Radosh on Beck on Bond on MLK

Historian Ron Radosh, a former socialist who moved rightward after researching for a book on the Rosenberg spy case, offers a gentle correction to Glenn Beck on MLK, and in particular Rev. King's democratic socialism. While I think he's being a little hard on Beck, the history lesson he provides is a valuable one.

Earlier this year, NAACP chairman Julian Bond said in an NPR interview that MLK believed in a "modified form of socialism," and that this fact has gotten lost in favor of an "anesthetized" view of the civil rights leader. Continued Bond:

We’ve made him into a different kind of person than he actually was in life. And it may be that that’s one reason he’s so celebrated today because we celebrate a different kind of man than really existed. But he was a bit more radical. Not terribly, terribly radical but a bit more radical than we make him out to be today

On his own radio show, Beck mused that this must have been an attempt on the part of Bond to resuscitate President Obama --i.e., if Obama has socialist tendencies they're okay since MLK had them too. Radosh says this amounts to a "conspiracy theory":

[Beck surmises that] Julian Bond spoke about King’s belief in socialism to make
Obama’s socialist agenda acceptable. Beck goes on to argue that this “icon” America has created, whom we say has “combined George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,” is probably being falsely portrayed as a socialist. King, he said, in reality “didn’t exist that way. He was different than that.” . . .

But Bond was not saying anything was wrong with King, only stating a fact. And it was King himself, as we shall see, who made it clear numerous times that he did see himself as some kind of a socialist.

Again, I think Radosh is being a bit hard on Beck in this piece -- it's not so crazy to think that Bond intended to create a little space for leftist politics by noting King's socialist sympathies. Beck's comments were overblown given the off-hand (and truthful) nature of Bond's remarks, but don't amount to loony conspiracy-theorizing. (The fact that Bond was not criticizing King adds support to Beck's position, rather than detracts from it as Radosh seems to think, and people, conservatives included, often try to use the King-agrees-with-me mode of argument).

More significantly Radosh provides a valuable brief history of MLK's political beliefs and the way he kept his eyes on the prize (to coin a phrase), making sure his views on civil rights stayed front and center, so that his life's most important work would not be derailed by his other political views which he knew were less popular.

It's an important piece, and not only because preserving the historical record is intrinsically worthwhile. Radosh's biographical sketch takes into account not only the things about MLK that every sane person loves him for, but also an aspect of the great man's life that some people might disagree with, what Radosh describes as King's "mild socialist beliefs." This kind of fully orbed approach is the antidote to politics and history as they are too often practiced these days, in which a public figure is cast as either "all good" (from the speaker's perspective) or "all bad" and the historian's job is to hand out white hats and black hats. Conservatives, especially, ought to be unfraid of seeing every human being as they really are. What King was, of course, was an American hero, and acknowledging that he wasn't a free-marketeer doesn't change that one bit. It also does not mean that socialism is sound economics, and the fact that some wonderful men thought otherwise does not change that fact either.