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love,
just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism,
nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King’s exciting
and learned work, the authors find an array of compelling
challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our
present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.
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