Prophet of Discontent
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Vicki L. Crawford
THE KING COLLECTION
Advisory Board
Lewis V. Baldwin
Vanderbilt University
Emilye Crosby
State University of New York, Geneseo
Adam Fairclough
Leiden University
Robert M. Franklin
Emory University
Françoise N. Hamlin
Brown University
Randal Jelks
University of Kansas
Barbara McCaskill
University of Georgia
Kathryn L. Nasstrom
University of San Francisco
Rev. Raphael Gamaliel Warnock
Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia
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Prophet of Discontent
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique
of Racial Capitalism
•
Andrew J. Douglas
Jared A. Loggins
The University of Georgia Press
Athens
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948819
ISBN: 9780820360164 (e-book: open access edition)
ISBN: 9780820360171 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN: 9780820360188 (paperback: alk. paper)
ISBN: 9780820360300 (e-book: standard edition)
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Contents
“The Trouble Is . . .”:
On Critique and Tradition 1
“The Other America”:
On the Method of Dissatisfaction 17
“Something Is Wrong with Capitalism”:
On the Revolution of Values 33
“Showdown for Nonviolence”:
On Black Radicalism and the Antipolitical 55
“Liberated Grounds on Which to Gather”:
On Black Study and the Afterlives of King’s Critique 74
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began as an open-ended search in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection. It has grown into a book that we hope will speak to a new era of movement activism. We made final revisions in the summer of 2020, as mass protests erupted in the United States and quickly spread worldwide. The tremendous groundswell of organizing energies, aimed at abolishing many of the same structural injustices that King fought against, breathed life into this book when the weight of the moment made writing especially difficult. We must first acknowledge those who have been killed, those who have been injured or jailed for protesting, and those who have taken to the streets in demonstration and have been lucky enough to return home unharmed, able to fight another day.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to Vicki Crawford, our Morehouse colleague who supported this project from its infancy and provided much-needed counsel as it matured. Many others in the Morehouse community have enriched our work: Sam Livingston, Kipton Jensen, Cynthia Hewitt, Frederick Knight, Matthew Platt, Adrienne Jones, Oumar Ba, Levar Smith, Lawrence Carter, Preston King, Patrick Darrington, and Jaeden Johnson. Beyond Morehouse, we owe thanks to Paul Taylor, Brandon Terry, Andrew Valls, Da’Von Boyd, Bryan Garsten, Lawrie Balfour, Ryan Russell, Justin Brooks, Jen Rubenstein, Dan Henry, Shaibal Gupta, Babak Amini, Meghnad Desai, Justin Rose, Ferris Lupino, De’Jon Hall, Michelle Rose, Gauri Wagle, and Paul Guttierez. Portions of the project were presented at the annual meeting of the African-American Intellectual History Society, the Yale Political Theory Workshop, the Brown University Graduate Political Philosophy Workshop, and the University of Virginia Political Theory Colloquium. We thank the participants in those discussions for their helpful queries and suggestions.
An earlier version of a portion of chapter three was the subject of the 2018 Frantz Fanon Memorial Lecture at the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna, India, and subsequently published as “King, Marx, and the Revolution of Worldwide Value,” in Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, edited by Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto, and Babak Amini (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 159-179. Another portion of chapter three, along with a small portion of chapter one, appeared in “Diagnosing Racial Capitalism,” in Fifty Years Since MLK, edited by Brandon M. Terry (Cambridge: MIT Press/Boston Review, 2018), 40-44. We thank Palgrave and Boston Review for permission to republish this material.
At the University of Georgia Press, Walter Biggins, Lisa Bayer, and Nate Holly kept the project moving though personnel changes and the onset of a global pandemic. Two anonymous reviewers provided expert, and very timely, feedback.
And, of course, we thank our families: Marcie Dickson, and Juliana and Genevieve Douglas; Shari, Vernell, Justin Loggins, and Kimberly Wilson.
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