President Sullivan recently led the University community in a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life and legacy. Deploying King's quote, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," Sullivan urged the University community to join her in reflection on "Dr. King's beliefs and their implications in our lives and in our society." King often used "the arc of the moral universe," which was attributed originally to the 19th century abolitionist Theodore Parker, in his speeches to convey that although the struggle for justice was long, justice was inevitable.
To really reflect on King's beliefs means that we must attend to the arc of King's intellect, to his development as a leader and fighter for justice.
There is a version of King, acceptable for national veneration and on display by those who hide their own complicity with injustice, stripped of the fiery righteousness and abiding courage of a man who deplored and struggled against racism, economic injustice and the Vietnam War. This sanitized appropriation of King obscures the prophet who was hunted by the F.B.I., who learned to be anti-war, who was sometimes reviled by both blacks and whites and who moved in his thinking and his action from an awareness of the powerful destructiveness of white supremacy to the recognition that one cannot comprehend racism without an understanding of capitalism-the private control of wealth, resources and information.
What is most important about the life and work of Martin Luther King is that he learned, he listened and his theory and practice developed and changed. His analysis of oppression became deeper, more comprehensive and inclusive, and the work of his last years was focused not only on race but also on economic injustice.
King is a model for us precisely because, as he put his body on the line against the forces of injustice, he learned to understand the ways in which race and class are completely interconnected. The year before he was assassinated, he conceived of the Poor People's Campaign, meant to force Congress to enact a guaranteed annual income in the United States.
He asked: "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" He answered that in order to address the problems of poverty, you must begin to raise questions "about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth
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