Martin Luther King’s Long-Standing Critique of Police Brutality – The Atlantic

In a lesser-known part of his March on Washington speech, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

Many people, upon hearing this, might assume that King was simply referring to the violence wreaked by the police department in Birmingham, Alabama, and its commissioner, Bull Connor, during the Southern Christian Leadership Conferences desegregation campaign that spring. But King understood that police brutalitylike segregationwasnt just a southern problem.

Earlier that year, shortly after getting out of jail in Birmingham, King traveled to Los Angeles and delivered a speech to 35,000 people at Wrigley Field. The city was in the midst of a growing effort, led by groups including the NAACP and the Nation of Islam, challenging the pattern of police brutality in the city and calling for Police Chief William Parkers resignation. L.A.s civil-rights leaders drew parallels between Birmingham and L.A.particularly regarding police brutality. So did King. He thanked Angelenos for their support of the Birmingham campaign but made clear that what was even more important was challenging L.A.s system of racial injustice. You asked me what Los Angeles can do to help us in Birmingham, King told the audience. The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.

In recent years, scholars have broadened the publics understanding of Kings political concerns to go beyond segregation to include poverty, labor, global human rights, and war. But even in this more expansive context, his attention to police brutality and the structural discrimination of the North has largely been missed. (King and most Black activists of the period used the terms North and northern to encompass all regions of the U.S. outside the Southin part to highlight the shared investment white city leaders and residents from the Northeast to the Midwest to the West all had in not being the South. I follow their terminology throughout this piece and in my academic work.) At the same time, commentators across the political spectrum have tended to pit King against contemporary youth movements such as Black Lives Matter, framing King as a kind of respectability-politics-upholding southern minister who kept a distance from northern Black communities.

Read: Martin Luther King Jr.s Letter From Birmingham Jail

But from the beginnings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King was clear that segregation and injustice were national, not regional, problems, and he relentlessly highlighted the need for a liberalism in the North that is truly liberal, that believes in integration in [the northerners] own community as well as in the deep South. King had observed pride among many northern white liberals for supporting the southern movement, only to see their sharp refusal to confront segregation and police brutality at home and their dismissal and demonization of local activists who did. Framing northern racism as structural and institutional, not simply a matter of individual racist cops or private discrimination, King called out the pattern of police brutality and segregation in northern cities before the uprisings of the 1960s as well as afterand he was roundly criticized for it by political leaders and citizens, as were other activists of the time. He described the total pattern of economic exploitation under which Negroes suffer in northern cities as a system of internal colonialism where police and the courts acted as enforcers.

King had been calling attention to the issue of police brutality for years. In the September 1958 issue of Fellowship, King published an article titled My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, where he wrote, I had seen police brutality with my own eyes, and watched Negroes receive the most tragic injustice in the courts. King himself had been at the mercy of police many times, and knew well the vulnerability and dangerous power dynamics a person under arrest can experience. In his 1964 book, Why We Cant Wait, King characterized police injustice as a nationwide problem: Armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner.

Throughout the 1960s, King supported disruptive direct-action movements including school boycotts, rent strikes, and street protests that challenged school and housing segregation, job discrimination, and police brutality in the North as well as in the South. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be, King observed. In 1964, he refused calls from Black and white moderates to condemn the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equalitys plan to highlight the structural discrimination rife within the city by stalling cars on the highway leading to the 1964 Worlds Fair in Flushing Meadows: We do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice ... If our direct action programs alienate so-called friends they never were really our friends.

In July 1964, the police killing of a 15-year-old Black student, James Powell, sparked a six-day uprising in Harlem. New York Citys mayor, Robert Wagner, invited King to come to town, hoping he would ease tensions between residents and city leaders. But King didnt play by the mayors script. He first went to Harlem to meet with local leaders whod been decrying issues of police brutality, housing, and school segregation in the city for years, and then had four unsuccessful meetings over three days with Wagner. King made clear that profound and basic changes related to jobs, housing, schools, and police would be essential to avoid further uprisings. He criticized the police commissioner, Michael Murphy, for having little understanding of the urgency of the situation and for being unresponsive to either the demands or the aspirations of Black people, and called for the suspension of the officer whod shot Powell. King was nearly run out of town by Wagner and Murphy when he dared to suggest that the police needed oversight and the city would benefit from a civilian board dedicated to that task.

Then, two weeks later, after Black people rose up in Rochester following another incident of police abuse, King spoke out about the conditions that had produced these two uprisings. Criticizing the nations shallow rhetoric condemning lawlessness, he called for an honest soul-searching analysis and evaluation of the environmental causes which have spawned the riots. Over and over, King echoed local activists in calling on public officials to tackle housing and school segregation, job discrimination, and police brutalitythe tinder that led to these uprisings.

The following year, on August 11, 1965, police in South L.A. pulled over Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old Black man, for drunk driving. The arrest became violentand Watts erupted in six days of rebellion. By the end, 34 people were dead and more than 1,000 were injured. White Americans were shocked at Black anger, but King and many L.A. activists argued that this was a willful surprise. Black Angelenos had been highlighting the patterns of police brutality, housing and school segregation, and job exclusion in the city for years, and, as King saw it, political leaders kept brushing them off. He decried the violence, and laid its cause at the governments feet, noting the lack of racial progress in cities like L.A. He wrote that at a time when the Negros aspirations were at a peak, his actual conditions of employment, education, and housing were worsening.

Ibram X. Kendi: Compliance will not save me

As the uprising subsided, he traveled to L.A. to assess the situation. In a contentious three-hour session with the mayor and the police chief, King highlighted the need for oversight of the police and called for a civilian complaint-review board, as he had in New York a year earlier. And like in New York, the suggestion was angrily shot down by the police chief, William Parker. King also reiterated Black Angelenos long-standing demands for Parkers resignation. Mayor Sam Yorty complained of unfounded charges of police brutality and accused King of advocating Black lawlessness. He said (white) Los Angeles would not stand for Parkers resignation.

Growing angry, King criticized the mayor for being insensitive to social revolution and made clear that overlooking police abuses or scapegoating an isolated criminal element was a dangerous fantasy. Parker and Yorty refused to let King meet with jailed rioters, and Yorty later told reporters that Kings visit was a great disservice to the people of Los Angeles and to the nation and said that King shouldnt have come here. King received many letters from white people angry at him about the rebellion and telling him he was playing into Communists tactics in crying Police Brutalities.

Three months later, King addressed white shock over the Watts uprising in an article in the Saturday Review, zeroing in on the acceptance of police brutality in the North: As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied. King was clear that this pattern of police brutality had been evident long before the uprisingand the movements that had grown out of itbut public attention, in particular the medias attention, focused on the South. Black northerners, in contrast with Black southerners, were blamed for their unruly behaviors, which then necessitated strong-arm policing while patterns of police brutality were repeatedly denied or swept under the rug. Indeed, a year and a half earlier, in The Nation, King had described the most tragic and widespread violations of police brutality: For many white Americans in the North there is little comprehension of the grossness of police behavior and its wide practice.

In contextualizing the uprisings of the mid-1960s, King was clear: The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness. King reframed the issue of criminality, moving the focus from Black behavior to white illegality and state action, which had produced northern ghettos: When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. His police. King made clear that the police were not there to protect or serve Black residents but functioned as a mechanism of control and inequality.

Read: Kings message of nonviolence has been distorted

Looking at this aspect of Kings politics provides an urgent antidote to the ways he has been positioned against contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter. Be more like Dr. King, commentators including former Governor Mike Huckabee and the Reverend Barbara Reynolds have instructed young activists. Dr. King would never take a freeway, thenAtlanta Mayor Kasim Reed scolded Atlanta demonstrators during nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in 2016. To see Kings attention to police brutality and belief in the utility of disruptive protest is to refuse to accept this false distinction.

Maybe the reason this side of King remains unfamiliar is that it forces us to reckon with a King speaking directly to our time on the structures of American racism. We prefer the story of buses and lunch counters because they place the civil-rights leaderand the inequity he was addressingsafely in the past, rather than reckoning with the ways King called out the repeated attempts to rationalize, tolerate and deny police abuse and the systems of injustice at play in American cities. Imagine where we would be today if Kings attention to police brutality, ghettoization, and northern segregation 60 years ago had been taken seriously and addressed.

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Martin Luther King's Long-Standing Critique of Police Brutality - The Atlantic