Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy Book 2)

by Martin Luther King Jr.

King insisted on constantly raising and reflecting on the basic questions he posed in the first chapter of this work—“Where Are We?” and in the overall title of the book itself, Where do we go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Always present, of course, were the deepest questions of all: Who are we? Who are we meant to be?)

Not surprisingly, such constant probing toward self-understanding was a central element of King’s practice when he was at his best.

Indeed, it was the urgent need for such self-examination and deep reflection on the new American world that he and the freedom movement helped create that literally drove King to wrestle publicly and boldly with the profound issues of this book.

Ironically, it was almost immediately after the extraordinary success of the heroic Alabama voter-registration campaign—which led to the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the follow-up congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act—that King realized he had to confront a very difficult set of emerging American realities that ...

He said, “Something is wrong with the economic system of our nation…. Something is wrong with capitalism.” Always careful (perhaps too careful) to announce that he was not a Marxist in any sense of the word, King told the staff he believed “there must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism….”

This seemed a natural direction for someone whose ultimate societal goal was the achievement of a nonviolent “beloved community.” But a major part of the white American community and its mass media seemed only able to condemn “Negro violence” and to justify a “white backlash” against the continuing attempts of the freedom movement to move northward toward a more perfect union. (King wisely indentified the fashionable “backlash” as a continuing expression of an antidemocratic white racism that was as old as the nation itself.)

One was his continuing plea for “a coalition of Negroes and liberal whites that will work to make both major parties truly responsive to the needs of the poor.” At the same time he insisted that “we must not be oblivious to the fact that the larger economic problems confronting the Negro community will only be solved by federal programs involving billions of dollars.”

King was constantly teaching, learning, urging, admonishing—reminding Americans not only of the powerful obstacles in our histories, our institutions, and our hearts, but also calling our attention to the amazing hope represented by Thomas Paine, one of the few really radical, grassroots-oriented “founding fathers,” who dared to proclaim, “We have the power to begin the world over again.” Insisting on claiming such revolutionary words, King readily grasped them for himself and for us all. Mixing all this with his undying commitment to the way of active nonviolence, King remained faithful to the call he had put forth at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march: “We must keep going.” (Always going, always carrying the costly testimony: “Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. That is what I have found in nonviolence.”)

“There is no solution for the Negro through isolation,” he wrote. Instead, encouraging black people to continue moving on toward our best possibilities (instead of copying white America’s worst habits—especially its racism, extreme materialism, and militarism), King declared that “our most fruitful course is to stand firm, move forward nonviolently, accept disappointment and cling to hope.” In that same frame of mind, King added, “To guard ourselves from bitterness we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society.” (Did he foresee the Obama opportunity? Will Obama really see King, paying attention? And what about us? Where do we go? The questions cannot be avoided.)

“We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.”

For me, as I revisit this King and remember his last years of unrelenting struggle against what he called “the triple evils” of racism, materialism, and militarism, I see him on the nettlesome, uncharted path toward a more perfect union, a path that still challenges us all. I hear him preaching at his Ebenezer Church in Atlanta: “I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry…. This is the way I’m going. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice say, ‘Do something for others.’”

Throughout this book, King continues to combine his various roles—as spirit-based, pro-democracy activist; thoughtful social analyst; loving, encouraging pastor who calls us to our best possibilities; and as justice-obsessed, biblically shaped, prophetic spokesperson for the poor.

“It is time for the Negro middle class to rise up from its stool of indifference, to retreat from its flight into unreality and to bring its full resources—its heart, its mind and its checkbook—to the aid of the less fortunate brother [and sister].”

“Let us not think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into all the existing values of American society.” Instead, he urged, “Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”

In the light of King’s unstintingly accurate critique of his “beloved nation,” and his vision of our “higher destiny” as human beings, it was clear why he needed to believe in Tom Paine’s radical vision of our capacity “to begin the world over again,” moving toward “the final goal” of “genuine intergroup and interpersonal living.”

Indeed, he seemed deeply in sync with James Baldwin’s urgent call to us to “realize ourselves” as an American family of many rich varieties. He was clearly attuned to Langston Hughes’s readiness to “swear this oath” that “America will be.” Indeed he often seemed the prescient older brother to poet June Jordan and her conviction that “we are the o...

In fact, reading his words of hope again, I remembered Martin’s elder sister-in-struggle, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi’s wise and courageous grassroots freedom movement leader who became a gift to us all. I recalled the story of her being questioned by a reporter at the historic 1964 Democratic National Convention and asked about her powerful challenge on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the convention’s acceptance of segregated delegations. Did her vigorous antisegregation stand mean that “she was seeking equality with the white man?” the reporter asked. “No,” Ms. Hamer firmly replied. “What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don’t want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that’ll raise me and the white man up … raise America up.” Using somewhat different language, this was the ...

Out of that freedom emerged King’s most direct word to white Americans: “Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.”

Significantly, the Poor People of the campaign were meant to include not only African Americans, but whites, Latinos, and Native Americans as well.

For King it was obvious that his answer to the book’s subtitle was very clear: a deeply integrated, loving community rather than segregated chaos; hope rather than despair—raising up America and making the world over.

When the late Coretta King wrote her brief and thoughtful preface to the original, post-assassination Beacon paperback she closed with these words: “The glowing spirit and the sharp insights of Martin Luther King, Jr., are embodied in this book. The solutions he offered can still save our society from self-destruction. I hope that it will be seen as a testament, and that the grief that followed his death will be transmitted to a universal determination to realize the economic and social justice for which he so willingly gave his life.” VINCENT HARDING

In this work Martin Luther King, Jr., stresses the common cause of all the disinherited, white and black, laying the basis for the contemporary struggles now unfolding around economic issues. He spoke out sharply for all the poor in all their hues, for he knew if color made them different, misery and oppression made them the same.

On August 6, 1965, the President’s Room of the Capitol could scarcely hold the multitude of white and Negro leaders crowding it. President Lyndon Johnson’s high spirits were marked as he circulated among the many guests whom he had invited to witness an event he confidently felt to be historic, the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The legislation was designed to put the ballot effectively into Negro hands in the South after a century of denial by terror and evasion.

The bill that lay on the polished mahogany desk was born in violence in Selma, Alabama, where a stubborn sheriff handling Negroes in the Southern tradition had stumbled against the future. During a nonviolent demonstration for voting rights, the sheriff had directed his men in teargassing and beating the marchers to the ground. The nation had seen and heard, and exploded in indignation.

During the year, in several Northern and Western cities, most tragically in Watts, young Negroes had exploded in violence. In an irrational burst of rage they had sought to say something, but the flames had blackened both themselves and their oppressors. A year later, Ramparts magazine was asserting, “After more than a decade of the Civil Rights Movement the black American in Harlem, Haynesville, Baltimore and Bogalousa is worse off today than he was ten years ago … the Movement’s leaders know it and it is the source of their despair…. The Movement is in despair because it has been forced to recognize the Negro revolution as a myth.” Had Negroes fumbled the opportunities described by the President? Was the movement in despair? Why was widespread sympathy with the Negro revolution abruptly submerged in indifference in some quarters or banished by outright hostility in others? Why was there ideological disarray? A simple explanation holds that Negroes rioted in Watts, the voice of Black Power was heard through the land and the white backlash was born; the public became infuriated and sympathy evaporated. This pat explanation founders, however, on the hard fact that the change in mood had preceded Watts and the Black Power slogan. Moreover, the white backlash had always existed underneath and sometimes on the surface of American life. No, the answers are both more complex and, for the long run, less pessimistic.

White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination.

When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared. The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood. The word was broken, and the free-running expectations of the Negro crashed into the stone walls of white resistance. The result was havoc. Negroes felt cheated, especially in the North, while many whites felt that the Negroes had gained so much it was virtually impudent and greedy to ask for more so soon.

Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains? The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of selfdeception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken. Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform.

This limited degree of concern is a reflection of an inner conflict which measures cautiously the impact of any change on the status quo. As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.

There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. Even the psychological adjustment is far from formidable. Having exaggerated the emotional difficulties for decades, when demands for new conduct became inescapable, white Southerners may have trembled under the strain but they did not collapse.

The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact. The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.

“The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.”

Let us take a look at the size of the problem through the lens of the Negro’s status in 1967. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person.1 Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life he has approximately one-half those of whites; of the bad he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing, and Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality (widely accepted as an accurate index of general health) among Negroes is double that of whites.2 The equation pursues Negroes even into war. There were twice as many Negroes as whites in combat in Vietnam at the beginning of 1967, and twice as many Negro soldiers died in action (20.6 percent) in proportion to their numbers in the population.3

The personal torment of discrimination cannot be measured on a numerical scale, but the grim evidence of its hold on white Americans is revealed in polls that indicate that 88 percent of them would object if their teenage child dated a Negro. Almost 80 percent would mind it if a close friend or relative married a Negro, and 50 percent would not want a Negro as a neighbor.6

These brief facts disclose the magnitude of the gap between existing realities and the goal of equality. Yet they would be less disturbing if it were not for a greater difficulty. There is not even a common language when the term “equality” is used. Negro and white have a fundamentally different definition. Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America in 1967, including many persons of goodwill, proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap—essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it. Most of the abrasions between Negroes and white liberals arise from this fact.

White America is uneasy with injustice and for ten years it believed it was righting wrongs. The struggles were often bravely fought by fine people. The conscience of man flamed high in hours of peril. The days can never be forgotten when the brutalities at Selma caused thousands all over the land to rus...

After the march to Montgomery, there was a delay at the airport and several thousand demonstrators waited more than five hours, crowding together on the seats, the floors and the stairways of the terminal building. As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood. But these were the best of America, not all of America. Elsewhere the commitment was shallower. Conscience burned only dimly...

Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.

White America would have liked to believe that in the past ten years a mechanism had somehow been created that needed only orderly and smooth tending for the painless accomplishment of change. Yet this is precisely what has not been achieved. Every civil rights law is still substantially more dishonored than honored. School desegregation is still 90 percent unimplemented across the land; the free exercise of the franchise is the exception rather than the rule in the South; open-occupancy laws theoretically apply to population centers embracing tens of millions, but grim ghettos contradict the fine language of the legislation. Despite the mandates of law, equal employment still remains a distant dream.

The legal structures have in practice proved to be neither structures nor law. The sparse and insufficient collection of statutes is not a structure; it is barely a naked framework. Legislation that is evaded, substantially nullified and unenforced is a mockery of law. Significant progress has effectively been barred by the cunning obstruction of segregationists. It has been barred by equivocations and retreats of government—the same government that was exultant when it sought political credit for enacting the measures.

In this light, we are now able to see why the Supreme Court decisions, on school desegregation, which we described at the time as historic, have not made history. After twelve years, barely 12 percent school integration existed in the whole South, and in the Deep South the figure hardly reached 2 percent.7 And even these few schools were in many cases integrated only with a handful of Negroes. The decisions indeed mandated a profound degree of genuine equality; for that ve...

Even the Supreme Court, despite its original courage and integrity, curbed itself only a little over a year after the 1954 landmark cases, when it handed down its Pupil Placement decision, in effect returning to the states the power to determine the tempo of change. This subsequent decision became the keystone in the structure that slowed school desegregation down to a crawl. Thus America, with segregationist obstruction...

These are the deepest causes for contemporary abrasions between the races. Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash. This characterization is necessarily general. It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand d...

The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.

The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in North and South. Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today—to many—have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life. Cries of Black Power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are consequences of it.

Meanwhile frustration and a loss of confidence in white power have engendered among many Negroes a response that is essentially a loss of confidence in themselves. They are failing to appreciate two important facts. First, the line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often it feels as though you were moving backward, and you lose sight of your goal; but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by. We are encountering just such an experience today. The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place. Failing to understand this as a normal process of development, some Negroes are falling into unjustified pessimism and despair. Focusing on the ultimate goal, and discovering it still distant, they declare no progress at all has been made. This mood illustrates another fact that has been misinterpreted. A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered. The argument that the Negro has made no progress in a decade of turbulent effort rests on demonstr...

Since the beginning of the civil rights revolution, Negro registration in almost every Southern state has increased by at least 100 percent, and in Virginia and Alabama, by 300 and 600 percent, respectively.8 There are no illusions among Southern segregationists that these gains are unimportant. The old order has already lost ground; its retreats are symbolized by the departure from public life of Sheriffs Clark and Bull Connor.

Far more important, the racists have restructured old parties to cope with the emerging challenge. In some states, such as Georgia and Alabama, white supremacy temporarily holds the State House, but it would be a foolish and shortsighted politician who felt secure with this victory. In both of these states the most serious contender in recent elections was a white former governor who publicly welcomed the Negro vote, shaped his policies to it and worked with Negro political organizations in the campaign.

For hundreds of years Negroes had fought to stay alive by developing an endurance to hardship and heartbreak. In this decade the Negro stepped into a new role. He no longer would endure; he would resist and win. He still had the age-old capacity to live in hunger and want, but now he banished these as his lifelong companions. He could tolerate humiliation and scorn, but now he armed himself with dignity and resistance and his adversary tasted the gall of defeat. For the first time in his history the Negro did not have to use subterfuge as a defense, or solicit pity. His endurance was not employed for compromise with evil but to supply the strength to crush it. He came out of his struggle integrated only slightly in the external society but powerfully integrated within. This was the victory that had to precede all other gains. He made his government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected him. He made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and recognize his oppression and struggle with a newly aroused conscience. He gained manhood in the nation that had always called him “boy.” These were the values he won that enlivened hope even while sluggish progress made no substantial changes in the quality or quantity of his daily bread. The great deal the Negro has won in spiritual undergirding and the great deal he has not won in material progress indicate the strengths and weaknesses in the life of the Negro in 1967. They also reveal...

The Black Power slogan was described as a doctrine that reached Negro hearts with so deep an appeal that no alternative method could withstand its magnetic force. Rioting was described as a new Negro form of action that evoked results when disciplined demonstration sputtered out against implacable opposition. Yet Black Power has proved to be a slogan without a program, and with an uncertain following.