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WHEN SOME STAFF MEMBERS OF THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP Conference (SCLC), including Jesse Jackson, resisted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s proposal to go to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers, Dr. King was incensed. SCLC staff, some concerned with their own more favored projects, argued that this new project would spread them too thin. Dr. King issued a strong rebuke to their narrowing of the horizons of the movement. He argued that that this country was in critical condition and that they all had to work together to "redeem the soul of America" (Frady, 1996: 225). Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man with a transcendent vision, but in stating these prescient sentiments, he stood on the shoulders of giants. This is too often forgotten in treatments of the Civil Rights Movement. This article seeks to understand the Civil Rights Movement in the context of its larger role as a force for the democratization of U.S. society, internally and in its international relations.
Although liberals and leftists have tended to disregard J. Edgar Hoover's fear of subversion within the Civil Rights Movement as either a disingenuous cover for his own racism or the paranoid fantasy of an anticommunist psychosis, I would argue that Hoover's fears were well founded within the context of his own premises: that the Civil Rights Movement posed a fundamental threat to the power arrangements of the American social order that he was sworn to defend. I have long felt that the lack of a serious appraisal of J. Edgar Hoover among liberals stemmed from a fear of confronting the contradictions within liberalism itself, partly revealed in its bastard offspring, neoconservatism. American liberalism is particularly torn between its egalitarian principles (vis-a-vis the New Deal and Great Society traditions) and its desire for stability and social order (stemming from the social position of the U.S. as the hegemonic power within the capitalist world-economy and from its propagation of a founding principle of the capitalist world, the myth of pan-European supremacy).
Martin Luther King, Jr., understood well these contradictions. His statement in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" could apply to liberals and moderates:
I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate....